For Emma and Isabel

and
Emily, Gerard, Miriam and Phoebe
 acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the following for their help and support:
Adbusters, Tony Carter, Michael Craig-Martin, Professor Willie Doherty, David
Fitzgerald, Mark Francis, Chris Jenks, Robert Longo, Robert Longo Studio, Museu Pi-
casso, Kevin O’Brien, Professor Christine Poggi, Ms E. R. Pulitzer and Helene Rundell,
Gerhard Richter, Atelier Richter, Chris Rojek, Andreas Schmitt, Mike Smith, Matthias
Wascheck.
We would also like to than Tristan Palmer for supporting this project throughout its
lengthy gestation and Emily Johnston for guiding the book through its final produc-
tion stages.
 contributors

Helen Anderson is a Tutor in the Archaeology of Art in the School of World Art
Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. She has presented research
­papers in both South Africa and the United States. Her thesis examined the origin and
development of art from Middle Stone Age Africa to Upper Palaeolithic Europe, using
neuroscience and in particular neural plasticity to understand the earliest art especially
the interrelationship between the brain, the environment and cultural production.
Her research interests centre on the origin and development of art in Africa and the
development of, and the neural correlates for, symbolic thought.
Fatimah Awan is a Research Fellow in Media Users and Creative Methodologies at the
University of Westminster, London. She taught media studies for a number of years at
Southampton Solent University and undertook her PhD at Bournemouth University
(see www.artlab.org.uk). Her research interests include the sociology of young peo-
ple and contemporary media, and new qualitative methods which use visual/creative
techniques.
Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies at Lancaster University. He is the
author of the monographs Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge University
Press, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of
Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook
(Palgrave, 2008). Among his current research projects is a study of the literature and
­culture of mountaineering in the Romantic period.
Malcolm Barnard is Lecturer in Visual Culture in the School of Art and Design at
Loughborough University. He has degrees in philosophy and the philosophical
­aspects of sociology and has published in the areas of fashion, graphic design and vi-
sual culture. His main publications include Fashion as Communication (Routledge,
xvi contributors

1996), Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001), Graphic Design as

Communication (Routledge, 2005) and Fashion Theory (Routledge, 2007).
Kajsa Berg is a neuroarthistorian who completed a PhD in Art History at the ­University
of East Anglia in 2010. Her thesis seeks to demonstrate that neuroscience is helpful in the
context of specific art-historical queries. In her thesis, ‘Caravaggio and a ­neuroarthistory
of engagement’, she uses neuroscience to explore artists’, patrons’ and other spectators’
responses to Caravaggio’s paintings. Her specialty is the culturally specific emotional
­engagement with early seventeenth-century painting and sculpture in Rome. More
widely she is developing Baxandall’s concept of the ‘period eye’, replacing it with the
‘contextual brain’, which allows a recognition of both the cognitive skills and the
­emotional factors involved in spectatorship. She has taught at the University of East
­Anglia and the Norwich University College of the Arts on a variety of topics.
Roy Boyne has published books on French philosophy, the sociology of art and cinema,
and cultures of risk. He is a member of the executive editorial board of Theory, Culture and
Society, and a board member of the recent journal, Creative Industries. He was guest-editor
for the 2007 edition, devoted to cinema, of Symbolism: A Journal of Critical Aesthetics. He
was Vice-Chair of the Board of Culture North East (until its demise in April 2009). He
is writing a book for Sage on regional and international cultural strategy, based in part on
research he did whilst visiting professor at the University of Strasbourg in 2007. As part
of the research into questions of cultural strategy, he has become especially interested in
the idea of ‘impact’, with particular reference to evaluation methodology, and to indirect
impacts and externalities.
Roger Burrows is a Professor of Sociology at the University of York, UK. His main
­research interests are in the areas of social informatics, urban studies and the sociology of
health and illness. He has published numerous articles, chapters and books in the fields
of sociology, social policy, social geography and research methods. His recent work with
Mike Savage on the ‘coming crisis of empirical sociology’, discussed in Chapter 25, has
generated considerable debate in UK sociology in recent years.
Lisa Cartwright is a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she
is appointed in the Department of Communication and affiliated with the graduate
Science Studies Program and the undergraduate program in Critical Gender Stud-
ies. She works across visual studies; gender and sexuality studies; science, ­technology,
information and medicine studies; and disability studies. Her most recent book is
Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the
Child (Duke University Press, 2008). She is coauthor, with Marita Sturken, of Prac-
tices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2nd edn, Oxford University Press,
2008). That book can be found in Czech, Korean and Mandarin. Her early work on
motion picture film and medicine is contained in Screening the Body: Tracing Medi-
cine’s Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1995). With Paula Treichler and
Constance Penley, she co-edited the volume The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies,
Gender and Science (New York University Press, 1998). A book about the visual culture
contributors xvii

of transnational adoption is in process. She is currently working on three small visual

culture book projects about animation and embodiment; biomedical citizenship, public
art and landscape; and wind power and the transformation of the American heartland.

Tim Dant is Head of Department and Reader in Sociology at the University of

Lancaster. He has written two books on sociological aspects of materiality (Material
Culture in the Social World, 1999 and Materiality and Society, 2005) and has pub-
lished a number of articles on different aspects of material interaction. His research
interests include the sociology of the image and he is currently writing a book on the
moral consequences of television.

Nicholas Davey was educated at the Universities of York, Sussex and Tübingen. He
has lectured at the City University London (1976–9), at the University of Manchester
(1979–80), the University of Wales Institute Cardiff Institute (1981–96) and is pres-
ently Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Humanities at the University of Dundee.
His principal teaching and research interests are in aesthetics and hermeneutics. At the
University of Wales and at the University of Dundee he has established new graduate
and postgraduate courses in art and philosophy. He has published widely in the field
of Continental philosophy, aesthetics and hermeneutic theory. His book, Unquiet Un-
derstanding: Gadamer and Philosophical Hermeneutics (2006), is published with the State
University Press of New York. He is currently completing a monograph Gadamer, Aes-
thetics and Hermeneutics: Seeing Otherwise.

Margaret Dikovitskaya obtained her PhD degree from Columbia University in New
York. She has directed three Summer Institutes in Visual Culture at the Central
European University, Soros Foundation, Budapest. Her first book, Visual Culture:
The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn was published by the MIT Press in 2005
(Korean edition, 2009). Currently she is writing on the image of Central Asia in early
Russian colour photography (researching materials from the Library of Congress,
Washington, DC).
Michael E. Gardiner is a Professor in Sociology at the University of Western On-
tario, Canada. His books include the edited four-volume collection Mikhail Bakhtin:
Masters of Modern Social Thought (Sage, 2003), Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge,
2000), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, co-edited with
Michael M. Bell) and The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of
­Ideology (Routledge, 1992), as well as numerous articles dedicated to dialogical social
theory, ethics, everyday life and utopianism in such journals as History of the Human
Sciences, Theory, Culture and Society, Theory and Society, and Utopian Studies. Recently
he has co-edited (with Gregory J. Seigworth) a special double issue of the journal
­Cultural Studies, with the title ‘Rethinking Everyday Life: And Nothing Turned Itself
Inside Out’ (Routledge, 2004).
David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications in the School of Media,
Arts and Design at the University of Westminster, London. He is the author of several
xviii contributors

books, including Moving Experiences (1995, 2005), Media, Gender and Identity (2002,
2008) and Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences (2007). He
produces the popular website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk, and the hub
for creative and visual research methods, www. artlab.org.uk.

Charlie Gere is Head of Department and Reader in New Media Research in the
­Department of Media, Film and Cultural Studies, Lancaster University. He is the ­author
of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002, 2008), Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006),
Non-Relational Aesthetics: Transmission, the Rules of Engagement 13 (Artworlds, 2008)
with Michael Corris, and co-editor of White Heat Cold Technology (MIT Press, 2009), as
well as many papers on questions of technology, media and art. In 2007 he co-curated
Feedback, a major exhibition on art responsive to its instructions, input, or its environ-
ment in Gijon, Northern Spain.

Kristyn Gorton is Lecturer in Television in the Department of Theatre, Film and

­Television at the University of York, UK. She is the author of Media Audiences: Televi-
sion, Meaning and Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and has written about
television for several journals such as Critical Studies in Television, Journal of British
­Cinema and Feminism and Feminism and Psychology.

Martin Hand is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. His research

­focuses on the consumption of technologies of varying kinds. He is currently researching
the spread of wireless handheld devices in relation to mobile commercial applications,
gaming, learning and social networking. He is the author of Ubiquitous Photography
(Polity Press, forthcoming), Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity and Authentic-
ity (Ashgate, 2008) and co-author of The Design of Everyday Life (Berg, 2007).
Ian Heywood was trained initially as a painter. He went on to study sociology and
social theory at Goldsmiths’ College, London and York University. For many years he
taught fine art at Leeds Polytechnic (later Leeds Metropolitan University). He is cur-
rently ­Research Fellow in the Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster Uni-
versity. He has written and published widely in the fields of art practice, theory and
criticism, ­social theory and leisure studies. He is the co-editor, with Barry Sandywell,
of Interpreting ­Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (Routledge,
1999).
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, and
the Director of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (CONSERT). He holds two
degrees in law and three degrees in anthropology. His research interests span the fields
of law, commerce, consumption, cross-cultural psychology, the senses and aesthetics.
He is the editor of The Varieties of Sensory Experience (Toronto, 1991), Cross-Cultural
Consumption (Routledge, 1996) and Empire of the Senses (Berg, 2004), the co-author
(with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of
Smell (Routledge, 1994), and the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in
Culture and Social Theory (University of Michigan, 2003). His latest book is The Sixth
contributors xix

Sense Reader (Berg, 2009). See generally www.david-howes.com. For more information
on the activities of CONSERT see http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses.

Martin Irvine is a Professor at Georgetown University and is the owner and direc-
tor of Irvine Contemporary gallery in Washington, DC. He founded the Communica-
tion, Culture and Technology programme at Georgetown University in 1995, the first
interdisciplinary post-Internet media and communication department at the graduate
level, where he currently teaches graduate seminars on media theory, visual culture and
contemporary art (www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj). In addition to his academic back-
ground in cultural history and theory, philosophy and art history, Martin Irvine has
twenty years of experience with the Internet and digital media. Through Irvine Contem-
porary gallery, he has curated over twenty major exhibitions and has worked with many
of the artists discussed in the essay in this book. He is currently writing a book on the
contemporary art world from a broad interdisciplinary perspective.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of

­California, Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (1973 and 1996),
Marxism and Totality (1984), Adorno (1984), Permanent Exiles (1985), Fin-de-Siècle
­Socialism (1989), Force Fields (1993), Downcast Eyes (1993), Cultural Semantics (1998),
Refractions of Violence (2003) and Songs of Experience (2004). The Virtues of Mendacity:
On Lying in Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2010) is his latest work.
Robin Marriner is a Senior Lecturer in the Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa
University, where he was the course director for the MA in Visual Culture for the
­duration of its life from 1990 to 2004. He teaches undergraduate and research fine
art students; his own research explores the conditions of meaning of art objects and
in particular the ways in which these are differently perceived within modernist and
­postmodernist art culture. His writings, which philosophically engage with the relation-
ships between theory, criticism and contemporary art practice, particularly painting,
photography and sculpture, have appeared in various British art journals and in several
anthologies.

Kathryn Moore is a Past President of the Landscape Institute and 2008 Thomas
­Jefferson Visiting Chair at the University of Virginia. Her book Overlooking the Vi-
sual: Demystifying the Art of Design (2010) lifts the philosophical veil obscuring critical,
artistic discourse. Crossing boundaries between philosophy, theory and practice it is an
­interdisciplinary analysis of consciousness and the creative process that is of considerable
interest to those concerned with design quality in the built environment and to those
striving to meet current global environmental challenges. Her research, having major
pedagogical implications, also informs her consultancy. On behalf of IFLA she is advis-
ing UNESCO on the feasibility of an international landscape convention.

John Onians is Emeritus Professor in the School of World Art Studies at the Univer-
sity of East Anglia where he taught for thirty-five years. He was founding ­Director
of Research and Academic Programs at the Clark Art Institute, founding editor
xx contributors

of the journal Art History and edited the first Atlas of World Art. His books include Hel-
lenistic Art: The Greek World View 350–133BC (1979), Bearers of Meaning: The Classi-
cal Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1988) and Neuroarthistory:
From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (2007). He is currently writing a history
of European art in the light of the latest neuroscience.
Donald Preziosi is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at UCLA
and a former Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He received his PhD at Harvard,
has taught at several American universities including MIT and Yale, and has lectured
widely in Europe, North America, Australia and the Middle East. He is the author of
twelve books on art and architectural history, critical theory and the historiography of
cultural institutions, including The Semiotics of the Built Environment; Architecture,
Language and Meaning; Aegean Art and Architecture; Rethinking Art History; and The
Art of Art History, and is co-author with Claire Farago of Grasping the World: The Idea
of the Museum. His newest book, Enchanted Credulities: Art, Religion, and Amnesia, is
­forthcoming in 2012.
Gillian Rose is Professor of Cultural Geography at the Open University in the UK. She
is the author of Visual Methodologies (2nd edn, Sage, 2007), and has just completed a
book about family photography in both domestic and public settings, entitled Doing
Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public, and The Politics of Sentiment (Ashgate
Press, 2010). She also has research interests in the everyday visualities of urban spaces,
some of which can be found at www.urban-experience.net.
Nancy Roth is Joint Course Leader of the MA photography course at University
­College Falmouth, Cornwall, UK. She studied art history at the City University of
New York, earning a PhD in 1996 with a study on the work of the German photomon-
tage artist, John Heartfield (1891–1968), whose work combined writing, photography
and ­theatrical elements in the mass circulation newspaper, the most technologically
advanced medium of its time. The combination of interests—in writing, photography,
art and new media—has made her an enthusiastic reader and translator of the work of
Vilém Flusser.
Barry Sandywell is Honorary Research Fellow in Social Theory in the Department of
Sociology at York, UK. He is the author of Logological Investigations (Routledge, 1996), a
multi-volume work on the history of reflexivity, alterity and ethics in philosophy and the
human sciences: Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason (volume 1), The Beginnings of
European Theorizing: Reflexivity in the Archaic Age (volume 2) and Presocratic ­Reflexivity:
The Construction of Philosophical Discourse (volume 3). He is also the ­co-editor, with Ian
Heywood, of Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual
(Routledge, 1999) and of essays on Baudrillard, Bakhtin and Benjamin and other theo-
rists published in various journals and collections. Recent publications include essays
on digitization, cyberspace, new media and global criminality as part of a continuing
programme of research concerned to map the reflexive transformations of postmodern
contributors xxi

societies and cultures. His most recent book, Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical
Lexicon of Terms was published in 2011 (Ashgate).
Catherine M. Soussloff teaches at the University of British Columbia, where she is
currently Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. Her book
publications include The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Duke
University Press, 2006), The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minne-
sota University Press, 1997), Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (California Univer-
sity Press, 1999) and Editing the Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the
Visual (Toronto University Press, in press). She is the author of more than thirty essays
that address the historiography of art history, aesthetics, early modern European art and
theory, image theories, performance studies, photography and Jewish identity and visual
culture. She is currently writing a book on Michel Foucault and late-twentieth-century
visual studies.
Andrew Spicer is Reader in Cultural History and Director of the Visual Culture
Research Group in the Department of Art and Design, University of the West of En-
gland. He has published widely on the construction of masculinities, British film history
and film noir, including Typical Men (2003), Sydney Box (2006) and the Historical Dic-
tionary of Film Noir (2010). He is currently directing an AHRC-funded research project
on the film producer Michael Klinger.
Fiona Summers is a Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. Prior to this she has
taught Media, Film and Cultural Studies at Lancaster. Her research and publications
focus on contemporary visual culture and she has recently published work on feminist
visual art and haptic visuality in Feminist Theory. She is currently working on a book
project on the relationship between the moving image in contemporary art gallery space
and spectatorship as well as a further book on visual research methods.
 Critical Approaches to the
Study of Visual Culture:
An Introduction to the
Handbook
Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood

Overview of Contents
The collection of original papers forming this Handbook has been assembled to facili-
tate access to recent thought and research in the study of visual culture. The volume has
been organized into five main sections, each prefaced by an introductory overview. This
chapter provides background to the Handbook of Visual Culture and the field of visual
culture as a whole.
The chapters are grouped as follows. In terms of content Part One, ‘Historical and
Theoretical Perspectives’, contains chapters that primarily deal with the historical con-
texts and theoretical orientations in the study of visual culture. Part Two, ‘Art and Visu-
ality’, focuses predominantly upon issues and questions linking art, aesthetics and visual
culture; it also opens the exploration of diverse art practices and the transformations of
public space and related topics. Part Three, ‘Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture’, ex-
plores the dialectical relationships that exist between aesthetic structures and everyday
life, in particular the role of aesthetic formations in material culture, fashion and cos-
tume, the spectacular transformation of the political imagination and resistance to the
aestheticization of daily life. Part Four, ‘Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture’,
explores different ‘regions’ of visual culture, including photography, television, cinema,
cultures of consumption and visual rhetoric. Finally, the chapters in Part Five, ‘Develop-
ments in the Field of Visual Culture’, deal with important issues of visual knowledge,
method and methodology, the impact of the global digital revolution upon visual experi-
ence, the emergence of everyday ‘reflexive sociologies’ as a response to consumer-led cap-
italism, visuality in performative context, the prospects of alternative methods of visual
research, and the emergence of new forms of transdisciplinary visual analysis. Of course
2 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

to some extent these clusterings are somewhat artificial as many individual chapters con-
tain both descriptive, critical and, occasionally, polemical orientations (thus a reader does
not have to wait until Part Five to gain a sense of future critical directions and changes
that need to be made to the current theory and practice of visual studies).
The brief editorial introductions to each of these five parts locate the intellectual
backgrounds that underwrite many of the individual chapters, pointing out the his-
tory and context of these engagements with seeing and visualization and how they have
influenced and continue to influence research and theorizing carried out within these
different traditions. Where appropriate each chapter also provides a ‘Further Reading’
section in addition to the references contained in the chapter. We have striven to iden-
tify the most theoretically relevant and up-to-date readings, without neglecting older
traditions and texts where these offer valuable insights, in order to assist students of vi-
sual culture to orient themselves to broader questions and issues not directly discussed
within the relevant chapter. We also include a comprehensive bibliographical chapter
that maps the landscape of visual studies for readers new to this field.

The Rationale and Approach of the Handbook :

Towards Reflexive Visual Studies
The Handbook of Visual Culture has three primary aims. First, in its selection of contri-
butions from a wide range of areas the book has been designed to reflect the diversity
and creativity of visual culture research in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Second, by commissioning new chapters from very different perspectives it provides
background knowledge for those who wish to understand the forces at work in the prac-
tices and institutions of contemporary visual culture. And third, the collection provides
a guide and information resource to the main issues, themes and theoretical orientations
within this rapidly expanding field. But even more important, we wish to encourage the
reader to reflect upon the positions and arguments contained in these chapters and to
question their theoretical and substantive claims about the place of images and visual ex-
perience in today’s global society, politics and culture. The emphasis throughout is upon
understanding visual experience as embodied in social and cultural practices. This might
be called the ‘institutional’ turn in visual studies (prefigured by George Dickie’s theory
of the institutional context of art objects, 1974). Of course we are acutely aware that the
all-but-neglected field of visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s has today become some-
thing of an intellectual industry (reflected in the explosion of journals, textbooks, aca-
demic programmes and conferences in this field). In fact the landscape of visual studies
is now filled with a plethora of theoretical superstructures and interpretative positions.
The rise of the new media and globalized visual culture in particular—we might also say
hybridized and diasporic cultures—has become one of the driving force-fields of con-
temporary knowledge production and cultural change.
One manifest danger in this situation of exponential expansion is that the discredited
logocentrism and textualism of previous cultural research in the 1970s and 1980s might
be simply replaced by a one-sided ocularcentrism. To avoid this we need to reconsider
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 3

the social and cultural contexts that have led to the expansion of visual studies and to sit-
uate this development within a wider critique of contemporary society and intellectual
life. We also need to provide a richer and more philosophically nuanced conception of
‘the visual’ that interfaces with the other senses as productive knowledge sites and criti-
cal interventions in social life. Finally we need to invent imaginative research agendas
and discourses to advance a multi-sensorial conception of visual experience and visual
understanding. All of these desiderata are part of a more general reflexive approach to
social relations, social practices and institutions.
Traditional cultural theory has until quite recently been dominated by linguistic and
verbally based semiotic models of ‘meaning production and reproduction’. This situa-
tion is largely the outcome of the dominance of French social theory and philosophy
in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet despite this linguistic bias even the most extreme forms of
‘Theory’ (we use this capitalized term as shorthand for ‘Theory and Cultural Studies’ and
to mark its predominantly European philosophical provenance) have had a transforma-
tive effect on the study of things visual. In different ways the papers assembled in this
collection all reflect the intended and unintended consequences of the Theory wars of
the 1970s and 1980s and the legacies of more constructive research in the last two de-
cades. In the light of this fluid situation we emphasize that any such Handbook needs to
be complemented by other perspectives, other voices, conversations and experimental
lines of thought that may not have found a place in the present collection. The inevita-
ble partiality and selectivity of any such anthology should invite criticism and stimulate
further thought (for example from the perspectives of the sociology of knowledge, psy-
chology of perception, information and artificial intelligence theory, cognitive science,
discourse theory, biomedical engineering and neuroscience).1

New Visual Studies

We also claim that this is a Handbook with a difference. We are not providing a text-
book of instructions or a ‘how-to-do-it’ manual of methods (such guides are available
and are often of great value as Sandywell’s ‘Bibliographical Guide’ (Chapter 30) later in
this volume argues). Rather than setting out canonical perspectives and methods that
can be ‘applied’ or adopted uncritically, the Handbook has been expressly designed as a
site of provocations and reflective dialogues in and around its main thematic sections.
The recurrent theme of interdisciplinary exchange is reflected in the diverse intellectual
origins of the contributions to this volume, which include Philosophy, Sociology, ­Social
and Cultural Anthropology, Art History, Art Practice, Aesthetics, Cultural Studies,
Semiotics, Education, Feminism, Geography, Theatre, Film and Television Studies and
Literary Theory. The very plurality of perspectives should encourage reflection about
the changing conditions and dynamics of the different forms of knowledge production
within these intellectual settings and institutional spaces. This diversity is itself symp-
tomatic of the transition from the relatively insular visual studies of the 1980s and 1990s
to the interdisciplinary (and postdisciplinary) explorations of everyday ­visualities that
characterize the past two decades of post-Theory inquiry and research. The exchange
4 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

of conceptual perspectives and methodological tools within and between these new
knowledge formations promises to create new contexts of inquiry and theories bearing
upon the institutional life of seeing in everyday life and the wider society. Contributors
and research in the fields from which they come, are coming to terms with history and
development of visual culture research and theory in very different ways. This is what
one would expect, given that visual culture studies has taken different forms and had
different impacts in, for example anthropology as opposed to art and design history,
film studies as against sociology.
We have marked this difference by arguing that critical reflection within visual
studies has moved from inter-disciplinary to multi-disciplinary and finally to trans-
­disciplinary—and perhaps in-disciplinary and post-disciplinary—research and theo-
rizing. This questioning of disciplinary preconceptions and historical institutional
boundaries is ­itself part of the larger social, economic and cultural processes that theo-
rists express with the difficult concepts of postmodernization and globalization (Bauman
2000, 2007; Beynon and Dunkerley, 2001; Featherstone 1990; Giddens 2002; Hall et al.
2005; Nancy 2007; Rancière 2007; Sandywell 2009). Seen from the perspective of
­cultural change, the contested transition from modernism to postmodernism might be
considered as the most recent form of the mass culture theories of the 1930s and 1940s
that stimulated the study of popular culture and, latterly, of the detailed analysis of
popular visual forms. Ultimately it is the socioeconomic and cultural impact of global-
ization over the past three decades that has ‘scrambled’ social relations and traditional
disciplinary institutions along with the vast changes in economic and social circum-
stances of millions of people worldwide. And one of the key cultural mechanisms of the
postmodernization of daily life is the emergence of the Internet and new communica-
tive media as these have transformed visual experience and its analysis.
The passage from modernism to postmodernism that has witnessed the re-direction
of Cultural Studies from traditional questions of economic determinism, ideology and
representation towards the micro-analysis of everyday life, the vision-saturated cultures
of material life, and the sociology of ordinary social practices and embodiments has had
a significant impact upon the field of visual studies. However, this shift has not wholly
negated an older framework, with a characteristic dichotomy. That is the grand histori-
cal narrative of the structural changes—the socioeconomic, political and technological
‘mechanisms’—behind the shift from modernity to postmodernity remains intact, if
only as a hugely powerful discursive feature of politics and policy, as well as that parallel
story, at once ‘complex’ but also invoking the ‘other’, of micro phenomena at the level of
our ever-mysterious everyday life, variously understood as effects, responses, spontane-
ous quotidian creative practices and so forth. Such post-Enlightenment struggles with
subjects and objects—or freedom and spontaneity on one hand and self-imposed rules
and forms of self-objectification on the other—are embedded in our ‘modern’ form of
life, our cultural grammar (Pippin 1991, 1997, 2005).
On a theoretical level we have moved from a sometimes quasi-elitist theory of ‘the
culture industry’ to a more demotic theory of the dynamics of global culture indus-
tries as these impact upon the configurations of everyday life. However, questions of
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 5

significance and value—once predominantly located in high culture, in aesthetics, ethics

and criticism—are more relevant than ever, given the instrumental success and economic
power of the culture industries in their penetration of the life world. It has become evi-
dent that in coming to terms with these seismic social, political and cultural changes we
need to acquire new levels of sophistication and reflexivity in deconstructing the history,
structure and dynamics of visuality and visual culture in contemporary life.
The new visual studies might also be called ‘reflexive visual studies’ given their aim
not only to describe and analyse visual media and communication through visual im-
agery but to excavate and display the generative conditions, assumptions and implicit
methods at work in visual analysis (and to use this knowledge of the interfaces between
operative assumptions and visual worlds as a force of criticism and transformation in
the wider society). One requirement of these new explorations is the imperative to re-
sist defining visual studies substantively (or thematically in terms of phenomenal ‘fields’,
‘domains’ or ‘regions’)—a traditional analytical strategy that produces an impossibly
wide realm of phenomenal objects—and instead to define visual studies strategically
and tactically in terms of specific problems and questions—for example in exploring
the existential, ethical, social and political functions of visual life, the blurring of dis-
tinctions between high and low culture, the wandering of visual signifiers within every-
day materialities, and, perhaps even more important, of asking radical questions about
the transformative dynamics at work in visual experience from the earlier ‘urhistory’
of visual media to the globalized digital worlds of cyberspace. However, any such ac-
knowledgement of a shift in the conditions under which one can ask existential, ethical,
aesthetic and politics questions does not entail the conclusion that they have become
irrelevant or impossible. They remain as important and urgent as ever.
In this sense the questions that were traditionally posed by such modernist disci-
plines as aesthetics and art history now interface with the postmodern problematics of
such perspectives as the study of power, gender and ideologically stratified ‘differences’,
the implosion of aesthetics within everyday life, the diverse cultural functions of science
and technology, postmodern geography and so on. Continuing in this vein, recent re-
search has begun to pose explicitly reflexive questions about the relationships between
seeing, social practices and knowledge production, vision and power, visual ways of
thinking and wider aesthetic, ideological and cultural formations. We will return to this
definitional problem later in the section ‘The Visual Turn?’.
We might take the ‘colonization’ of everyday life by visual media as a specific example
of new forms of visual space. The globalization of visual media—what some have called
the global society of the spectacle or, more generically, the postmodernization of every-
day life—has forced every academic programme in visual culture to resolve the paradox
that to know the real world we have to examine the mediations and re-mediations of
visual forms; indeed to gain any kind of knowledge requires something like a genealogy
of the heterogeneous work of images and interpretive traditions that are more ancient
than social life itself (the vicissitudes of the concept of ideology might be explored in this
context). The resurgent interest in socially constructed institutional sites and cultural
processes is again a prominent theme of such emerging problematics as global media
6 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

studies, mediology and new cultural studies (for example Hall et al. 2005; Hall and Bir-
chall 2006; Longhurst et al. 2008; McGowan 2007; McRobbie 2005; Turner 1996).
Locating our bearings in the complex worlds of contemporary life is only possible
through the mediations of image-saturated storytelling and narratives that make up the
larger part of a living culture. What sociologists have called ‘the practices of everyday life’
have come to be overwhelmingly mediated by visual forms and the ways in which we
discuss and analyse our visual experiences. Major social institutions—including systems
of education, entertainment industries and political systems—have been reconfigured in
response to the impact of new media. In turn this concern for the popular, the quotidian
and the everyday has forced a general change of focus from a high-altitude concern with
semiotic codes, generative structures and meta-languages to a more micrological and
self-referential focus upon vernacular modes of embodiment, performances and ­social
practices that involve all the senses in shaping what passes for experience and reality
(cf. Howes 2006). In this sea-change exclusively linguistic concepts have proved inad-
equate as a general model of mediated and re-mediated cultural processes (cf. Mitchell
1994a). Indeed the emergence of a range of transdisciplinary problematics in the last
decade—including Media Studies, Internet Studies, Cyberculture Studies, Cognitive
Science, Information Theory, Globalization research (Globalization studies), Cultural
Geography, Consciousness Studies, Animation Studies, and Ecophilosophy—is symp-
tomatic of deeper crises and changes within text-dominated university systems as these
respond to global shifts in the larger information economy. In this context it is worth
noting the resilience of the text, that is its capacity to re-territorialize and set itself in
command, a power which stems from its abstraction, the insignificance of the signifier
and its related promiscuity; set this against the stubborn ‘this-ness’ or ‘haecceity’ of the
material image. The imperial text is highly resilient, particularly adept in reappearing in
ways claimed to be contrary to purportedly conventional textual forms.
It has become clear that the task of working through these contradictory processes
and implementing more transdisciplinary perspectives will have to inform the agen-
das of future theorists and researchers. Whatever the ultimate shape of these emerging
constellations we believe that future explorations will continue to be committed to the
values of dialogue, critical debate, cross-disciplinary exploration and the willingness to
create new conceptual formations, methodologies and philosophical alliances in return-
ing to the things themselves. However, the conceptual and methodological flexibility
advocated by this approach to visual studies is not at the expense of the important in-
sights lodged within relatively separate disciplines and practices. Such visual phenom-
ena, experiences and ideas—some related to sensory specialization and embodiment,
some to conceptual frameworks that divide up the world in different ways, some to dif-
ferent histories—frequently challenge or resist translation. Rather than the definitive es-
tablishment of any post-disciplinary quasi-discipline of visual studies, the new situation
is defined by the need to encounter visual and somatic phenomena creatively and sen-
sitively, attentive to what disciplines and practices offer, but also what they obscure and
limit. Post- or a-disciplinarity is improvising, not allowing interpretation to be ‘settled’,
either by discipline or routinized indiscipline.
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 7

On a more practical level these new developments pose more immediate questions
for those developing course programmes and curricula in the field of aesthetics, new
media and new visual studies. If it is the case that we are moving from linear-verbal
and ­writing-dominated paradigms to multidimensional hybrid paradigms based on
digitalized audiovisual information (see Flusser 2004; Gitelman 2006; Johnson 1999;
­Kittler 2009; Levy 1997, 1998; Lister 1995; Manovich 2001; McLuhan 1989; ­Mitchell
1994a,b; Poster 1990, 1995, 2001, 2002; Robins 1996; Silver and Massanari 2006;
­Stephens 1998; Terranova 2004; Zielinski 2008) then the most urgent task is to ­construct
­transactional and interactional sites that facilitate dialogues across all the constituencies
concerned with the vicissitudes of visual meaning and cultural formations in the emerg-
ing information society. Comprehensive programmes of visual studies must, in principle,
be multidisciplinary, transcultural and global in design and delivery. Such programmes
must be capable of theorizing the material dynamics embedded in systems and institu-
tions of meaning as these are increasingly transformed through digitalization. We will
need to pursue difficult forms of reflection by asking: What kind of syllabus, reading list,
lecture series or library could accommodate the infinite and expanding realms of ­visual
knowledge? How should we acquire the competences to interpret non-Western art? How
can we keep track with the hybridized subcultures of the contemporary world?
Turning to the conditions for visual study and practice, in the UK visual art and
­design education and training evolved independently, initially in colleges of art and
design, then in Polytechnic departments. With the conversion of Polytechnics into
universities in 1992, these courses joined with other arts and humanities subjects in a
unified university sector. Recent years have seen considerable pressure on creative vi-
sual and material practices to make themselves more ‘academic’, or at least to claim the
conceptual and methodological rigour supposedly characteristic of ‘research’. Yet the
stimulus and benefits of visual sensibility and thinking to other largely text-based arts
and humanities subjects are almost entirely unrecognized.2 Where are the ‘Creative
Seeing’ programmes that might complement well-established ‘Creative Writing’? How
should we develop the ‘close seeing’ of image-based cultural forms and digital media to
parallel the task of close readings of literary texts commended by structuralist and post-
structuralist paradigms? What analytical and synoptic competences would empower a
teacher to provide explicit instruction in ‘critical visual studies’ within the mediascapes
of a globalized society? What would be the visual equivalent of critical social theory?
How can future students be trained to analyse the visual topographies created by cy-
berspace, to understand and intervene within the expanding universe of creative in-
dustries based upon electronic image processing? What philosophical and institutional
changes would be necessary to create reflexive programmes of cultural criticism? And so
on. Clearly one of the most urgent tasks for teachers and researchers is to create more
strategic, holistic, critical, comparative, multisensorial frameworks and reflexive inter-
cultural methodologies for visual inquiry (a ‘route-map’ of such strategic directions—
what we then called the hermeneutics and politics of vision—is included in our earlier
collection of chapters, see Heywood and Sandywell 1999, ‘Appendix: The Original
Project’, pp. 238 – 50).
8 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

Critical Themes
Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it,
and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to look-
ing at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes,
­Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today
everything exists to end in a photograph. (Sontag 2002: 24)

We have suggested that one of the fundamental requirements of the new visual studies
is to approach visual phenomena reflexively from critical, culturally specific and historical
standpoints. But like the heteroglossial character of the contemporary academy, criti-
cal thinking about the visual forms a spectrum of interests distributed unevenly across
­existing disciplinary formations. Our starting point is the view that the new visual stud-
ies have no realistic alternative other than to build upon and exploit the energies released
by the many forms of critical discourse and media theorizing of the last three decades.
This is particularly true with respect to what has been called the postmodern turn and
the wider impact of poststructuralist problematics in social theory (for example in the
burgeoning research that has accumulated thanks to feminist theorizations of vision,
­social space and society).
Within a larger horizon and time-frame, programmes of visual enquiry will need
to reconnect to perspectives that transcend the history of Cultural Studies and lead
back into the deep-history of European institutional life. By deconstructing such post-
modernist programmes we also need to problematize the exclusively ‘Eurocentred’
paradigms of traditional cultural/visual theory and be open to non-European and com-
parative accounts of image awareness and consciousness (for example Davis 1999). We
are ­reminded that the concern for modes of signification and signifying practices is not
a ­recent intellectual invention. John Berger in his path-breaking lectures Ways of Seeing
had already pointed the way to more concrete studies of gendered power in understand-
ing the visual field. Being ‘shocked’ by past theories of meaning and signification might
help loosen the overwhelming textual orientation of critical studies. Here again how
we break the grip of such text-centred disciplines like art history, museology and media
studies will prove crucial to the development of a more robust social theory of visual
forms, visual space and visual institutions.
To this end we have emphasized the importance of developing self-reflexive per-
spectives towards the current status of ‘visual studies’ and commend new configura-
tions of the visual as complex, heterogeneous and dynamic sociocultural formations in
their own right. However, by opening up traditional perspectives we do not claim to
lay down rules or preempt the explorations of others. The promise of Reflexive ­Visual
Studies converges on three recurrent themes: first, that we need to question and rethink
many of the earlier formulations and implicit frameworks of visual studies programmes
(­Martin Jay’s contribution to this volume, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited’ is
exemplary in returning to and revising his earlier path-breaking essay (Jay 1992) on the
historicity of ‘regimes of seeing’), second, that we need to critically recover the history
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 9

and philosophical presuppositions of earlier forms of visual analysis and our com-
monsense understandings of audiovisual experience (exemplified in Barry Sandywell’s
­programmatic chapter on the historicity of visual knowledge), and third, that we need to
imagine and invent new forms of research and alternative methodologies—and ­perhaps
even metadisciplines—in response to the transformational forces of digitalization and
cyberspace as these are reconfiguring social relations and everyday life (for example to
uncover both the aestheticizing and the de-aestheticizing forces at work in contempo-
rary society). In all of these respects we claim that the ‘pictorial’ turn cannot simply
­replace the ‘linguistic’ turn of traditional cultural studies.
More than a decade ago, in an earlier collection of essays on interpretation and visual
culture (Heywood and Sandywell 1999), we diagnosed the prospects of visual studies in
the following way:

The visual field has begun to be explored with a thoroughness and global under-
standing that is unique in the history of human self-reflection. Recent work on
the work of seeing, vision, perception, and culture has taken explicitly historical
and hermeneutic directions. Indeed, to borrow an expression from Martin Jay, the
topic of ‘­visuality’ presents itself as a radical discursive ‘force field’, ‘a non-totalized
juxtaposition of changing elements, a dynamic interplay of attractions and aver-
sions, without a ­generative first principle, common denominator or inherent essence’
(1993, 2). ­Recent work from sociology and social theory have been at the forefront
of this ­revaluation of visual metaphors and ideas—witness the recent collection of
essays ­edited by Chris Jenks (Visual Culture, 1995), David Lowe’s History of Bour-
geois Perception (1982), Elizabeth Chaplin’s book Sociology and Visual Representation
(1994), Paul Virilio’s Vision Machine (1994) as well as major texts exploring ‘the
denigration of ­vision’ in social thought (Jay’s Downcast Eyes, the collection of essays
edited by David Michael Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993) and
the more recent ­collection edited by Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, Vision and
Textuality (1995)). From the contributions of these important interventions we are
gradually realizing the extent to which the project of modernity has been saturated
by the problematics of viewing and visualisation. We are also now fully aware that
the latter are themselves open to sociocultural and historical analysis in their own
right. (1999: ix – x).

Ten years of scholarship and critical reflection has seen a massive explosion of theo-
retical and empirical research on the material presence of imagery, artworks and visual
culture in society. As a response to the globalization of media, the appearance of conver-
gent and interactive media, and the digitization of culture we have become acutely aware
of the ‘specularization’ of social life and with it the spread of new technologies that visi-
bilize ever more spheres of private and public life (from the family, schooling, religion
to the social organization of science and politics). Terms like ‘surveillance’, ‘panopti-
con’, ‘society of the spectacle’, ‘gaze’, ‘image’, ‘screen culture’, ‘digital image process-
ing’, and ‘ways of seeing’ have become commonplace across the human sciences. What
10 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

earlier theorists somewhat innocently called ‘the visual field’—we might think of the
path-breaking explorations of John Berger, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Roland
­Barthes, Susan Sontag, Norman Bryson, Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell and others—
has today become a global space of material performances and practices. In the world of
late-capitalist societies, visual culture has become one of the most dynamic global indus-
tries of the age. The fusion of the political economy of visuality and the emerging new
media technologies has created the transinstitutional and transnational virtual topogra-
phies that we refer to as ‘cyberspace’.
In the light of these unparalleled transformations it is no accident that the field of
visual studies has itself moved beyond its exploratory and preparadigmatic stage influ-
enced by traditional art history and cultural historiography to a more forthright accep-
tance of the material, neurobiological, cognitive, social-historical and cultural processes
that mediate visual experience. The coming of cyberspace has forced many to rethink
their assumptions about visuality as the new information technologies have produced
qualitatively new forms of seeing and interactivity on a global scale. Where older theo-
ries of art and media sometimes tended to dematerialize the operations of visuality,
today many researchers are acutely aware of the concrete effects and operations of visual
apparatuses in the context of particular organizations of seeing, spectatorship and sur-
veillance.3 Older litigious disputes about disciplinary borders have given way to inter-
and cross-disciplinary dialogues. In areas such as Art History, Film Studies, Culture and
Media Studies explorations of the interstices and intersections of disciplinary perspec-
tives have become much more significant and productive. And as we move into the
first decades of the new millennium one of the recurrent motifs of work in this area—
a theme as evident in the later writings of Stuart Hall as in the work of Slavoj ŽiŽek,
Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Kittler, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Lisa Cartwright—is the shift
away from interdisciplinary collaboration to more resolutely meta- and trans-disciplin-
ary thinking and a growth of reflexive self-awareness with regard to methodological and
epistemological issues that cut across the natural sciences, arts, social studies and phi-
losophy. Today the emerging programmes of ‘visual studies’ are exerting an irresistible
pressure for change upon all the arts, sciences and humanities.
The diversity of voices, emphases and theoretical strategies exemplified by this collec-
tion attests to the remarkable growth of the field of visual studies. Yet despite the mani-
fest differences in approach and diversity of theoretical backgrounds there has emerged
a remarkable set of overlapping concerns—philosophical, theoretical and thematic—
running through the Handbook. Taken together we believe that this unique mosaic of
themes forms a creative matrix of ideas that might act as conceptual markers for more
radical experiments in visual research and teaching.
Among these distinctive features we would single out the following:

•• The explicit concern with questioning the historical and philosophical tradi-
tions that inform the available paradigms of visual thinking across the arts,
humanities and sciences. This concern for the genesis and genealogy of inter-
pretive traditions is part of a broader philosophical effort to restore human
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 11

activities and practices to their sustaining experiential contexts and forms of

life (a project that involves integrations of research agendas concerned with the
senses in historical and comparative perspective). In this respect theorists like
Constance Classen and David Howes have spoken of ‘the sensual revolution’
or ‘sensory turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (Howes 2006: 402; cf.
­Classen 1993 and Howes’s contribution to this volume).
•• The interdisciplinary nature of many of the chapters (exemplifying a desire to
move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and frameworks that have
tended to focus more or less exclusively upon painting and pictorial arts, per-
formance arts, television, cinema and related visual media). This shift might
also be understood as a loosening of the tie between particular visual forms and
conventional, modish or authoritative ways of talking about them.4 An active
engagement with the visual field in explicitly self-reflective and deconstruc-
tive terms (an engagement that commends self-analyses of the guiding assump-
tions and methods of inquiry as integral to every form of visual and audiovisual
research).
•• A common concern to develop more reflexive frameworks of visual research and
visual teaching that are both theoretically informed, historically specific and
empirically concrete.5
•• An emphasis upon the ‘politics of the visual’ that relates the organization of
­visual practices and visual subcultures to their concrete performative settings
and material contexts in everyday social life.
•• A commitment to diverse projects of imagining new ways of thinking about
­visual practices and institutions that articulate with the seismic changes in
global society and culture, especially with force fields linked to ‘new technolo-
gies’ and emerging forms of information culture indexed by the problematics of
‘globalization’, ‘digitalization’, and ‘cyberculture’ (Sandywell 2009, 2011).
•• In the context of the global turn, an emphasis upon theoretical openness, diver-
sity and explicitly ethical and political concerns in imagining future develop-
ments in the rapidly changing world of visual identities and forms of life.

To summarize, despite differences of emphasis and diverse theoretical backgrounds,

all of the voices in this collection concur that the field of visual culture and visual studies
is one of the most creative and dynamic zones of contemporary intellectual life. The new
visual studies promise to open the academy to other voices and practices intent upon
transforming the landscape of everyday life. The challenge posed to the traditional uni-
versity and text-based university curricula is to have the imagination and will to create
structures that facilitate radical dialogue across the established disciplinary boundaries.
Ultimately the success of these programmes will depend on macro- and micro-­agencies—
from governmental departments to individual scholarly enterprises—with the imagina-
tion to invest resources to encourage and sustain these new developments.
While we know a great deal about visuality and visual culture the ‘field of the ­visual’
is still one that invites new theories and intellectual perspectives. In what follows we wish
12 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

to conceptualize ‘the visual’ less as a discretely bounded domain of study—­traditionally

occupied by art history, media studies, film studies and the like—and more as an under-
lying problematic that informs the disciplinary concerns and research programmes of all
the arts, sciences and philosophy. As an intersecting cluster of themes and problems—
what we might call a transverse problematic—visual culture lends itself to a multiplicity
of theoretical interventions and programmatic inquiries. Investigations into practices of
seeing thus necessarily interface with wider frameworks of thought, among these aes-
thetics, the philosophy of culture, sociology, politics, anthropology, cognitive science,
philosophy, the psychology and physiology of vision and neuroscience. By encouraging
researchers to question disciplinary boundaries and traditional conceptual tools, the
‘­visual problematic’ provides a rich resource of reflexivity and further attests to the vital-
ity of existing work and the promise of future research.

Some Preliminary Distinctions

While terminology is often nebulous and ill-defined we need some operational clarity in
locating the chapters in this collection. Bearing in mind that language itself is inevita-
bly contested and subject to contextual determination, we might establish a number of
conceptual issues that should prove useful to those wishing to work productively within
the visual field. The following brief discussion has accented the operational and meth-
odological implications of these conceptual tools.

The Visual
The visual (usually appearing in quotation marks as ‘the visual’) is the most generic term
designating the entire multifaceted field of visual experience. Like the word ‘culture’, ref-
erences to the visual, ‘visual field/s’ and visual experience are in one sense completely ordi-
nary. If we denaturalize and historicize the concept of perception we generate the category
of ‘seeing’ or, more simply, visuality. Visuality, then, refers to the presence and workings of
image-mediated phenomenon operating in the organization of human experience. Today
the field of vision would include the arts, the creative work of the media and the built
environments—or as sociologists might say ‘art-worlds’, ‘media-worlds’ and ‘architectural
worlds’. But it would also include everyday or vernacular visual cultures—both mass
popular culture and the routine organization of mundane ecologies for different societies
and cultures, the spatiotemporal systems of domestic arrangements, the unnoticed visual
spaces of everyday social interaction, the reconfiguration of urban space and the social
processes this facilitates. Until quite recently the ‘seeing’ and analysis of the spatiotempo-
ral structuring of quotidian life as a serious domain of research was all-but-­nonexistent.
Today we see the outline forms of more robust institutional theory and research focused
upon the cultural practices that mediate everyday life and social space (Massey 1984,
1994, 2005; Rose 1993; Smith 1987; Sheringham 2006; Soja 1989, 1996).
To inhabit a culture is to belong to its orderings of visual space, its structuring of
environments and meaningful sites as contexts of action and interaction. As with the
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 13

performances of routine conversation, fluency in these spatial domains is assessed imma-

nently in terms of the operative capacities to negotiate these ‘subworlds’ and universes of
meaning. In the activities of daily life praxis takes priority over theory. We move through
different ‘provinces’ of social space. We listen to music, we are surrounded by images,
we experience the virtual worlds of digital culture at particular times and in specific
places. To function competently any society typically requires individuals to internal-
ize the dominant audiovisual order as a taken-for-granted field of action. Individuals are
‘socialized’ into prescribed identities and roles ‘tuned’ to these spatiotemporal singulari-
ties. In this way children engage in social activities and visual practices before they are
capable of formulating anything like a theory or meta-theory of those activities. Visual
competences—like linguistic competences—are acquired without deliberate thought or
reflection. Here the concept ‘field’ also marks the everyday invisibility of routinized
practices of seeing and identity. Visual worlds—think of domestic artefacts, public space
and architectural structures—are, so to speak, constantly ‘in play’ as the vital horizon
of identity-formations in ordinary life. But like many of the practices of everyday life
the horizon of visuality is typically taken for granted. The complex origins and struc-
turation of institutional space is ignored as an analytic concern. Institutional sites are
encountered at the level of ‘the lived’ rather than ‘the reflected’ (thus the everydayness
of visual perception remains silent about its underlying neurological, biological and psy-
chological mechanisms). What we call ‘the visual’, then, signifies the vast and typically
unremarked phenomenal orderings that configure and accompany every individual and
social activity. If we can supplement traditional aesthetics focused primarily upon the
analysis and evaluation of ‘fine art’6, the visual turn today discloses a remarkable field
of everyday aesthetic concerns, singular judgements and practical experiences. Once we
overcome the traditional condescension towards the everyday we reveal the unexplored
landscapes of everyday aesthetics (Saito 2007). We reclaim the aesthetics of everyday life
but only on the condition that we return what is called ‘art’ to the wider community, to
an enlarged horizon of subjects and their diverse concerns, although not at the expense
of types of experience and ‘values’ traditionally nurtured by the arts.

Visuality
The complex institutions of visuality come into focus when the unnoticed realms of the
visual are seen as problematic or extraordinary. What is striking here, and what matters, is
what we might call ‘invisible visibility’, that combination of the utterly obvious—on which
our capacity to live a life necessarily depends—and the radical elusiveness of ­everyday life.
In this context ‘institution’ is shorthand for the organized articulations of social practices
and their sustaining material resources, personnel and interactional processes. In historical
terms institutions of visuality have been mediated by relations and representations of class,
gender, age, ethnicity and ‘race’ (here again we return to the theme of identity formations
as a central focus of gender theory). Or, even more ­directly, by the transformative effect
of such new visual technologies as photography, cinema and digitalized optics. Once this
‘alienation effect’ is set into motion we begin to notice the remarkable unremarkableness
14 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

of ordinary perception and visual practices. On a broader historical scale, the social
­organization of seeing is transformed into a problem, a cultural and historical puzzle:
how do different cultures and subcultures organize and envision their worlds?, why did
these societies come to view the world in these ways?, how do different subcultures envi-
sion ­everyday life, create art and interpret the visible?, how do we see the world?. Everyday
practices of seeing—including the making of artefacts, visible signs and artworks—can
then be revealed as ‘anthropologically’ strange and research-worthy.
Asking historical questions about institutional contexts functions like an eth-
nomethodological ‘breaching experiment’ enabling the analyst to appreciate the diverse
and multifarious involvements human beings have with the visual surface in all their
remarkable singularity and concreteness. Of course major advances in science and, espe-
cially, in the neurobiology of vision and cognitive processes has historically been decisive
in this ‘problematization’ (indeed one of the earliest transdisciplinary sources of inquiry
into the dynamics of vision is the experimental work of the physiologist Hermann von
Helmholz (1821 – 94)). Even earlier we might mention the impact of microscopy in the
work of the English scientist Robert Hooke (Micrographia, 1665) as an exemplary epi-
sode in the emergence of modern forms of descriptive ‘seeing’. In terms of its influence,
Hooke’s work remained a paradigm case of the power of rigorous observation and de-
scriptive imagery in early modern science. Many other examples of the transformative
impact of optical media and instrumentation might be cited (Kittler 2009).
By approaching vernacular perception as problematic we experience a sudden dé-
tournement, a vertigo of disorientation and, hopefully, wonder (again, we might men-
tion the reception of Hooke’s Micrographia that more or less established the authority of
the Royal Society and physical research in seventeenth-century Britain). What was pre-
viously an unnoticed resource—the visual field—now turns into a topic of thought and
inquiry. Through the researches of a range of new sciences the familiar has been relativ-
ized and assumes the character of unfamiliarity, the ordinary assumes the appearance of
the extraordinary. And, of course, this ‘defamiliarizing’ operation can take many forms
and result in different ‘seeings’ (we should recall that like modern science one of the
functions of artworks is to perform this ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’ (Danto
1981) by reordering our taken-for-granted assumptions and perceptions of the world).
We can also make analogous claims for the phenomenological tradition originating
in the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the sociological tradi-
tions of ethnomethodology and reflexive social inquiry (Blum 1974; Garfinkel 1968;
Sandywell et al. 1975). The historical predecessor of this kind of aesthetic distanciation
that creates new techniques of observation and new forms of knowledge is the recur-
rent appearance of the carnivalesque and ludic episodes that turned everyday life ‘upside
down’ (Bakhtin 1968). By means of such symbolic reversals we are, in Walter ­Benjamin’s
terminology, ‘shocked’ into new insights and profane illuminations (­Benjamin 1969;
also Benjamin 2008; cf. Bryson 2004; Foster 1987). In different ways and using dif-
ferent media the history of modern science and modern art is a continuous record of
such transformative shocks to commonsense beliefs and assumptions. Any kind of
critical theory of vision, social space or society presupposes some kind of operative
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 15

defamiliarization (in recent years these operative strategies have sheltered under the gen-
eral rubric of ‘postmodernism’).
When visual experience is transformed into an explicit topic of inquiry the term ‘vi-
suality’ can function both as a placeholder for the phenomenological qualities of seeing
and visual phenomena more generally (qualities that tend to get occluded when ex-
pressed in the visual predicates that enter ordinary language and everyday judgements
about visual experience) and, more analytically, as a concept that emphasizes the craft,
techniques and processes of seeing (expressed more directly, the practices of seeing avail-
able to a given community, society or whole culture). The radical extension and transfor-
mation of practices of looking is, of course, one of the major functions of new art forms,
new sciences and visual technologies (Crary 1990). The genealogy of photography re-
veals a reciprocal field that enfolds the discourse of science and photographic science
(Wilder 2009). An analogous formation operates in the science/technology/­cinematic
constellation (Cartwright 1995). The coming of cinematic technologies not only cre-
ated new forms of knowledge and expertise configured around cinematic art (set de-
sign, art direction, montage, special effects, colour technology, editing, film processing,
management and distribution, image storage and archiving, film music and so on), but
also revolutionized scientific medicine and therapeutic observation. For example those
professionally concerned with the origins, structure and dynamics of visuality could as-
sume a more ‘disengaged’, reflective and analytic attitude towards the visual phenom-
ena (again photography’s and film’s complex and creative relationship with the conduct
of modern scientific research is paradigmatic of these emergent configurations). Rather
than ‘living in’ visual experience we experience estrangement and adopt an investigative
orientation towards the conditions, mechanisms and structures of visual life.
Habituated forms of perception and commonsense assumptions are bracketed by
the virtual spaces of screen imagery. Through the magical zones created by visual tech-
nologies we stop and wonder and in the space of this astonishment ask questions about
previously hidden phenomenal orders. What appeared solid and universal now ­appears
mutable and relative. Through such ‘shocks’ the visuality of everyday life is trans-
formed into an analytical, scientific, aesthetic and reflexive topic (cf. Jacobsen 2009;
­Merleau-Ponty 1962; Onians 2007; Johnstone 2008; Saito 2007; Sheringham 2006).
The ­invisible is made visible and we turn to the ‘showing’ of seeing (Mitchell 2002).
This ‘bracketing’ of the visual field as a taken-for-granted attitude enables the inquirer
to ‘see that even something as broad as the image does not exhaust the field of visuality;
that ­visual studies is not the same thing as image studies, and that the study of the visual
image is just one component of the larger field’ (Mitchell 2002: 178 – 9).

Visibilization
Visibilization designates the social and material conditions, machineries and processes
that make different modalities of visuality possible. Research into social visibilization
is particularly concerned with the activities, techniques and performative status of see-
ing, spectatorship and the technological expansions of visual experience through optical
16 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

media. As an analytical theme the concept of visibilization is inseparable from the so-
ciological question as to who imagines, designs and transforms visual ideas and image
‘blueprints’ into real works, artefacts and technological apparatuses. Who is licensed to
produce visibilizations as a routine operation of particular social activities and organi-
zations (who has the responsibility and sanctionable power to reframe social objects,
reconfigure categories of objects and process the products of visibilization)? Who is
empowered to reproduce (or to contest) the dominant ways of seeing? In general we as-
sume that powerful groups and institutions in a society prescribe the forms of empirical
visibility—sites of vision—along with the operative practices of the wider culture. We
also assume that every form of social interaction presupposes some type of observational
scene (involving prototypes of actual or virtual surveillance). The simple fact of seeing
others turns out to involve a complex set of constructive procedures and interpretive
‘work’. Even ghosts require a spectral stage. Individuals and groups who control a so-
ciety’s ‘visibility machines’ also control the ‘scenes of appearance’ which can be linked
to surveillance strategies, discourses and the mobilization of socio-symbolic power. But
once in existence such scenarios constrain the kinds of interaction they facilitate. As
Mitchell rightly observes, visual culture ‘is the visual construction of the social, not just
the social construction of vision’ (2002: 170).
Mitchell’s chiastic inversion becomes self-referential when we realize that every
model of knowledge and every programme of education is itself a kind of seeing. The
theoretician’s ways of ‘seeing vision’—by, for example asking after the visual construc-
tion of the social—is itself a suitable topic for historical analysis. Cultural capital be-
comes transformative when it is linked up to social apparatuses and ‘vision machines’
just as a society actualizes its values only when these are translated into spectacles and
scenes of normative inscription. From this perspective a society is a grid of visual net-
works composed—in Foucault’s idiom—of normalized sites and heterotopias. Today
these ‘relations’, ‘link-ups’ and ‘externalizations’ are carried out in ways that relate local
cultures to events on a truly global scale.
But ‘visibilization’ may also be extended to the particular work of singular arts and cul-
tural forms—the specialized forms of experience, subjective intentionalities and dialogical
possibilities made possible by the available machineries of visual experience and practices
of looking (Sturken and Cartwright 2001). It should also be extended to practices that
contest and resist the dominant forms of visualization (Haraway 1991). We need to be
reminded that subversive images, just like critical verbal acts, are potentially dangerous
phenomena that can have serious implications for the wider social and political order.
The story of modernist art and music is littered with such transgressive interventions. The
iconic instance of Osip Mandelstam’s fateful ‘Ode to Stalin’ might be taken as an object
lesson in the dangerous consequences of audiovisual intervention (Mandelstam 2003).

Visual Technologies
Visual technologies refer to the apparatuses and mechanisms that provide the conditions
of the possibility of visibilization/s (ranging from the ‘biological apparatus’ of neural
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 17

networks to the technological apparatuses that extend and transform human percep-
tion). With the transition to a global social order we move from an age of ‘mechanical
reproduction’ to an age of ‘electronic’ and ‘digital reproduction’. The shift from analogue
technologies like lithographic reproduction and emulsion-based photography to digital
technologies is one of the major changes that has revolutionized the rules governing the
visual field. In general the focus upon the ‘machineries’ of visibilization opens new paths
into the traditional research practices of art historians and art critics (cf. Onians 2007).
We might cite recent research on the historical uses of the camera obscura, linear per-
spective techniques, photographic media, multimedia digital technology and the like.
In general such apparatuses are ‘composed of lines of visibility, utterances, lines of force,
lines of subjectivation, lines of cracking, breaking and ruptures that all intertwine and
mix together and where some augment the others or elicit others through variations and
even mutations of the assemblage’ (Deleuze, ‘What Is a Dispositif ?’ (1989), in Deleuze
2007: 347).

Visibility Machines
Visibility (or aesthetic) machines are specific instruments and apparatuses that
­generate—or facilitate the generation of—visible displays, sites and scenes of optical
interpretation:

Visibility [Deleuze is discussing Foucault’s analyses of visibilization processes] does

not refer to a general light that would illuminate pre-existing objects; it is made up of
lines of light that form variable figures inseparable from an apparatus. Each apparatus
has its regimen of light, the way it falls, softens and spreads, distributing the visible
and the invisible, generating or eliminating an object, which cannot exist without it.
This is not only true of painting but of architecture as well: the ‘prison apparatus’ as an
­optical machine for seeing without being seen. If there is a historicity of apparatuses,
it is the history of regimes of light but also of regimes of utterances. (Deleuze, ‘What
Is a Dispositif ?’ (1989), in Deleuze 2007: 344)

Aesthetic machines are artefacts, devices, instruments, apparatuses and technologies

which extend (and in some cases transform) human awareness, perception and sensual
consciousness through visual simulacra: from older and no less wonderful technology,
like damp, dimly lit cave walls (Lascaux to Plato), a piece of paper and a pencil, the
camera obscura, through to more recent light machines and artificial technical senso-
ria (magnifying lenses, spectacles, magic-lanterns, dioramas, the telescope, microscopes,
cameras, x-ray technology (radiography), body scanners (Magnetic-Resonance Imag-
ing), writing machines, lasers, magnetic resonators, televisual technologies, etc.), cogni-
tive machines, recording machines, artificial intelligence machines, prosthetic devices,
telegraph, typewriters, maps and so on. The transformative power of such machinery has
frequently been described in ‘magical’ or ‘dream-like’ terms (photography capturing the
ghosts of the past, cinema as an oneiric medium, etc.). While the idea has Darwinian
18 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

precedents and, more specifically, origins in the notebooks of his contemporary, Charles
Babbage (1801 – 71), the model of machinic production might be considered as a gen-
eralization of Charles Baudelaire’s thought-provoking maxim: ‘A painting is a machine’.
Postmodernists have taken the theme to heart in their notions of the machine à écriture
and vision machine (cf. Virilio 1989, 1994). Paintings are image machines. Maps are
power machines. Photography is an evidence machine. Cinema is a dream machine. This
is the same idiom that permitted Walter Benjamin’s well-known homology: ‘The cam-
era introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’
((1936) 1992: 230; cf. Sontag, ‘Melancholy Objects’, in 2002). Today we would invert
Baudelaire’s phrase in describing the digital machineries of telecommunications: ‘Digital
machines are painting the world’. Through digitization we revolutionize the relationship
between the visible and the invisible, the real and the virtual, actuality and dream, self
and other. Photography, as Susan Sontag observed, ‘though not an art form in itself, has
the peculiar capacity to turn all its subjects into works of art . . . Now all art aspires to
the condition of photography’ (2002: 149).
We are entirely comfortable with the synesthesia that enables us to ‘see’ with sound
(as in ultrasound technologies) or to visualize the workings of the brain through
­magnetic waves. Today the conduct of modern science has become inseparable from
the ­revelatory work of such prosthetic instruments. If the telescope is the paradigmatic
aesthetic ­machine of the seventeenth century, perhaps the camera (including the more
advanced machines of cinematography) will one day be considered as the paradig-
matic aesthetic machine of the nineteenth century (Benjamin had already formulated
the thesis in relation to photography and cinema in the 1930s) and the laser or digital
light machine as the aesthetic machine of the twentieth century. Speaking generically,
we might respecify the vast and heterogeneous universes of material culture, technol-
ogy and telecommunications as not only information media, but as ‘embodiments of
mind’ (cf. McCulloch 1989), extensions of human praxis (McLuhan 1989, 1994), and
‘tools of living’ (the eye itself being nature’s great contribution to the development of
infinitely extended aesthetic machinery). Thus the digital apparatuses of contemporary
advertising, popular culture, film, architecture and the designed environment are all
intensive domains of materialized aesthetics based upon the transformative powers of
visual technology (an expanded concept of technological embodiment which demands
the creation of a new cultural science of Prosthetics). Such a prosthetics would have as
its central theme the sociocultural construction of embodied subjectivities and objec-
tivities and their social, ethical and political consequences.

Visual Subjectivation/Objectivation
Subjectivation and objectivation refer to the processes and practices that construct ‘sub-
jectivities’ and ‘objectivities’ in different historical regimes and social orders. Speaking
of the library as a visibility machine, Alberto Manguel reflects: ‘Entering a library, I am
always struck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the
reader through its categories and its order’ (2008: 47). A physical organization like a
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 19

library or museum prescribes ways of seeing and acting upon its users. It is not merely a
physical space but a grammar of social interaction. It is, in this sense, an image machine.
But from this perspective all powerful social organizations and institutions create visual
domains in which certain forms of selfhood are prescribed or proscribed.
The visual turn is thus also a turn towards a renewed interest in the self and concep-
tions of selfhood and ‘modes of spectatorship’ as these are correlated to the changing
organizations of visual experience within larger political constellations. A library is thus
both a mirror of the universe and a technology of the self. The central contention here is
that different techniques and apparatuses of visibilization give rise to different forms of
space, subjective orientation and self-experience. Just as texts always entail an ‘implied
reader’ so visual artefacts always presume an ‘implied spectator’ (the library, in Manguel’s
sense, would project an ‘implied browser’, a flâneur/flâneuse both following and resist-
ing the rules of its categorical systems). And these projected ‘spectators/readers/­listeners’
vary in time and space. A melancholic eye thus elicits a melancholic glance from the
objects in its visual field. As Irit Rogoff observes: ‘Spectatorship as an investigative field
understands that what the eye purportedly “sees” is dictated to it by an entire set of be-
liefs and desires and by a set of coded languages and generic apparatuses’ (1998: 22).
The ‘spaces of seeing’, ‘practices of looking’, and ‘forms of selfhood’ they facilitate are
themselves products of particular modes of production (Benjamin (1936) 1992, 2008),
socioeconomic formations of lived space and time (Gregory 1994; Lefebvre 1991; Soja
1989, 1996), gendered ways of seeing (Berger 1972; Haraway 1991; Pollock 1988) and
‘scopic regimes’ (Jay 1993). Acts of perception are both routine extensions and everyday
expressions of a culture’s obsessions and sensibilities.
As a general heuristic assumption we would hypothesize a complex relationship
or internal ‘dialectic’ operating between discursive formations, visual structures and
­embodied forms of selfhood. The empirical exploration of the grammars of different
­visual regimes and subcultures—what Martin Jay has called the contested terrain of
scopic ­regimes—opens paths to a more explicitly social and historical analysis of past and
present visual practices and to the forms of material embodiment and differential self-
hood these facilitate. Somewhat surprisingly the precise empirical analysis of the lived
experiences of different visual life-worlds and historical cultures—the vast panorama of
different forms of visual consciousness—is of quite recent provenance.

Visual Engagement
Visual engagement refers to the embodied encounters, dialogical transactions and inter-
pretative adventures of visual life. Here the one-dimensional and monological concept
of ‘subjective constitution’ to be found in modernist and postmodernist theory needs
to be radically modified to accommodate the active appropriations of visual experi-
ence by self-reflective, interactive, embodied human agents. The contingencies of spec-
tatorship and interpretation mean that what has been called the act of seeing is rarely
passive and disinterested. Rather, practices of seeing are typically active and engaged
(for example as the virtual sites of desire and pleasure located in different class, gender
20 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

and ‘­race’-based relationships). The term ‘spectator’ has unfortunate connotations that
are themselves rooted in older positivist and reflectionist views of subjects encounter-
ing objects (for example where the traditional concept of the museum and of museum
studies was ­premised on spectatorship, of disengaged subjects viewing curious artefacts
and objects). Where older theoretical frameworks, particularly those seeking to exhibit
quasi-scientific rigour, from Structural Marxism, Semiotics, Critical Theory, and early
Feminism, ­postulated a relatively fixed mode of passive spectatorship, the new theori-
zations openly admit heterogeneity and multiplicity in modes of perception and corre-
lated forms of subjectivity.7
From this perspective every modality of lived experience—perception, memory,
anticipation, interpretation, judgement and so forth—is differentially embodied and
historically contingent. A ‘full-bodied’ social phenomenology based on these insights
would be one where the social forms of memory, perception, action and interaction
are recovered together and integrated into a more encompassing account of incarnate
awareness and situated knowledge drawn upon by individuals and collectivities in proj-
ects of self-understanding (if space permitted we would explore the implications of
these constellations for concepts of memory, identity and cultural transmission). Where
­earlier visual research methodologies posited a passive ‘spectator’ and ‘dominated’ ob-
ject, we now see realms of corporeal agency interwoven with complex vectors of affec-
tivity and pleasure. The ‘sensory-turn’ in general epistemology entails a renewed focus
upon the materiality and corporeality of vision.
A more existential and performative concept of ‘material encounter’ thus helps to
transform the passive ‘object’ of visual experience into an active facilitator of concrete
kinaesthetic practices and meanings. While no doubt spectators will continue to ‘gaze’
and ‘watch’, while museums and art galleries will predominantly remain archives of aes-
thetic objects, the possible modalities of empirical visuality are much more interactive,
diverse and complex. Acts of seeing are precisely actions, modes of praxis bordered by
contingencies and unanticipated consequences. Viewing ‘seeing’ in isolation from social
action and interaction is precisely an ‘abstraction’ from the contexts of lived experience.
In reality perception is interwoven with active world orientations, moral and ideologi-
cal discourses. From this perspective every act of seeing—including the acts of seeing
we call ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’—is shot through with gendered, racialized and other
cultural mediations. Thus the pictorial artwork, the photograph and cinematic image
now appear more like grenades of possible meanings and interpretative openings upon
possible worlds rather than inert planes of colours, lines and textures. By reactivating
the gendered and racialized structures of ways of seeing we can return to the work of art
history and art practice with renewed eyes.
We might then reclaim the polysemic word ‘art’ as a portmanteau term for every
kind of act or instrument that engenders reflexive awareness of being in the world. What
is called ‘art’ is not simply a passive medium of class ideologies or gendered power. It
is more deeply an articulation and revelation of historical social relations. Moreover, as
seeing is thoroughly socialized every act of seeing is acquired in relation to the wider
fabric of education and learning in a particular culture. To see ‘art’ as an embodiment
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 21

of knowledge and learning provides new dialogues with traditional art history. We see
things together; we ‘read’ the world by applying common interpretive repertoires. We
view the world and talk about the world in shared idioms. Knowledge is always an antic-
ipated outcome of dialogical pacts. This relational and dialogical reorientation also leads
to systematic reappraisals of the diverse functions of older representational artworks,
painting traditions, icon factories in the late medieval period, modes of representation in
the Middle Ages, Renaissance painting schools, Enlightenment visual cultures, modern
regimes of visual replication, modern science, museology, cinematic flânerie and so on.
Art history, the epic story of modernism, the canonical works of the European avant-
gardes become candidates for reappropriation in sociocultural terms as particular organs
of societal reflexivity.
This paradigm shift towards models of active reception and processes of interpreta-
tive self-definition might be considered as part of a more radical integration of phe-
nomenological hermeneutics and gendered inquiry that informs the reflexive turn in
contemporary intellectual life.

Visual Performance
Of course, every such ‘zone of encounter’ presupposes a medium of material images
and, typically, contested complexes of image repertoires and discourses. Visual perfor-
mance indexes the concrete enactments of visual forms and practices as a dialogical
work of situated, collaborative, signifying performances. Sensitized by the concept of
performance we again underline the radical sociality of visual media. We now see that
from its oldest origins ‘art’ has been a mode of social engagement, an interrogation rather
than a reflection of the real. In general we not only do things with visual media, we do
things with others to realize particular ends (and such acts and values are invariably con-
flictual). From the perspective of praxis, visible artefacts and artworks begin to assume
a much more complex provenance and diverse functionality in the genesis of meaning.
Recall, for example, that the Romantic image of the isolated painter is a product of an
essentially modern conception of art and in no sense reflects the practices of earlier tradi-
tions of painting where the craft involved cooperative performances involving a number
of different skilled practitioners and artisanal conventions. The ‘finished product’ was
thus a kind of palimpsest of laminated inscriptions, each layer compiled like a trace of
untrained and trained competences (art historians recognize this ‘layering’ by using the
designation ‘from the school of x’—that is that certain ‘Titians’ are actually in part the
work of Titian’s apprentices and collaborators).
It might be more fruitful to adopt the idea of collective inscription as a general model
of art and culture. The emphasis on the trans-subjective dimensions of cultural produc-
tion and interpretation restores the interplay between image, verbal media and active
appropriations across the whole field of situated social interaction. By underlining the
situated social character of visual ‘events’ we also underline the historical specifics of oc-
casioned encounters—the partial and fractured transactions human beings have with
visual objects and artefacts that are already framed and colonized by powerful material
22 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

systems and normative constraints. We see, in Michael Baxandall’s terms, with ‘period
eyes’ (1988). Perhaps every society produces the eyes it deserves. A culture insulated
against movement and travel produces a static and timeless sense of things. Histori-
cally, aspects of the world seen from female standpoints have differed significantly from
the world viewed through male eyes. Cultures that proscribe figural representation find
compensatory release in worlds of labyrinthine geometrical designs and verbal imagery
(Haldon and Brubaker 2010). The world seen from a moving train is radically different
from the world viewed on foot (Schivelbusch 1986; Kern 1993).
In phenomenological terms, the zones of engagement mentioned above are cultural
envelopes of embodied intentionality that are normatively linked with their experiential
‘correlates’ (for a phenomenology of lived-place and landscape in these visceral terms see
Charles Tilley’s The Phenomenology of Landscape (1994), Edward Relph’s Place and Place-
lessness (1976) and Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience (1999)).

Visible Cultures/Cultures of Visibility

If Visual Studies defines its topic as the investigation of visual cultural practices we
should immediately warn that there is no homogeneous ‘object’ indexed by the phrase
‘visual culture’. What we see are always visual cultures. By highlighting the plural phrase
‘cultures of visibility’ we draw attention to the importance of investigating sociocultural
differences and normative social multiplicities (these pluralized terms underlining het-
erogeneity, complexity, conflict and ‘polyphony’ as normal features of the ongoing par-
ticularities of cultural life).
The pluralized and modal concept of vision also reminds analysts to respect the sin-
gularity of different practices, technologies and media. Thus we should resist collapsing
one medium into another or ‘flattening’ the diverse practices of seeing by translating
them into some monological concept or theory. One example is the importance of de-
fending the singularity of visual art and its resistance to facile appropriation and the-
oretical translation. It is the very ambivalence and singular ‘spaceless spatiality’—the
punctum—of the artwork that facilitates a range of determinate and indeterminate vi-
sual experiences and discourses. This in essence is the phenomenological teaching that
what survives every reductive translation inhabits the sphere of singularity. In this re-
spect we can learn a great deal from some of the more reflective practices of traditional
art history with their intensive focus upon the material density and performative char-
acteristics of singular artefacts and artworks.
Here we have in mind the ‘immanent methodology’ of approaches to the art-
work where the task is not to describe the visual artefact or performance from afar—­
codifying and mapping the work from a high-altitude—but to ‘enter into’, to open a
dialogue, to surrender to and be contested by the complexity, ambiguity and ambiva-
lent experiences released by the work in question. From this perspective, artworks are
provocations and interrogations of the world before they are reflections or represen-
tations of pre-formed experience. Before we search for meanings and construct inter-
pretations we have to surrender to the disturbing ‘embodied presence’ of the artwork
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 23

and related aesthetic forms (Roland Barthes, for example identifies singularity as
the essential feature of the photograph—suggesting a definition of photographic art as
‘the impossible science of the unique being’ (2000: 71)). In this context we also under-
line the importance of rethinking the materiality of art practices—the sheer haecceity
of painterly works, for example—as a way of resisting and contesting dominant ways
of reading the tradition of art history. Ian Heywood’s reflections on the cubist moment
in modern art in this Handbook analyses the materiality of early modernist art and sug-
gests other ways of addressing the standard story of modernism in the arts. Merleau-
Ponty’s late reflections on the painterly work of Paul Cézanne interfaces with his own
version of phenomenological thought to create an alternative form of embodied and
participatory phenomenology (see Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (1968)
and The World of Perception (2008)). An analogous appreciation of the material singu-
larity of artworks can be found in the work of Theodor Adorno and the kind of close
reading practices that Walter Benjamin undertook in his Arcades project (Benjamin
1999b, 2008; cf. Buck-Morss 1989). A recent exponent of a similarly image-pervaded
literary art is the novelist and critic W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001; the interplay of dis-
course and photography in Sebald’s fictions is a central theme in Carolin Duttlinger’s
work (2006)).
The general ‘ethnographic’ task of entering into the occasioned particularity of a so-
cial practice or organization with the aim of recovering the meanings that practice has
for participants is a commonplace in certain forms of reflexive sociology (for example
de Certeau (1998) and Sandywell (1996)—the theme is also recovered and defended in
Gillian Rose’s chapter in the Handbook). For related empirical studies of the differential
work of ‘visibility machines’ see the collection edited by Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen,
Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances (1995). See also the references under ‘Tech-
noculture and visual technology’ in the bibliographical chapter by Barry Sandywell in
this volume. Sandywell’s ‘Seven Theses on Visual Culture’ in this volume addresses some
of these theoretical concerns.

The Visual Turn?

Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philoso-
phers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the stan-
dard of an image-free way of apprehending the real. (Sontag 2002: 153)

Sontag’s neat formulation needs immediate qualification. Plato’s work is of course as full
of images and ideas that depend on vision as it is of compelling theatre, narrative and
myth, the ‘allegory of the cave’ being the most famous example. Much the same could
be said of the presence of visual ideas in Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
Husserl or Heidegger. Rather than the fact that certain key ideas gain explanatory and
metaphoric power from vision, visual images are critical to their teaching. So while the
prominence of the visual in older philosophy and theory cannot be denied, are we being
unduly optimistic in anticipating a new phase in theorizing and empirical research in
24 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

the ever-expanding field of visual studies? Certainly there are signs that rigidities and
assumptions in the way of this change are breaking down. What will emerge is partially
historically contingent, and it is important to heed the warnings of Stafford (1996) and
others about growing visual illiteracy, ironically amid a culture suffused by the image,
but also one taking itself to be somehow naturally fluent and at ease with the visual.
While some have spoken of a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic’ turn by analogy with what Richard
Rorty famously called the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy, the general strategy
advocated here is to move away from linguistic and text-based models centred upon the
linguistic signifier towards image-based semiotic and intertextual models of visual expe-
rience and image life.8
Once we accept that every ‘reality’ or ‘form of life’ constructed by human beings is
image-based we have a new incentive to focus intensively upon the ontology and sociol-
ogy of image formations.
There are clearly dangers in thinking that this ‘pictorial’ turn has suddenly discovered
visual experience and perceptual life. This is clearly not the case as even the briefest en-
counter with the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others in the phe-
nomenological tradition will confirm. Once we begin to ‘read’ the tradition of Western
philosophy for these themes we find that visuality has been a constant concern from
Plato and Aristotle down to Descartes, Kant, Hegel and beyond. Indeed we find that
in many of the canonical writings of this tradition and against the general logocentrism
of other perspectives, visual experience—particularly everyday perception—has been
recurrently used as the paradigmatic model for other forms of human intentionality.
Husserlian phenomenology is in some respects the culmination of a deep-rooted Eu-
ropean ocularcentrism. Writers in the Marxist tradition such as Theodor Adorno, Wal-
ter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch were even more intensively concerned with the modern
transformations of the visual field as were such modern art historians as Erwin Panof-
sky, Heinrich Wölfflin and E. H. Gombrich.9 The self-interpretation of modernity as
an age of ‘enlightenment’ and self-reflection betrays the same obsessive fascination with
things visual. The institutional genealogy of Art History as a discipline in the eighteenth
century and ‘image science’ and ‘photographic science’ in the nineteenth century offer
further examples of the fascination with the image in European intellectual life. This
‘specular’ legacy lives on in the hegemonic grip of images and ideas centred upon theoria,
mimesis and representation that continue to organize everyday life and intellectual culture
to the present day (Sandywell 1996, 2011; cf. McNeill 1999; Thrift 2007). Yet while no-
tions of seeing have been powerfully active in much of Western thought, a proposition
denoted by the term ‘occularcentrism’, it is important to avoid a simplistic connecting
of ‘visual thinking’ to the mechanics of ideology and the politics of domination. Careen-
ing from obliviousness to the visual to reflex suspicion or condemning it out of hand is
precisely what a new visual culture studies would want to avoid.
In the many justified attempts to escape the framework of logocentric perspectives
and verbal paradigms there is a danger of abstracting ‘the visual’ from larger patterns
of human experience, of isolating acts of seeing from the complex range of sensory
­experience that is a normal condition for human beings and human praxis. Against this
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 25

tendency we emphasize that such distinctions are to be seen primarily in analytical and
strategic terms. In reality visuality cannot be readily separated from other sensory and af-
fective modalities and, as many of the chapters in this collection argue, we should begin
thinking of the human sensorium in developmental, multidimensional and multisenso-
rial terms (a rethinking of basic epistemological categories that transform what we un-
derstand by terms like ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’). However, it is important not
to neglect an important legacy of cultural and artistic forms that have been concerned
to explore the senses in relative, but certainly never complete, isolation. A key topic for
visual studies must be the particular but various modes of ‘visual thinking’ present in
such forms.
Where we have traditionally carved up creative arts into pictorial arts, literature and
music, today it is the crossings and ‘synaesthesia’ within and between these domains
that have stimulated reflection and rethinking; the theme of synaesthesia is particularly
­evident in film studies where the concern for ‘cinesthesia’ and ‘cinesthetic form’ is rela-
tively well developed, but is also present in reflections on the body and metaphor in
painting (Wollheim 1987: 305 – 56). The currently popular idea of ‘mixed media’ and
‘multimedia’ experience woven from sound-image-text ensembles is in fact prefigured
by the multisensorial nature of human intelligence in its endless quest to ‘translate’ the
visual into the verbal and the verbal into the visual (we already recognize this interplay
of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ in the commonplace idea of ‘visual music’—for example in
the visually rich orchestration of Elgar, Mahler or Shostakovich or the visuality of the
novel genre as a hybrid art of ‘telling-showing’). Recent research on the neurophysiol-
ogy of ‘mirror neurons’ has even suggested that the evolution of the human cortex has
become hard-wired to carry out these intersubjective ‘translations’ between verbal and
the visual experience. While recent research in neuroscience has revealed extraordinary
sensory specialization, thus presenting the problem of how connections and networks
operate, we might speculate that the networked multimodal organization of the brain
is reflected (at several ontological removes) by the multimodal or synaesthetic function-
ing of perception. From contemporary neuroscience and the basic phenomenology of
the human sensorium to the higher reaches of aesthetic practice and technoscience we
increasingly find that we are dealing with complex experimental intersections and con-
stellations of synaesthetic experience involving tactile, auditory, olfactory, haptic as well
as visual information.
It becomes clear that the binary contrast between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ is inadequate
and misleading and that an adequate philosophy of the visual needs to deconstruct this
opposition and explore spheres of experience where showing and telling—image and
text—interact in productive ways. Perhaps even the most elementary human compe-
tences are always already experimental, dialogical and polyphonic. In 1948 Merleau-
Ponty was already speaking of sensory qualities as emerging from ‘the dialogue between
me as an embodied subject and the external object which bears this quality’ (2008: 47).
As an experiential adventure such ‘dialogues’ can never be grasped as a pure transmission
of information nor as a purely abstract verbal ‘event’. To think otherwise is to allow a dis-
ciplinary classification to shape the transformative possibilities of concrete experience.
26 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

Indeed mandatory disciplinary commitments to autonomy and purity remain abstract

ideals in the face of such nomadic and hybridized experiences. As Shohat and Stam
argue, the visual:

never comes ‘pure’, it is always ‘contaminated’ by the work of other senses (hearing,
touch, smell), touched by other texts and discourses, and imbricated in a whole series
of apparatuses—the museum, the academy, the art world, the publishing industry,
even the nation state—which govern the production, dissemination, and legitimation
of artistic productions . . . The visual, we would argue, is ‘languaged’, just as language
itself has a visual dimension . . . The visual is simply one point of entry, and a very
strategic one at this historical moment, into a multidimensional world of intertextual
dialogism. (1998: 45)

The problem here, ‘at this historical moment’ but with its roots deep in modernity, is
that the abstraction and consequent power of the text then tends to dominate in many
analyses of this synthesis. As the history of both pragmatic thought and Heideggerian
hermeneutics has argued the simplest visible thing is already a dialogical complex, a
concretum of sensory qualities, a node of affectivity and desire, a congealed history that
opens out upon a genealogy of human practices and forms of embodiment (here the
investigation of material culture in its dense historical materiality is a more instructive
paradigm for the new visual research). From this perspective ‘the visual’ is an open to-
tality of sensory histories (for synaesthesia and the interaction of the senses see Richard
Cytowic 2002, 2003 and David Howes 2006). Above all we need to avoid the tempta-
tion to reify ‘the visual’ by abstracting visual forms and experiences from the complex
ecological, cultural, technological, historical and political contexts of human experience.
In this respect William Mitchell is correct in claiming that ‘there are no visual media. All
media are mixed media, with varying ratios of senses and sign-types’ (2002: 170). This
suggests the need for phenomenological sensitivity to and respect for such ‘varying ra-
tios’, not their levelling in the name of textual analysis or mutlimedia technology.
Literary practices—diverse modalities of telling—are thus also profoundly visual.
The classical narrative forms of the novel not only involve ‘techniques like ekphrasis
and description’ but ‘more subtle strategies of formal arrangement’ that involve ‘virtual
or imaginative experiences of space and vision that are no less real for being indirectly
conveyed through language’ (Mitchell 2002: 174). This, again, is a lesson that we can
learn from the embodied phenomenology of lived experience: ‘We are rediscovering in
every object a certain style of being that makes it a mirror of human modes of behav-
iour’ (Merleau-Ponty 2008: 53 – 4). From the auspices of these critical conceptions of
sensory experience we may say that the visual studies of the future must be strategically
intermodal, intermedial, and intertextual.
Of course we are already unknowing victims of a dualist mythology in even oppos-
ing ‘the visual’ and ‘the verbal’, the ‘realms’ of the visible and the sayable, what can be
seen and shown and what can be heard and read (recall that ekphrasis is an ancient trope
that promised to translate visual images into verbal representations, iconic experience
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 27

into textual meanings). Historically this hybridization is encoded in Horace’s maxim ut

pictura poiesis. The idea of embracing the visual by mortgaging the verbal is a prime ex-
ample of undialectical thinking. In fact all such ‘ecphratic’ reductions simply avoid the
complex problems associated with the dialectical texture of everyday experience, percep-
tual interaction and social knowledge. The theme of the crossing of the poetic and the
visual dates back to Greek antiquity: the saying that painting was silent poetry and po-
etry speaking painting is attributed to the poet Simonides (c. 556 bc–468 bc).
This type of uncritical reduction and ontological ‘flattening’—itself a product of
our spontaneous representational ideology—is particularly misleading in restricting ‘the
visual’ to ‘the pictorial’ or thinking of visuality as purely a question of the production,
transmission, dissemination and appropriation of images, as though the ‘image universe’
stood diametrically opposed to a nonvisual realm of verbal culture or discourse. To coun-
ter this kind of reification we commend the idea of an image-saturated universe, a world
of everyday life relations organized by definite social ‘imaginaries’ and visual practices.
Here it might be more useful to think of the construction of the real in terms of inter-
acting networks of sensory information (in parenthesis we might note that even the term
‘intertextual’ is inappropriate by retaining its overtly verbal resonances when analysing
the interplay between music, poetry, painting, sculpture and prose). The most insistent
of such intermodal networks are those that interlace diegetic and optical forms (where
words ‘carry’ images and images are saturated by verbal materials). Ancient Graeco-
­Roman art forms contain endless examples of this interplay of audiovisual forms (cf.
Squire 2009). And, of course, this intermixing of verbal and visual ideologies continues
to the present day. Modern commercial iconography, for example is pervaded by this
complex form of interwoven semiotics.
Against the Platonic tradition of reflectionism that posited a derivative relationship
between thing and image, image formations and image processing need to be viewed
as transformations of being, modes of existence and historicity. Although we do not
have the space to defend the thesis we would claim that the basic building-blocks of so-
cial worlds are images (or as we have elaborated in later chapters in this volume, image
networks).
While we should avoid Cartesian dualism and resolutely refuse to compartmental-
ize the verbal and the visual, we accept that the analysis of words and language remain
fundamental for every visual inquiry. To this end we adopt a strong version of the re-
flexivity thesis that claims that visual worlds are partially constituted by the ways in
which we speak and verbally articulate those phenomena. This, of course, does not
remove the complexity, opaqueness and ambiguity of visible displays. To borrow an
older terminology, visual forms are always-already theory-laden. In the light of this the-
sis we postulate a complex dialectical relationship between image and text, invoking
the syncretic idea of image configurations or intersensoriality as a more useful metaphor
for research in this field (the latter notion interfacing with the recent rediscovery of
corporeality and performativity in social and cultural theory). Thus while not privi-
leging linguistic and textual paradigms we would nevertheless underline the impor-
tance of exploring the cultural functions of visual rhetorics and visual narratives—visual
28 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

stories—as reflexively constitutive of phenomenal domains. This places emphasis upon

the ­dynamic—and often contradictory—transactions between the worlds created by nar-
rative and the worlds created by visual imagery (as we have already noted, the tradition
of the ­European novel is itself a dialectical archive of such visual worlds).
Sontag suggests that the powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our
­understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience
according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals.

It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to shadows—­

transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real things
which cast them. But the force of photographic images comes from their being mate-
rial realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever
­emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality—for turning it into a
shadow. Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they
are an unlimited ­resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there
is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way
for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of
real things but of i­mages as well (2002: 179 – 80).

This passage floats a common misreading of Plato, related to another frequent

­misconception, his alleged opposition to all forms of art. Plato’s attitude to images could
not be entirely ‘derogatory’ when he makes clear that the ‘intellectual intuition’ through
which we approach the Ideas is itself a kind of seeing. It is important not to confuse
the possibility of mis-seeing with a condemnation of images as such. However, ­Sontag’s
­emphasis upon the material force of images and the ‘dialectics of seeing’, of course, echoes
questions and themes that were first explicitly defined by critical thinkers like Walter Ben-
jamin, semiologists such as Roland Barthes, and the psychoanalytic tradition that traces its
lineage from Freud’s metapsychology to Jacques Lacan. Benjamin’s materialist hermeneu-
tics in particular stressed the socially embedded character of visual artefacts (‘The unique-
ness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition’
((1936) 1992: 217)). Here social and contextual considerations are constitutive of the
meaning and function of acts of perception and visual objectivities. In some of his early
writings in semiology Barthes was already tracing the etymology of the word image to the
root imitari—suggesting the profound mimetic, rhetorical and narrative implications of
images in human experience (for example his ‘Rhetorique de l’image’ (1964)). Benjamin
is also well known for arguing for the formative functions of imagery in human experi-
ence and in particularly what he calls the ‘mimetic faculty’ and the ‘optical unconscious’
revealed by new forms of technological mimesis (1999c: 511–12). Similar considerations
led the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin to foreground the heteroglossial nature of human
activities (suggesting an even broader conceptualization of a future ‘dialogics of seeing’).
On the plane of theory we would also necessarily have to critically reassess the
rhetorical presuppositions and design of major theoretical frameworks as these have
sought to articulate and delimit the field of visual culture in reflective and mimetic
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 29

terms (for example the classical neglect of visual experience within traditional Marxist
and Marxian theorizing—despite their erstwhile origins in the philosophical writings
of G.W.F. Hegel, one of whose major works was his Aesthetics: Lectures on the Fine Arts).
Indeed, Frederick Beiser (2005) has recently underlined how passionately interested
and hugely well informed Hegel was about the arts, including the visual and material
art forms, far more so than the vast majority of philosophers and theorists.
Once we have abandoned misleading mirror-imagery and the simplistic idea that
culture is a ‘reflection’ of a more substantial and ‘real’ infrastructure we can recognize
that there is a thoroughgoing interaction between the ideal and the material, the visible
and the sayable (or, as we might say, between the rhetorics of the visible and the sayable).
Yet visual studies needs to bear in mind that the notion of a rhetoric of the visible might
easily put the sayable back in the driving seat. Moreover, this dialectic is not unique to
the ‘higher realms’ of visual art, criticism or philosophy. The interpenetration of ­visual
rhetorics and visual ‘phenomena’ in fact implicates the widest spectrum of human com-
petencies as these are found in everyday ‘imaginings’ and ‘interpretations’ of experience.
There is, in other words, an immanent ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ embodied in large
stretches of human endeavours. The recognition of ‘significant form’ and playful experi-
ments with visible configurations may well turn out to be generic features across a range
of human experiences. Evidence is accumulating that the evolution of the human brain
and the emergence of ‘mind’ are co-implicated in dynamic forms of pattern recognition
and synaesthetic consciousness. Here the constitutive ‘dialogue’ between the deep struc-
tures of human cognition, visuality and discursivity opens up a range of historical inqui-
ries into the ways in which experience has been semiotically networked and narratively
organized by past societies and cultures. Such narrative-­mediated enquiries also intro-
duce a more radical sense of historicity as a precondition for the new visual studies.10
In the light of these reflections we need to openly admit and explicitly address the
­diversity and variability of the ways in which ‘the visual’ has been approached, defined
and thematized in traditional and contemporary scholarship. The basic conceptual
structures of these theories have been dominated by linear, progressive and Eurocentric
presuppositions. Thus rather than being neutral instruments some of our major con-
ceptual resources are themselves organized as particular ways of seeing the world—and
in an unconscious sense, ways of seeing the world through ‘Western’ eyes. In fact criti-
cal knowledge of the workings of these different ‘visual rhetorics’ and culturally specific
‘ways of understanding’ presupposes a comprehensive critique of many of the theoretical
movements that have organized debates and research in the social sciences, humanities
and philosophy over the past two or three decades. Here the changing fate of philo-
sophical ideas and philosophical debates are themselves both topics and resources for
a more transdisciplinary review of intellectual cultures. Precisely how such frameworks
as Husserlian phenomenology, Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutics, Wittgen-
stein-inspired Analytical Philosophy, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Psychoanalysis,
Marxism and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Semiology, New Science Studies, De-
construction, Gender Studies, Cultural Geography have entered into the fabric of intel-
lectual debate and more general public concerns becomes an important focus of inquiry.
30 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

We should also emphasize that our ‘cognitive maps’ in general, and more particularly
with regard to what we mean by ‘visual culture’ or ‘the visual’ are constitutive and not
simply passively reflective of our practices and forms of life (hence the tendency within
traditional visual studies to think of these conceptual frameworks and the methodolo-
gies and narratives they sustain less as creative acts and interventions and more as secure
categorical grids to be ‘applied’ to visual culture). Against this we maintain that how we
conceptualize visual culture is itself a topic of considerable interest to reflexive inquiry.
By thinking in terms of secure ‘frameworks’, established ‘fields’, and neutral ‘applica-
tions’ we miss a fundamental reflexive opportunity—to engage in a genealogical inquiry
into the particular origins of our own ‘ways of seeing’ and their entanglements in forms
of power and ideology that can be dated in centuries if not millennia. New visual tech-
niques may transform how we see and act in the world. Moreover, how we have objec-
tified ‘the’ visual—how we have produced the concept of the visual—is itself a topic
requiring extensive genealogical investigations.
Our alternative models of self-implicating ‘networks’, ‘formations’ and ‘configu-
rations’ suggest more fluid, temporal and historical ways of proceeding in the study
of visual experience. For the new visual studies issues of method, methodology and
philosophical self-understanding are to be viewed as historically specific ways of in-
terpretatively framing and delineating experience for particular interests and purposes.
Each intervention and form of self-reflection (sociological, art-historical, philosophical,
iconological and so forth) has its own specific locus within a socio-historical network
of practices, institutions and material contexts. Such networks are typically open-ended
and hybrid-like interactional formations. The traditional blindness towards social differ-
ences and historical hybridity in the very formation of our concepts and models is the
first obstacle to be overcome in moving into more productive zones. Each is a network
of discourse that must be forced to account for its own possibility. In this context we
can identify with the ‘polycentric’ approach to visual culture advocated by Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam:

For us, art is born between individuals and communities and cultures in the process
of dialogic interaction. Creation takes place not within the suffocating confines of
­Cartesian egos or even between discrete bounded cultures but rather between perme-
able, changing communities. (1998: 46)

The project of a more pragmatic, strategic and reflexive dialogics of seeing is trans-
disciplinary in opening up ‘the visual field’ to a range of ‘others’. Our justified scepti-
cism towards high-altitude theorizing and disciplinary definitions of ‘objects’ and ‘fields’
extends to some of the major theoretical traditions and serves to underline the funda-
mental importance of ‘terms’, ‘words’ and vocabularies of the visual in the development
of what we mean by ‘visuality’ and ‘visual culture’ (hence the difficulties of securing a
watertight separation between the discursive and the experiential). In reality the cog-
nitive, discursive and the experiential fuse into one another like interweaving layers
of information.11 So it is important that the specificity of visual thinking deposited in
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 31

historical and contemporary art and material culture is disclosed and understood, not
carelessly consigned to hastily drawn ‘Cartesian egos’ or ‘bounded cultures’.
These cautionary observations have led us to emphasize the importance of develop-
ing more reflexive concepts and theoretical frameworks when approaching the ‘universe
of the image’ (image networks, image repertoires, image creation, image morphology,
image politics, image epistemology, ontology, axiology and so forth) but also prompt
more comprehensive or synoptic ways of thinking that can address the realm of ‘word-
images’ as coeval with the politics of images in contemporary society and culture (see
Sandywell 2011). In the light of this reorientation we might consider Benjamin’s chiastic
formulation of a ‘dialectical optic’ governing the mutations of ‘art’ and ‘art worlds’ as a
particular path towards a new cultural science of imagineering: ‘as soon as the criterion
of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of
art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different prac-
tice: politics’ (2008: 25). However, since Benjamin’s time, there has emerged another,
and more ominous sense of ‘imagineering’, that is the explicit use of the social and natu-
ral and sciences—including neuroscience—combined with information technology and
‘creativity’, to design and market optimally effective commodities for a capitalist society
of the spectacle. As Stafford has observed:

The convergence of advanced information technology with cognitive science is,

I fear, sidelining the effortful and deliberative aspects of thinking. One fall-out of the
merger between automaticity and high-speed processing is that the making of cogni-
tive ­meaning—emerging from acts of connecting of which we are aware—tends to get
lost. (2007: 191)

There is growing need in the social sciences and humanities not only to understand
the cultural impact of digital technology and cognitive science, but also to mount a
thoroughly critical political economy of their applications.

What Is ‘Visual Culture’?

As might be anticipated there is no shortage of general conceptions of the field of visual
culture and visual studies. The unprecedented expansion of courses and programmes
concerned with visual experience over the past two decades has itself become part of the
political landscape of modern educational systems and modern societies. On an even
broader canvas, image creation, production and appropriation have become central to
corporate imagineering industries. Creating and commodifying visual worlds is now
inseparable from the transnational activities of the global cultural industries. It is not
only the case, to extend Guy Debord’s well-known thesis, that the universe of those so-
cieties in which the capitalist mode of production prevails now presents itself as an im-
mense accumulation of spectacles (Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 1); rather the empire
of the visible now reaches into the microscopically small and the unimaginably large
(instruction in science now takes the form of guided tours through the subatomic world
32 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

disclosed by electronic microscopy and the cosmically violent galactic worlds revealed
by radiotelescopy). We have moved from the society of the spectacle to the universe of
the spectacle. In sum, every branch of knowledge, every social institution, every modern
social system now relies upon visual image making.
In the context of this commercialization of the visual we need to be aware that many,
if not all, of these definitions cast as much light on the purposes of their formulators as
they do upon the nature of the visual field itself. They are, in other words, self-displaying
conceptions—understandings and interpretations of visual culture produced in the con-
text of particular economic, political and philosophical projects, theoretical paradigms
and empirical concerns. In this way the ‘politics of the visual’ stretches from everyday
popular media to the realms of higher education, art and cultural criticism. This ubiq-
uity of the visual also stamps the concepts and frameworks of visual culture with an in-
escapable provisionality.
In the terminology of classical philosophy the visual field designates the world of
sensuous images and perception, or in its older Greek sense aisthesis. In vernacular usage
‘the visual’ is an expansive, polysemous concept that includes everything linked with
aisthesis—sensory appearances, embodied experience and acts of visual perception in
particular (aisthanomai). In keeping with this polysemy we could, somewhat disingen-
uously, claim that ‘visual studies’ includes everything that is taught in ‘visual studies
programmes’, in the creative arts, traditional art-historical research, film, photography,
digital media, video game studies, design and cultural studies curricula. In this context
the visual would include the whole spectrum of visual forms and their interpretation
from painting, sculpture and design to advertising, fashion, costume, virtual imagining
and digital media (forms that the ancients would no doubt categorize under the heading
of phantasia). We might also be faulted if we left out such noncanonical visual forms as
weaving, basket-making, quilting, domestic furnishing, jewellery, ornamentation, adver-
tisements, movie posters, postcards, comics, junk culture and the like. Once we admit
vernacular design and ornamentation we would also have to include the whole realm of
quotidian aesthetics—the images, furnishings, ornaments and objects that decorate our
domestic spaces and gardens (landscape gardening), the ubiquitous presence of visual
displays, screens and Web sites, the stylization of writing and font making that accompa-
nies all academic life today (cf. Saito 2007). Of course such an all-embracing, and some-
what promiscuous, definition threatens to admit every phenomenal domain explored by
such programmes and activities. Once thematized, visuality expands into myriad streams
of image making that mediate the practices and structures of everyday life. In other
words ‘visuality’ begins to merge into the all-embracing category of ‘culture’ itself.
More cautiously, we might say that visual studies are those cultural inquiries that are
typically designated by such disciplinary labels as ‘the pictorial arts’ (and in particular,
painting and drawing), art practice and education, sculpture, architecture/architectural
studies, photographic science, the designed world (including landscaping, gardening
and related crafts), theatre, cinema, television, new visual media (digital arts, video,
information arts, computer animation, 3-D modelling, Web art and so forth). This
broad conception would then generate further ‘chains’ of signifiers linked with the terms
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 33

‘culture’, ‘arts’, ‘visual’, ‘aesthetic’, ‘modernism’ and their conjugates. It would provide a
more critical incentive to reframe the question of the ‘everydayness’ of everyday artefacts
deemed to be beautiful.
To place some limit upon this expanding galaxy we might qualify this generic for-
mulation by defining the field through those particular inquiries that explicitly address,
analyse, explain and interpret visual phenomena. ‘Visual studies’ would thus designate
such areas as the history of art, aesthetics, the philosophy of art, cultural studies (cultural
art history), design, media studies, film studies, technologies of the visual, advertising
and media-based industries. Visual culture ‘provides the visual articulation of the contin-
uous displacement of meaning in the field of vision and the visible’ (Rogoff 1998: 15).
Perhaps until recently the dominant perspective in contemporary visual studies is one
that emphasizes the understanding of visual artefacts, forms and media as social and ­cultural
formations (or in the idiom of this perspective, as sociocultural formations of ­signifying prac-
tices). This approach was historically linked to the British tradition of ‘­Cultural Studies’
arising from the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in the 1960s (itself a polyphonic
formation derived from different theoretical traditions—such as Marxism, ­sociology,
­semiotics, structuralism and psychoanalysis but also a strand of political and aesthetic
cultural criticism going back to the Romantic poets, John Ruskin, William Morris and
F. R. Leavis, as well as the British Left’s strong tradition of working-class social history).
Of course the perspective of Cultural Studies has long since broken free from its origins in
Anglophone debates about cultural production, semiotic mediation and ­meaning-making
to form a transnational tradition of critical research into media-ted sociocultural practices
and hybrid semiotic formations (see Hall and Birchall 2006). The broad paradigm of Cul-
tural Studies has today blended with the equally comprehensive traditions of European
critical social theory, Media theory and Communications studies.12
This generic sociocultural framework then provides both a definition of visual studies
as the exploration of visual culture and a projective sense of the most appropriate methods
of visual research (namely methods that emphasize investigations of the social-­structural
and cultural conditions of visual representations). This general approach to visual repre-
sentations has been typically influenced by the idea of a general ‘cultural studies’ frame-
work first explored in the context of debates within British Marxism in the 1970s and
1980s and associated with the writings of Stuart Hall and his colleagues working in the
Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. And just as the post-Althusserian debates in
British Marxism formed a creative intellectual and academic site for the importation
of European theory—Gramscian ‘cultural’ Marxism, Saussurean structuralism, Laca-
nian psychoanalysis, Bakhtinian dialogical theory, Derridean deconstruction, Postmod-
ernism, Genealogy and so forth—so the field of visual studies and research has been
­decisively shaped and reshaped by changing methodological commitments reflecting the
shifting debates within and between the different currents of psychoanalysis, linguistics,
deconstruction, genealogy, hermeneutics, feminism and so forth as these movements
have structured the field of critical intellectual debate over the past thirty or forty years.
The ‘cultural studies’ approach to visual phenomena now reflects many different kinds
of influence and interests. However, tensions persistently emerge between a postmodern
34 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

hankering for a transcendence of disciplines, defined object-domains and cognitive claims

buttressed by rigorous methodology, along with social-structural ‘narrative’ history, on
the one hand, and the practical, institutional imperative to suggest that just such things,
including the narrative of narrative’s demise, underpin visual cultural studies.
We come to the inevitable conclusion that in its genesis and academic institutional-
ization the field of visual studies is both contested in terms of its substantial definition
and intrinsically plural with regard to an array of possible methods of analysis, theoreti-
cal approaches and interpretative frameworks. This is not a history that can be or needs
to be repaired. This contested tradition remains as a notable characteristic of academic
visual studies during the period of ‘Theory wars’ and still shapes many of the emerg-
ing transdisciplinary paradigms of visual culture. Rather than seeing this situation in
negative terms as an obstacle to creative work we think of the open-textuality of visual
research as a provocation for more creative interdisciplinary inventiveness and collabora-
tion. In this respect it replicates many of the debates over the nature and meaning of art
and the arts in society from the late 1960s to the present. It clearly underlines the impor-
tance of public debate and political context in the emergence and direction of academic
research. However, as Readings’s (1996) stimulating polemic suggests, the reflexive terms
of any such debate may be uncomfortable for political pieties prevailing in the academy.
A similar cluster of questions, for example, arises with respect to the question as to
whether there is a definition of the field of ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ that would be acceptable
to partisan interests in the contested field of aesthetic criticism? ‘Aesthetics’ like ‘culture’
is also one of the most contested words in the intellectual lexicon. The past two decades
have, for example, seen a shift from Eurocentred and ‘contemporary’ aesthetic questions
to global and historical problematics. In this context we might broach the definitional
problem by transforming the more traditional language of aesthetics and philosophical
aesthetics. Thus what would be a ‘useable’ general definition for a philosopher of film
studies (cf. Cavell 1971; Shaw 2008) would not necessarily be helpful for a semiolo-
gist or sociologist of culture, let alone a ‘neuroart’ historian (John Onians writes: ‘Ex-
periences are indeed “mediated”, and the extent to which they are mediated by words,
images and other forms of discourse can continue to be studied using semiotics, but
primarily they are mediated by neurons, so it is on neurons that anyone interested in
mediation should really concentrate’ (2007: 2)).
It is clear that the field of visual studies—as with cultural studies more generally—
reflects the common experiences of many of the human sciences—particularly sociol-
ogy, anthropology and political science—as these have developed away from empiricist
meta-theories and embraced more ‘postmodern’ and ‘continental’ styles of analysis and
theorizing. The historical impact of cultural and media studies—what their critics con-
demned as ‘culturalism’—within the Anglophone academy in the 1970s and 1980s
­retains its polemical significance for key contributors to the debate on visuality today.
We might, for example cite the generous definition provided by Nicholas Mirzoeff:

Visual culture is concerned with visual events in which information, meaning, or

pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology. By visual
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 35

technology, I mean any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to en-

hance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet. (1998: 3)

Mirzoeff ’s deconstruction of the standard binaries—high and low culture, elite and
popular culture, mass media and fine art, art and non-art and so forth—is wholly in keep-
ing with the tradition of Cultural Studies. In a similar pluralistic spirit, Malcolm Barnard
(2001) has explored approaches to the visual field from the social sciences—particularly
sociology, Marxism, Semiology, Feminism and Cultural Studies, concluding his survey
with an advocacy of a historically specific hermeneutics of visuality (a position that is also
explored in the collection edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (1999)). Barnard
singles out the post-phenomenological French philosopher Paul Ricoeur as one example
of a dialectical synthesis of structural and hermeneutic interpretations of cultural phe-
nomena that might open lines of inquiry for future research. Adapting ideas from herme-
neutics would reframe cultural studies as an attempt to disclose the meanings of visual
forms in order to interpret and explain their functions in human life-worlds.
We should also point out that what orthodox media and cultural studies have tradi-
tionally sidelined has recently become central to accounts of the visual. One such ‘do-
main’ is the gendered character of visual phenomena and the relationships into which
the visual is folded; this is not to neglect the fact that gender issues have been important
for an earlier tradition of visual scholarship including Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of
the Text (1975), Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Erving
Goffman’s Gender Advertisements (1979) and Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertise-
ments (1978) among these (for a comprehensive sample of such positions see The Femi-
nism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones (2003)).

Towards a Renewal of Visual Studies: Dimensions

of a New Visual Studies
By correcting these elisions and oversights recent work on visibilization, what we might
call the new visual studies, would now include the sociology of visuality, the politics and
ethics of visual cultures, the impact of technological transformations involved in ‘new
media’, digital visibilities, new aesthetics and so on. More specific studies of everyday
visualities have promoted alternative methodologies that avoid the generic positivism
of the traditional social sciences by emphasizing the reflexive processes involved in the
processes of meaning-making, performance and cultural interpretation throughout ev-
eryday life.13

Cultural Constellations
Of course, methodological reflection and epistemological reflexivity are only the begin-
ning of a more radical understanding of the layers of experience and self-understand-
ing involved in the intricacies of visual culture. Here the analogy between ‘old media’
studies and ‘new media’ studies (sociology of the Internet, digitalization, global mobile
36 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

communications, computer-mediated interaction, cyber-networked societies and so on)

re-occurs in the secondary literature. If this analogy can be sustained, new visual studies
would be postdisciplinary studies focusing upon the global impact of the new technolo-
gies and the spread of global visualities. Digital visualities are the new forms of inscrip-
tion characterizing the electronic age. These visible ‘writings’ form the seeding grounds
for new forms of cultural life and community (inscriptions that actively create virtual
communities, new forms of communication, network sites, blog-culture and the like).
The investigation of these technological inscriptions might find their common ground
in an extended concept of ‘information’ or ‘information arts’ (see Wilson 2002).
In this rapidly changing arena we might bracket substantive and thematic definitions
of visual culture and look for problematics and strategies: how do visual media and visual
information function in a globalized world? What are the dynamic interfaces between vi-
sualizations in the arts, sciences and technology? How do different individuals and com-
munities use visual artefacts? What forms of inscription and writing have emerged with
the mobile digital media? How are different subjectivities (audiences, agents, agencies,
etc.) constituted through their particular modes of visual appropriation?
It is no accident that the adjective ‘new’ or ‘novel’ has increasingly crept into attempts
to revitalize more traditional and relatively unreflexive conceptions of aesthetics and art
history (the new art history described in Harris 2001, 2006; Rees and Borzello 1986),
new media studies (Taylor and Harris 2008), new cultural studies (Hall and Birchall
2006; Gunster 2004) and new humanities (Trifonas and Peters 2005). Here the qualifier
‘new’ functions as a signifier of both discontent and discontinuity within the academic
traditions of art history, media and communication studies and cultural studies.14 As an
authentic marker for both anxiety and hope, it should resist all ‘rebranding’ opportun-
ism, although this is very much part of a ‘real world’ of globalized capital into which
universities are steadily dissolving.

Practices and Active Appropriation

We have suggested that one important step in imagining the shape of future conceptual­
frameworks and theoretical perspectives is to move away from definitions of visual stud-
ies couched in terms of their substantive focus and to shift to thinking of new visual
studies in terms of the questions they ask, their strategic interventions in new visual
space, their tactical dialogues with those who produce and consume new visualities in an
increasing globalized world. This is where the ‘new visibilities’ of digital screen culture,
global culture industries and the coming of cyberculture become the forcing ground of
new conceptualizations and critical problematics.
The emergence of global imagineering industries has cast a revealing light upon the
workings of earlier image cultures (would Barthes’s definition of the essence of the photo-
graph, for example in terms of the primacy of the referent—the photograph as a witness
to the fact that the thing has been there (2000: 76 – 7)—need to be modified in the light
of digital photography, citizen journalism and family-based photographic archiving?).
The fact that today the target audiences of advertising and media communications
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 37

are acutely knowledgeable about the ‘meaning of the message’ and the ‘rhetoric of the
image’ and modern image-repertoires already entail a different attitude towards recep-
tion and appropriation. Today most people live in worlds that are irreversibly mediated
by multiple image rhetorics. If the idea of the passive ‘receiver’ or inert audience has
long since lost its validity, we should also consign the idea of the passive ‘object’ or inert
image to the grave. Images—indeed all objects and artefacts—are grenades of meaning,
often with their own life and fortunes. This is Michell’s point in restoring the ‘voice’ to
images: ‘the questions to ask about images are not just what do they mean, or what do
they do? But what is the secret of their vitality—and what do they want?’ (2002: 176).
If the initial energy of cultural studies is to survive in the new information age it must be
capable of transforming itself and moving beyond the traditional concepts of semiotic
representation and signification.
The availability of affordable photographic equipment—today in the form of digi-
tal cameras and computers with sophisticated image-manipulating software—has both
democratized image production and led to new levels of competence distributed across
diverse constituencies and populations. Where Barthes could claim that ‘in every society
various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signified in such a
way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs’ (‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image-Music-
Text (1977)), we are now aware that self-reflective audiences positively welcome and cel-
ebrate ‘the terror of uncertain signs’. Audiences now search for images with ‘something
to say’—they ascribe agency to images in the face of a long tradition of voicelessness.
Today the mass use of digital media actively encourages the production and circula-
tion of ‘uncertain signifiers’. Where Barthes believed that the photograph is ‘literally
an emanation of the referent’ (2000: 80) advertising and other forms of visual media
have moved through the phase of ‘irony’ to become acutely reflexive about message
content and structure. The compartmentalized stability of the Referent and the Virtual
no ­longer survives digitization. To stay ahead of the game advertising has to reflexively
deconstruct its own history and forms.15 Large sections of the populations of modern
societies begin to think in terms of cybernetic analogies and network imagery. Faith in
Representation gives way to the Play of Virtuality. Digitalization undermines Barthes’s
claim that every photograph is a certificate of presence (2000: 87). The ‘what-has-been’
of photography is not immune from difference and manipulation. Here, once again, we
have come to realize that we are dealing with complex processes of active reading, situ-
ated interpretation and with much more structurally differential and ‘self-selected’ audi-
ences acutely aware of the rhetorical work of mediated meaning. We move from artworks
to heterogeneous art works (with a verbal inflection). From works framed by individual
signatures to anonymous, collective, unnameable cultural performances and webworks
(iconically the Web and Cyberspace provide semantic resources for self-reflection and
self-­understanding on a global scale). Yet while recent technology provides these oppor-
tunities, it remains to be seen how much difference they will eventually make to every-
day photographic practices, for example whether they will transform it fundamentally
or whether it will survive pretty much intact, but with additions (the widespread email-
ing and social network exposure of images, Flickr and so on).
38 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

Functions Not Essences, Tactics Not Structures

In stressing the ‘productive’, ‘praxical’ and ‘reflexive’ dimensions of visual experience—in
thinking in terms of the organization, distribution and workings of visual practices in a
given society—we might proceed pragmatically and sketch alternative forms of strate-
gic conceptuality. Thus rather than asking after the essence or structure of ‘the visual’,
we pursue the question of the ontogeny, situated functions and operations of visuality in
the experience of individuals and communities: what are the origins and functions of
artworks, photography, televisual media, advertising rhetorics, digital cinema, mobile
computing? Here genesis displaces substance.
In this reorientation towards the history and social functions of visual practices and
image dialogues we resist the reductive idea that these functions coincide or, even worse,
that they can be conflated (for example painting is simply an older form of photographic
representation or the idea that analysis is complete when the ‘meaning’ or ‘interpreta-
tion’ of the image has been secured). Even before we turn to the wandering signifiers of
deconstruction we should attend to the fact of cultural hybridity, diversity and global
appropriation (what the images from non-European space want still remains to be seen).
Here we still lack detailed empirical and ethnographic knowledge of the diverse func-
tions of images and, especially, of their participation in local cultures across the world.
What event-sites, scenarios and contexts define the ‘orders’ of aesthetic or cinematic ex-
perience for different societies and subcultures? How have more traditional visual media
been transformed through digitization? What kinds of societal work do the arts, photog-
raphy, television, mainstream cinema, art cinema and so on perform for different groups,
societies and cultures? How do audiences navigate the complex media-ted worlds of
popular culture and everyday life, blending religious imagery with secular discourses?
Here traditional metaphors and frameworks organized around the static categories of
substance and predication need to be displaced by transactional ontologies of events,
developmental processes and information networks.
As ‘events’ and ‘processes’ pay no respect to disciplinary borders the general direc-
tive would be to explore questions and problems that straddle disciplines, problems
with a ‘transverse’ resonance and dynamic (for example the cross-disciplinary operations
of imagination, image-formations and imagineering in different societies). In radically
rethinking the ‘being’ of images, in restoring the immanent dialogics of visual life, in
returning to the ‘secret’ life of signs we are only at the beginning of alternative con-
ceptualizations. Indeed the expression ‘new visual studies’ is itself merely a provisional
placeholder, a temporary site from where we might conduct skirmishes and mount cam-
paigns against rigid barriers, boundaries and borders.

Systematic Reflexivity
We have argued that visual studies problematics are increasingly concerned with indi-
viduals and communities who are visually literate, who actively adopt positions with re-
gard to their experience, who interpret and change the dominant messages and—with
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 39

new computer-based technologies—transform media and create their personalized

media-ted life-worlds and communication networks. The ability to digitally produce,
transform and circulate visual images plays a key role in these new forms of audience
reflexivity and interpersonal communication. Here it is not so much the liberation of
the signifieds of the image as the liberation of the ‘means of image production’ that is
currently transforming visual culture on an increasingly transnational scale. We move,
to borrow Benjamin’s formula, from an age of mechanical reproducibility to an epoch of
digital replication. And this transition has transformed how we think about images and
how we imagine a world saturated by imaginary practices.
The basic theorem here is that there are indefinitely many modalities of visibility and
forms of visual experience and in response to this situation we urgently need a much
more historical and cultural phenomenology of these modes, media and forms of com-
munication as they actually operate within the material and technological systems of the
postmodern economy and in the interactional contexts of day-to-day life. The ‘return
of the Subject’ in visual research needs to be complemented by the ‘return of the Ob-
ject’, by the rematerialization of images with all their postontological reflexivities and
complexities.

Visual Media as Instruments of Self-Understanding

In the light of this principle we need to look for strategic operations, procedures and
tactics within everyday social action and interaction rather than continue to pursue non-
contextual, eidetic and pseudo-universal definitions of ‘the visual field’. Thus rather than
asking the substantive ‘what’ (or ‘whatness’) it is more fruitful to ask after the origins,
uses and appropriations of visual artefacts and media in the context of everyday life.
How do individuals and communities communicate with visual media? The strategic
question ‘How’ leads inevitably to the question of ‘Who?’—who uses, appropriates, op-
erates upon, interprets, transforms visual objects? Who produces and consumes images?
Who engages and interacts with visual media? In turn the ‘who’ question is looped back
into the ‘why’ question: why are visual media produced, used, reproduced, changed, cir-
culated? Finally we are returned to the enigma of images themselves: what are images,
what are their demands? And each of these questions leads back to the central ques-
tion of ‘subjectivation’—what forms of subjectivity, what forms of selfhood, are created
in and by visual performances. Who—which individuals, groups and communities—
take an interest in things visual? Inversely what types of ‘subject’ are created by differ-
ent image orders and institutionally sanctioned spectacles? How do these interweaving
processes of subjectivation and objectivation interact and transform one another in the
everyday transactions of different visual worlds?

Visuality in/as Textuality

These programmatic agenda, of course, implicate even more complex philosophical
questions and larger issues of social, political and cultural context—to what ends and
40 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

why do we live these kinds of media-ted life? What are the connections between textual-
ity and visuality? How do the dominant metaphors of visual life—until recently domi-
nated by verbal and textual conceits—actively shape and define our personal horizons?
How do visual worlds come to be differentiated into ‘everyday life’, ‘art worlds’, ‘adver-
tising’, ‘popular media’ and so on? What are the differences between private and public
visual worlds? How are ‘public spheres’ dramatized through the interaction of verbal and
visual means? How has the perception of visual artefacts and representations changed
over time (do we look at photographs in 2010 as we did in 1910 or 1840?—how would
we research and investigate the mutations undergone by these historical gazes?). In what
way are the visual legacies of earlier civilizations also the history of visual barbarism?
At this point the question of delimiting the legitimate sphere of ‘visual studies’ opens
out upon difficult empirical, theoretical and philosophical questions concerning the
changing social, technological, cultural and ethico-political structures of modernity
and postmodernity. The new agenda comes into play immediately in foregrounding the
­reflexive relationships that now exist between the visual field and the globalization of
social relations in an increasingly multicultural and diasporic world.
This interwoven problematic of visuality, media and information systems prefigures
more self-critical and reflexive paradigms of visual cultural studies where the orienta-
tions, attitudes and ideas towards the visual become as important as the forms of the
visual themselves. We do well to remember that visual artefacts and media are first and
foremost ‘extensions’ of the self (in McLuhan’s sense) and, more problematically, ‘tech-
nologies of the self ’ and ‘arts of existence’ (in Foucault’s sense, 1978). But above all, they
provide the tools and instruments of self-understanding and clues to how they were used
by individuals and whole societies (Sandywell 1996, vol. 1; Sandywell 2011).
Traditional approaches have been forced to come to terms with the idea that individ-
uals adopt stances and attitudes towards their lives, apply critical standards and criteria
to their activities, espouse beliefs and hold opinions about their life-worlds. They are,
in the sociological jargon, ‘reflexively knowledgeable agents’, they know ‘for all practical
purposes’ what they are doing. In principle some of the forms of ‘reading’ or ‘modes of
appropriation’ carried out by different individuals and communities need to be viewed
as research ‘objects’ in their own right. Moreover such ‘interpretations’ may be critically
aligned with the interpretative frames used by theorists and researchers. Here we see a
realm of interaction rather than a hierarchical order where active researchers investigate
the responses of passive research subjects. Without this ‘dialectic’ we lose a vast realm of
researchable phenomena—precisely the realm where interpretations of the world—in
this case, the world of the visible—are in conflict, where readings are not reducible to a
shared account, where interpretations suggest fractures and lines of change in social and
political arrangements.
Malcolm Barnard speaks to this conception in the following description:

opinions concerning, and responses to, visual culture are part of what makes people
the people they are and an understanding of these opinions and responses can generate
a more sophisticated, self-reflexive and critical, understanding of the visual world and
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 41

one’s place in it. Here, the study of visual culture performs the relatively sophisticated
function of self-enlightenment through providing an understanding of one’s own role
and position in the process of understanding visual material. (2001: 4)

This helpful reminder underlines the way in which our images and representations of
visual experience are themselves reflexively folded back into new orders of the visual as
these become technically available to wider sections of the public (here again the global-
ization of media and new communications technologies has a direct bearing upon the
transformation of visual space in contemporary life). Contemporaries are completely at
ease with the idea of alternative, competing and contestatory scopic regimes. They no
longer see the point in earlier debates as to whether the Benin bronzes could have been
produced by a non-European culture; they are not shocked by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907); they are no longer troubled by the practices of a Damien Hirst or
Tracey Emin. Yet, while many are no longer outraged by Picasso or Emin, particularly
that someone can do ‘this’ and call it art, we might still be shocked by the frank sexual
confrontation of Demoiselles or the nervy vulnerability of an Emin. ‘Shock’ demon-
strates that we still care about art, life, good and evil. It would be worrying indeed were
we never to feel annoyed, frustrated, disoriented, baffled, alienated, upset or bemused
by new (or indeed old) art and visual culture.

Conclusion: The Future(s) of

Transdisciplinary Research
We suggest that the new visual studies might be one of the first major efforts to tran-
scend existing disciplinary domains and paradigms and produce something like a trans-
disciplinary research programme of critical sociocultural studies. In this respect Visual
Studies represent something like a test-case for future cross-disciplinary dialogues and
the generation of new ‘knowledges’. As Irit Rogoff has conjectured: ‘Perhaps then we
are at long last approaching Roland Barthes’s description of interdisciplinarity not as
surrounding a chosen object with numerous modes of scientific inquiry, but rather as
the constitution of a new object of knowledge’ (Rogoff 1998: 15). This ‘new object
of knowledge’ is most emphatic in explorations of the social life of the arts and visual
media. This reinforces an argument formulated by Nicholas Mirzoeff:

To some, visual culture may seem to claim too broad a scope to be of practical use.
It is true that visual culture will not sit comfortably in already existing university
structures. It is part of an emerging body of post-disciplinary academic endeavours
from cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, to African-American studies, and so
on, whose focus crosses the borders of traditional academic disciplines at will. In this
sense, visual culture is a tactic, not an academic discipline. It is a fluid and interpretive
structure, centered on understanding the response to visual media of both individuals
and groups. Its definition comes from the questions it asks and issues it seeks to raise.
(Mirzoeff 1999: 4; cf. Mirzoeff 1998: 11 – 12)
42 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

While Mirzoeff rightly emphasizes the need to cross arbitrary discipline boundar-
ies when necessary, the vocabulary of ‘tactics’ has a military flavour, a particular way of
describing the outlook of visual culture studies perhaps derived in Mirzoeff ’s case from
the prevailing Gramscism of his time as a student of Stuart Hall at the Centre for Con-
temporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham. As set out here, the authentically reflexive
politics of writing in the spirit of the ‘new visual studies’ is inseparable from particular
substantive, interpretive and critical questions about visual culture. These kinds of sub-
stantives, plus the reflexive perplexities of writing more generally, are at the core of this
approach to the study of visual culture. The reflexive political challenge, to which Bar-
nard refers, is a highly indexical, singular effort that often runs against the grain, or pow-
ers, of the image-suffused language that modernity makes available.
If the term was not already appropriated by French poststructuralism we might think
of the project of new visual studies in the plural as critical ‘archaeologies of the visible’
(Foucault 1973; cf. Gutting 1989; Shapiro 2003). Another name for this reorientation
of cultural studies is ‘cultural politics’ (Jordan and Weedon 1995) or ‘the politics of cul-
ture’ (Lloyd and Thomas 1998) where the emphasis is placed upon the social and ethico-
political contexts of research in the visual field. A more appropriate designation would
be the genealogy of visibilities or visual imagineering.16
Initially many of the advocates of visual studies as a research field spoke of its ‘in-
terdisciplinarity’ as a virtue. Others, however, see dangers of dispersion and vagueness
in the promissory statements of visual studies programmes (the now-classical negative
reaction to such programmes can be found in the responses to the ‘Questionnaire on
Visual Culture’ (1996) circulated by the journal October). Yet a third position suggests
that visual studies point the way towards more radical transdisciplinary formations as
the older organization of university disciplines breaks down giving rise to new models of
vision and new knowledge formations:

It is one of the characteristic features of this problematic that there is no simple way
of disentangling the social history of perception from the arts of observation and the
technologies of visual culture. Indeed an adequate hermeneutics of the scopic regimes
of modern European culture needs to ‘triangulate’ all three of these themes and to
invent new forms of interpretive inquiry that advance this understanding on several
fronts. (Heywood and Sandywell 1999: x)

By adopting the third position we see the ‘field of visual culture’ less as a discrete
and bounded ‘domain’ of social research and more as a force-field that is in the process
of changing the academic divisions of labour that organize the humanities, arts and
social sciences. Thus where we traditionally focused upon national contexts (‘national
sociologies’, ‘art histories’ and so on) we would now move towards globalized frame-
works (where the traditional ‘national traditions’ are seen to have complex relationships
with colonial and imperial powers). Where ‘aesthetics’ was profoundly Eurocentred we
now must entertain the idea of hybrid aesthetics. Where social theory was ‘nation-state’
­oriented we must now think in terms of global mobilities.
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 43

By opening the discourses of academic inquiry to broader public issues and to wider
domains of social, ethical and political debate we introduce a greater sense of relevance
and purpose to some of the arcane debates about the visual and the verbal. As many of
the chapters in the Handbook suggest, the phenomena of visual culture are inextricably
bound up with issues that are central to the idea of the public sphere and political life.
Whatever our ultimate theoretical destinations, research on the functions of images in
society that has taken the postdisciplionary turn must enter this turbulent space and
experience some of the vectors and dynamics of the field in its emergent complexity.
The future holds out the promise not merely of a ‘politics of aesthetics’ but a more
global ‘politics of vision’. We anticipate that the next decades of creative inquiry will
constitute unprecedented horizons and research agendas for the visual studies of the
future.17

Notes
1. For examples of work exploring the intersections between art and science, and in particular
between art, aesthetics and neuroscience see Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cog-
nitive Work of Images (2007). For cross-disciplinary exchange between the arts, sciences and
technology see Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technol-
ogy (2002) and Jill Scott, ed., Artists-in-Labs (2010). For the dialogue between photogra-
phy, cinema and neuroscience see Warren Neidich, Blow-up (2003). On the interaction of
psychology, visual science and art see Richard L. Gregory’s Eye and Brain: The Psychology of
Seeing (1998). John Onians has elaborated a new discipline of art history from the conver-
gence of research in art, biology and neuroscience, calling this, appropriately, Neuroarthis-
tory, tracing its intellectual genealogy back to Aristotle, Pliny, Apollonius of Tyana, Ibn
al-Haytham (Alhazen) and others (2007). Computation-based studies and cognitive science
form a major research cluster with innovative ideas on the place of visual experience within a
larger theory of mind and neural science (for example Robert L. Solso’s The Psychology of Art
and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain, 2005). For resources from cognitive science, philos-
ophy and psychology see Alva Noë and Evan Thompson, eds., Vision and Mind (2002) and
Alva Noë’s account of visuality in terms of sensorimotor functions and kinaesthetic activity,
Action in Perception (2004) (also Alva Noë and J. Kevin O’Regan, 2002). For the dialogue
between aesthetics, social thought and hermeneutics see Heywood and Sandywell, Interpret-
ing Visual Culture (1999). On the interplay between art and social theory see Ian Heywood,
Social Theories of Art (1997) and Chris Jenks, Visual Culture (1995). For the confluence of
philosophy, life sciences and cybernetics drawing upon post-metaphysical European philos-
ophy see the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel de Landa and Paul Virilio. The emergence
of such transdisciplinary collaborative theory and research suggests a more radical ‘dialogue’
between visual formations and their material, biological and ecological conditions A brief
list of explorers who have forged or are forging new forms of transdsciplinary inquiry would
include Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Alain Badiou, Mieke Bal,
Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Pierre
Bourdieu, Cornelius Castoriadis, Manuel Castells, Arthur Danto, Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Vilém Flusser, Donna Haraway, Luce Iragaray, Martin Jay, Julia
Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Michéle Le Doeuff, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, Alberto
44 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

Manguel, Lev Manovich, Jacques Rancière, W. G. Sebald, Barbara Maria Stafford, Charles
Taylor, Francisco J. Varela, Gianni Vattimo, Paul Virilio, Slavoj ŽiŽek.
2. See Stafford 1996 on the situation in the USA.
3. However, even in art history preference for the immaterial was far from universal, with ex-
amples ranging from Aby Warburg’s passion for a broad range of graphic forms to Michael
Baxandall’s careful interpretations of the cultural significance of the materials and processes
of painting. The concrete nature of the medium of communication was, of course, at the
centre of Marshall McLuhan’s pioneering media theory.
4. For a striking and innovative example outwith the collection, see Michael Fried’s interpre-
tations of recent art photography (Wall, Gursky, Struth, the Bechers et al.) via ideas de-
veloped with respect of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting and postwar
modernism.
5. For example Kittler 2009.
6. The term ‘aesthetics’ is used enormously widely, from references to a specific Kantian and
eventually analytical philosophical tradition to the much broader idea of values and experi-
ences uniquely to do with ‘art’, and of course ‘art’ can mean virtually anything these days.
Narrow descriptions of ‘fine art’ and ‘aesthetic’ struggle to make much sense of either con-
temporary art or the experiences and questions it raises. The possibility and significance of
critically based definitions is, of course, a different matter entirely.
7. Subjects of study, disciplines, epistemes and the institutional edifices associated with them
often involved passive spectatorship as part of an attempt to tidy up, organize and mobi-
lize everyday, scholarly and avant-garde practices (both reproduction and experimentation).
However, untidiness and heterogeneity are highly resilient, not only because materials and
processes often refuse to behave as required, but also because the subjects ostensibly in
charge of disciplines and quasipolitical ideologies often fail to discipline themselves.
8. The ‘pictorial turn’ has become associated with the work of W.J.T. Mitchell and the Chicago
school of visual studies (see his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1987); Picture Theory (1994);
and The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1994)) and with the in-
tensive analysis of iconism in the writings of Gottfried Boehm (Boehm speaks more broadly
of the ‘iconic turn’; for the latter see Keith Moxley, ‘Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn’
(2008)). Mitchell derides this imputation as ‘the fallacy of the pictorial turn’ and rather links
the contemporary interest in iconology and pictorialism with the closure of postmodernism
and commends a renewed interest in ‘pictures’ and ‘iconic’ objects that fall outside the textu-
alist framework of poststructuralist theory (see Mitchell 2002: 171 – 2). For caveats and cau-
tions with regard to the expansionary claims of visual studies see James Elkins (2003), W.J.T.
Mitchell (2002) and Mark Poster (2002). In ‘Showing Seeing’, Mitchell treats the pictorial
turn as a rhetorical trope or ‘narrative figure’ rather than a social or metaphysical condition.
At best it should be used as a heuristic or diagnostic tool ‘to analyze specific moments when
a new medium, a technical invention, or a cultural practice erupts in symptoms of panic or
euphoria (usually both) about the visual’ (2002: 173). Such commonplace schemas are ‘be-
guiling, handy for the purposes of presentist polemics, and useless for the purposes of genu-
ine historical criticism’ (2002: 173).
9. For Benjamin’s ocular interests see Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing (1989). For re-
translations of Benjamin’s writings on visual artefacts and media see Benjamin (2008). For
classical art historians see Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthol-
ogy (1998), chs. 3 – 5. For a comprehensive philosophical demonstration of the rich visual
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 45

resources within the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition see David Levin’s The
Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (1988); The Philosopher’s Gaze: Mo-
dernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (1999); and his edited collections Modernity and the
Hegemony of Vision (1993) and Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the His-
tory of Philosophy (1997).
10. Historicity also means recognizing and deconstructing the Eurocentric, phallocentric,
and logocentric origins of our own theoretical frameworks and discourses. Here we might
think of historicity as a mode of self-reflection created by modernity that problematizes the
grounding presuppositions of traditional investigative projects and discursive formations.
One of its recurrent features is an acute self-consciousness about the implicative order of
social systems and modes of selfhood and self-reflective consciousness. On historicity with
respect to visual studies see Sandywell’s essay in this volume: ‘Seven Theses on Visual Cul-
ture’. For a post-Eurocentric and ‘polycentric’ conception of aesthetics and visual culture
see Shohat and Stam (1998). For deconstructions of the metaphysical models of mimesis,
reflection and representation that have shaped Western European culture see Sandywell,
Logological Investigations (1996), volume 1. The historicity of all forms and modes of image
production and representation is another recurrent theme of recent research. For the older
idea of ‘the dialectics of seeing’ see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Ben-
jamin and the Arcades Project (1989). For the ‘theory-dependence’ of ‘artworks’ see Arthur
Danto’s Transfigration of the Commonplace (1981). Danto notes that to ‘see something as art
at all demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the
history of art. Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories . . . the
artworld is logically dependant upon theory . . . there is an internal connection between
the status of an artwork and the language with which artworks are identified as such, inas-
much as nothing is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such’ (1981:
164; cf. Dickie 1974). In essence, it is the mythos or interpretation embodied in particular
practices and institutions that constitutes an ‘artwork’ from a possible array of visual objects.
Interestingly, the convention-bound interweaving of myth and narrative and the production
of visual art works is one of the most established techniques of traditional art history (see
Patrick de Rynck, Understanding Paintings: Bible Stories and Classical Myths in Art (2009)
and Harris 2001, 2006).
11. The image of ‘fusion’ is, of course, Gadamerian. But the dialectical involvement of acts of
reading and interpretive traditions of meaning might also be derived from the writings of
Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and oth-
ers. For the remarkable parallels between Benjamin’s materialist hermeneutics and Bakhtin’s
‘dialogics’ see Sandywell, ‘Memories of Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin’, in Craig Brandist
and Galin Tihanov, eds., Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory (1999).
From a more critical multicultural history the term ‘fusion’ might be replaced by a concern
for transcultural transaction, intercultural dialogue and ‘polycentric’ hybridity (Shohat and
Stam 1998). For a systematic defence of this kind of ‘logological’ reflection upon the dis-
courses of reflection and representational theorizing see Sandywell, Logological Investigations,
volume 1, Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason (1996). Although this is not the place
to defend the idea we would suggest that there is a critical mass of scholarship that suggests
the construction of a comparative, post-logocentric, transdisciplinary science of ‘image cre-
ation’ (iconpoiesis) which might be called social imagineering, concerned with the creation of
plural, hybridized and heterogeneous social alterities and intersubjective imaginaries. The
46 Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture

first reaction to such a transdisciplinary critique is shock and defensiveness on the part of
established canons and traditions: ‘The culturally empowered are not accustomed to being
relativized; the world’s institutions and representations are tailored to the measure of their
narcissism. Thus a sudden relativization by a less flattering perspective is experienced as a
shock, an outrage, giving rise to a hysterical discourse of besieged standards and desecrated
icons. A polycentric approach, in our view, is a long-overdue gesture toward historical equity
and lucidity, a way of re-­envisioning the global politics of visual culture’ (Shohat and Stam
1998: 47).
12. For standard accounts of Cultural Studies see Barker (2000); During (2005); Easthope and
McGowan (1997); Gray and McGuigan (1993); Munns and Rajan (1995); Storey (2001).
For imaginative and innovative reappraisals of this tradition see Connor (1989); Grossberg
et al. (1992); Hall and Birchall (2006). On the complex relationships between art, aesthetics
and the human sciences see Inglis and Herrero, eds. Art and Aesthetics: Critical Concepts in
the Social Sciences (2009).
13. The general trend over the past two decades is towards methodologies that emphasize cul-
tural difference, social complexity and discontinuous constellations of experience in the
formation of cultural orders. After the work of Clifford Geertz this is usually referred to as
the quest to establish ‘thick descriptions’ of cultural phenomena (Geertz 1973, 1983). As
we shall later argue, the pervasive idea that runs through these redirections is the theme of
historicity and with it a renewed interest in temporality, memory, dialogue and intersubjec-
tivity. See, for example Sandywell, Logological Investigations (1996), Rose, Visual Methodolo-
gies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2001), and John A. Walker and
Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (1997). On the horizon we foresee the larger
hermeneutical project of exploring all the arts in performative terms and investigating the
‘outcomes’ of the different arts as different kinds of embodied performance. The emphasis
on lived experience and creative embodiment in an expanded dramaturgy of art suggests
new kinds of dramatic ontology and interactive strategies of appreciation and interpretation
(a comprehensive philosophy of art might have to look towards the cultural work of ballet,
theatrical and filmic performances rather than to the two-dimensional models of mimesis
and representation that have traditionally informed discussions of art and culture). The key
note was struck by Roland Barthes in his last work, Camera Lucida where he writes: ‘Photog-
raphy is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless
and made-up face beneath which we see the dead’ (2000: 32). Hence like theatre artworks
inevitably return to the themes of love and death. The polyphonic character of ‘performance
studies’ might also be seen as another example of an essentially transdisciplinary problematic
(see the essays in Erin Striff, ed. (2003) and Christopher Balme’s overview (2008) for recent
perspectives and statements in ‘performance studies’).
14. Nicholas Mirzoeff is quite explicit on this reorientation: ‘Everyday life is the key terrain for
visual culture, just as it has been for cultural studies. This represents an ethical choice to con-
centrate on the culture of the majority rather than the elite practices of a few, for everyday
life is the mass experience of modernity’ (‘Introduction to Part Two’, Mirzoeff 1998: 125).
New forms of critical theory provide occasions where the interplay of art, media, science
and technology become commonplace (Wilson 2002: 11). Another sign of the times is the
revitalized interest in aesthetics and the philosophy of aesthetics, exemplified by Cambridge
University Press’s Studies in New Art History and Criticism, Blackwell’s New Directions in Aes-
thetics, Routledge’s series, The Art Seminar, and important collections of essays concerned
Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture 47

with the arts and aesthetic questions (for example Garry Hagberg’s Art and Ethical Criticism
(2008) and James Elkins’s Art History versus Aesthetics (2006) and more recently Halsall,
Jansen and O’Connor, Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Phi-
losophy and Art Practice (2009)).
15. There appears to be a new wave of spectacularly ‘dumb’ advertising (for example Burger
King and Go Compare), although whether this is motivated by a conscious reaction against
being ‘smart’ or just the need to cut costs is not clear.
16. Work that already moves within this general orientation includes the following: the his-
torical investigation of scopic regimes (Crary (1990); Foucault (1971, 1977); Gregory
(1994); Jay (1992, 1993); Kern (1993); Lefebvre (1991); Maillet (2004); Murphie and
Potts (2003); Shapiro (2003); Soja (1989, 1996); Stafford (1996, 2007); Virilio (1983,
1986, 1989, 1991a, 1997)); the global economy of visualization exploring transnational
class-based visibilities (visible and invisible classes, inequalities, social struggles, new forms
of virtual space-time, urban formations and cityscapes): Amin and Thrift (2002); Cresswell
(2004); de Certeau (1988); de Landa (1992, 1997, 2002); Hardt and Negri (2000); Ran-
cière (2006, 2007); Sibley (1995); Thrift (2008); the exploration of gendered visibilities
and feminist perspectives in visual studies: Berger (1972); Bernal (1987, 2001); Chaudhuri
(2006); Fuller (1980); Haraway (1991); Jones (2003); McRobbie (1991); Mulvey (1989);
Plant (1997). On race and racialized visibilities: Bernal (1987, 2001); Paul Gilroy (1987);
Cornell West (1990); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1987, 1988, 1990). For general back-
ground studies see Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan, eds., A Cultural Studies Reader, Section 6
‘Race studies’ (1995); Lisa Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual
Culture (1999). More broadly the intersecting areas of ‘Afro-American studies’ and ‘postco-
lonial studies’ have made important contributions to the role of visual representations in
the constitution of racist attitudes, beliefs and institutional formations (Gregory (1994);
Said (1985); Spivak (1987, 1988, 1990); West (1990)). Explicitly reflexive approaches to
social visibility and visibilization can be found in the essays collected in Teresa Brennan
and Martin Jay (1996); Chris Jenks (1995); Nicholas Mirzoeff (1998). Visual transforma-
tions through digitization and global multimedia: Bolter and Grusin (2002); Levy (1997,
1998); Lister (1995); Manovich (1993, 2001, 2003); Nichols (1995); Plant (1997); Ter-
ranova (2004); Turkle (1984, 1995); Wells (2004).
17. A local instance is the creation by the Department of Philosophy at the University of York
(Spring 2009) of the Centre for Research into Imagination, Creativity and Knowledge
(CRICK), with its mission statement that promises to ‘focus on understanding the nature of
creativity and innovation, their relation to the imagination, and their role in developing and
extending the frontiers of human knowledge in the arts and humanities, the sciences, and
­business’ (http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/phil/crick/ 14 May 2009). For more global ­examples
of similar multidisciplinary projects crossing the arts, humanities and sciences see Stephen
Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (2002), especially
pp. 41–8 and pp. 850–73 for details of these projects (also the Web site http://mitpress.mit.edu/
Leonardo for Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology).

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 Editorial Introduction

Margaret Dikovitskaya’s chapter begins with what she regards as a decisive challenge
to the development of visual culture studies: how to retain its legitimate ambition to
breadth while avoiding the incoherence and confusion that failure to identify and
­embrace a suitable conceptual, methodological and disciplinary model might entail.
Setting the scene, Dikovitskaya argues that the 1980s cultural turn in the humanities
and social sciences was related to both a dissatisfaction with ‘positivist’ and/or quanti-
tative methods on the one hand, and a reawakened interest in subjectivity, conscious-
ness or what in sociology were known as ‘members’ accounts’ on the other. However, in
the field of culture these developments soon succumbed to a new wave of objectifying
theory and method in the forms of ideology critique and an obsession with codes, signs
and structures. For Dikovitskaya what defines contemporary visual studies is a rejection
of the supposedly ‘privileged’ position of visual high art coupled with a determined em-
phasis on the ‘sensuous and semiotic particularity’ of the cultural artefact.
In defending this perspective she identifies different approaches to the study of visual
culture. In the USA the programme developed at the University of Rochester sought to
combine art history with ‘Theory’, a mélange of predominantly French ideas based in
linguistics and semiotics but reordered through a Nietzschean ‘genealogical’ approach
to the more traditional critique of ideology and discourse formations. Concepts drawn
from these theoretical perspectives proved both powerful and attractive, especially in
the context of the study of culture and cultural change in the setting of the university
world after 1968, convincing many of the need to abandon all existing forms of art his-
tory and traditional discourses drawn from the humanities, and to replace these with
new programmes explicitly informed by Theory. After this turn towards Theory the
special place granted to art and high-cultural critique could only be justified in terms
of their ‘socio-political’ significance. The radically demotic impulses of late-modernity
or postmodernity had thoroughly discredited the very idea of an exclusive concept of
60 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

high culture. Although castigated by some as reductive, in this new political context the
notion of ‘aesthetic value’ became indistinguishable from an arbitrary assertion of local
valuations or personal taste.
Dikovitskaya turns next to W.J.T. Mitchell’s important attempt to introduce more
precision and discrimination into the field of visual culture studies, in particular his
distinction between the verbal, the visual and the pictorial. Mitchell treats word and
image as two different ways of interpreting the world or creating meaning. The image,
however, has often been thought of as ‘natural’, identifying something by simple resem-
blance rather than by participation in a system of codes and conventions. Yet Mitchell
also insists that many of the canonical texts celebrated by Theory are thoroughly ‘im-
pure’, not only supplemented by pictures of various kinds but also suffused with visual
imagery and metaphor. For Mitchell the creation of meaning through language or im-
ages is firmly embedded in society, history and culture. Mitchell is careful to clearly dis-
tinguish between these terms. ‘Society’ refers to real relations between people, whereas
‘culture’ refers to representations of these relations, what they are, what they mean, and
critically how they are enacted. This last step, however, has the unfortunate effect of
emptying the notion of ‘society’ of any substantial content, a problem that we will see
reappear elsewhere in this collection.
Turning to the influential approach of Nicholas Mirzoeff, Dikovitskaya focuses on
his advocacy of the postmodern social condition, a relative of Guy Debord’s ‘society
of the spectacle’ and Jean Baudrillard’s simulated hyperreality. Advanced information
technology linked with structural and global changes in the capitalist economy towards
hypercommodification characterized by the proliferation of powerfully persuasive im-
ages, meant that today’s society experiences and understands itself as a globalized visual
culture. Global technologies for producing, distributing and consuming images reflect
and enhance relations of cultural power, hence the need for a visual political economy
capable of analysing and intervening in such systems. For Mirzoeff, visual culture stud-
ies needs to resist narrow conceptions of the visible, if only because of the convergence
of different sensory modalities engineered by the new media technologies.
Given the very different approaches outlined above, for Dikovitskaya the study of
visual culture has transcended the attempt to synthesize a new discipline out of artefact-
oriented approaches like art history, linguistics, film studies and anthropology.
Finally, Dikovitskaya returns to the place of art and art history in visual studies. Vi-
sual culture is not a separate kind of culture, but the result of a particular emphasis,
whose approach is historical and social, and this must apply to art as well as other pre-
dominantly visual phenomena. Art is ‘a human construct that functions in particular
ways at particular times, and analyzes artistic production locally.’ This is not to negate
art and its history but to make these formations topics of historical and sociological en-
quiry. Popular and elite forms survive but represent different materials for analysis, not
levels in a hierarchy of aesthetic or reflective ontology.
For Catherine Soussloff, popular assumptions about visual culture and visual stud-
ies have not aided the understanding of their intimately related histories. Soussloff iden-
tifies two such approaches during the last twenty years: the admonitory sensibility and
the redemptive impulse.
Editorial Introduction 61

The redemptive theme in the study of visual culture is often expressed in positive
evaluations or expectations of new visual and communicative technologies, from Wal-
ter Benjamin’s endorsement of photography and ‘collage’, which he associated with the
onset of the mechanical reproduction of the image, through to more recent enthusiasm
for digital media and the Internet. However, an admonitory or critical outlook has been
behind powerful critiques of the ‘society of the spectacle’, and even of the visual image
itself and its supposed predominance in late-modern or postmodern society.
As a way of making sense of such opposed positions within the study of visual cul-
ture, Soussloff proposes a ‘historiography of visual culture and visual studies’, culminat-
ing in a new idea of aesthetics based around a critique of the theoretical foundations of
visual culture and its investigation.
The field of visual culture is usually taken to include the ‘creation, production and
interpretation of all visual artifacts and images’. Visual studies focuses on the centrality
of the image to many cultural forms. The development and spread of image technolo-
gies has been particularly important to visual studies because of their obvious impact
on popular culture and the attitudes and outlooks it shapes. Soussloff observes that the
inherently inter- or cross-disciplinary character of visual studies springs from the variety
of approaches, practices and media within visual culture itself. She notes different reac-
tions to the heterogeneity and ‘unruliness’ of late-modern visual cultures, welcomed by
some as inherently subversive of hierarchical high culture, but condemned by others as
merely reflecting, or indeed being critically important to, the new epoch of globalized,
disorganized capital.
Soussloff concurs with many others that theories of postmodernity that predate vi-
sual studies have strongly influenced its development. The confluence of visual culture,
visual studies and postmodernism is an important part of her proposed historiography.
Fredric Jameson advances the argument for postmodernity in a highly traditional Marx-
ist way. Technological and economic developments in the capitalist mode of production
underlie profound change in relations of production and products, specifically the shift
towards ‘aesthetically’ activated commodities, this essentially to stave off a ‘crisis of over-
production’ by increasing turnover. For Jameson, the stylistics of postmodernism mean
nothing unless rooted in its political economy, a strongly realist and critical idea that
outcrops widely in visual culture and visual studies.
Soussloff also notes François Lyotard’s view that the irrelevance of older disciplinary
boundaries mirrors the new economic and political realities of global, postmodern capi-
tal. Interdisciplinarity as both a reality and a critical methodology thus offers a more ef-
fective range of performative applications.
Turning to art history, Soussloff recalls debates in 1990s about the appropriateness
of art history’s theories and methods to an ‘expanded field’ of visual culture. However,
the traditional concern of art history and practice with ‘aesthetics’ reappears in a new
form. Important here is Jacques Rancière’s view that the aesthetic has fresh political and
cultural significance as an imaginative attempt to ‘remodel’ the basic elements of sensory
experience in the context of everyday life. This means that it cannot derive its justifica-
tion or guiding interests from current political forces, arrangements and discourses. It is
forced to take up once more the theme of emotion or feeling, and seeks to develop its
62 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

ethical implications. Soussloff compares Jameson to Rancière. Both seem to share a view
of late-modernity in which older ideas of aesthetic autonomy and the freedom of the
artist on the one side, but also the ideological functions performed by art for a domi-
nant class, made only very limited sense. For Jameson, the result is the obsolescence or
neutralization of the aesthetic, while for Rancière it suggests new positive possibilities
and new forms of relevance for the arts. In particular a ‘political aesthetics’ promises to
free art and cultural practice and reflection generally from the assumed opposition be-
tween the higher status of active intelligence and the lower faculty of passive sensibility.
Soussloff concludes by arguing that the aesthetic turn, and the retrieval of visual art’s
significance to the study of visual culture generally, requires a more critical historiog-
raphy capable of establishing a social and historical context for art as a practice and art
history and scholarly, critical discipline. The emergence of this kind of interdisciplinary
work is inextricably linked to the central concerns of visual culture and visual studies.
Martin Jay sets out to examine what has happened to his earlier idea of a ‘scopic re-
gime’ or historically predominant ‘way of seeing’ that takes root in and gives shape to
certain general cultural forms and social practices at particular periods in history. The
concept was given its current meaning in his paper ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in
1988, which both reformulates and critiques Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the
World Picture’ (1938).
‘World-picture’, for Heidegger, does not simply mean a conventional representa-
tional image (of a world or cosmos) but a kind of active representing where being is in-
distinguishable from ‘being able to be re-presented to a subjectum’, and a situation he
thinks of as ‘the essence of the modern age’ in mimetic or representational terms. Ac-
cording to Heidegger Classical Greece and Medieval Europe did not ‘picture’ being or
understand human being as picturing in this representational fashion. Rather, beings
(seiende) were taken as integral parts of Being (Sein), entities emerging from the world
as an ‘event of disclosure’ (aletheia). Not only could human beings look at things but
also things could look back at them. Modern science and technology, particularly tech-
nologies of vision, far from creating this situation, are rather its expressions, forms or
consequences of a radically different conception of Being. At its core is ‘representational
enframing’ and the ‘primacy of subject over object’.
Jay identifies two central claims of Heidegger’s essay. While this kind of picturing
is uniquely characteristic of the modern age, ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’, technological
instrumentality and modern science do not cause the violent subjection of Being, jeop-
ardizing Dasien’s essential care for Sein; as Heidegger remarks, the essence of technology
is nothing technological. However, Heidegger roots the origins of modernity in the clas-
sical period, specifically in Plato’s identification of the appearance of Sein as eidos (the
look or ‘idea’ of something). So pre- and non-modern cultures may not be exempt from
ocularcentric tendencies.
Jay next examines the contention that modern culture is entirely dominated by
­‘vision’, understood along Heidegger’s lines. It has been widely argued that Cartesian
perspectivalism was the predominant way of understanding and experiencing vision
in the modern era. Some claim that post-Renaissance art, or at least the philosophical
Editorial Introduction 63

system of ‘aesthetics’ that develops in order to understand it, is dominated by the same
ideas, forcing art to understand itself exclusively in terms of the visual experience of the
subject.
Sceptical of the view that modernity is best described as a single, hegemonic regime
of seeing and visibility, Jay’s original essay supplemented Cartesian perspectivalism with
two other scopic regimes: Svetlana Alpers’s ‘art of describing’ and Buci-Glucksmann’s
account of ‘Baroque reason’.
Critical responses to Jay’s thesis pointed out other attempted departures from and
moments of crisis in the development of Cartesian perspectivalism, for example the
break-up of coherent Albertian perspective or pictorial regimes of ordered spatial reces-
sion in the history of European painting, correlated with parallel critiques of ‘integrated
subjectivity’ and realist and positivist epistemologies. Much later, the arrival of antino-
mian modernism and postmodernism dealt further blows to Cartesianism.
Other critics argued that Descartes’s attitude to vision is much more complex than
often supposed, often exhibiting considerable suspicion of vision, and that the Baroque
era marks a crisis in early modern culture so profound as to make implausible the idea
of the serene rule of a hegemonic perspectivalism.
In revisiting his earlier work Jay sums up his thoughts about the currency of the no-
tion of a scopic regime as a ‘tool of critical analysis’ in visual studies. The initial exam-
ples of scopic regimes were always intended to be ideal types, tools of historical analysis,
characterizing broad features of historical visual cultures, and were never intended to be
absolutely accurate, exhaustive or definitive descriptive accounts. At a microscopic level,
the idea has been fruitfully applied to a wide range of historical and contemporary phe-
nomena, from visual aspects of the ‘war on terror’, the literature of Chaucer and John
Ashbury, to the visual experience of shopping malls and consumer culture.
Jay supports the idea of reflecting on the relationship between ideal type constructs
through detailed inspection of particular visual forms. For example to what extent do
contemporary films or artworks, analysed under the notion of Baroque reason, conform
to, qualify or deviate from this template? Also, like Mitchell, Jay insists on the need to
think more broadly and critically about the ‘visual’, including not just optical phenom-
ena and conventionally visual artefacts, but also the use of visual concepts and meta-
phors and visually articulated ways of apprehending and recording embodied in specific
historical conjunctures and systems of social relations.
Beyond this, however, is the question of the idea of a ‘regime’ itself. For Jay the idea is
holistic, broader than a type of government. He quotes the political theorist Leo Strauss:
a regime is a particular way of life characteristic of a given society, which depends upon
the ‘predominance of human beings of a certain type’. As far back as Christian Metz’s
use of the term with regard to the cinema, and perhaps echoing French Jacobin attitudes
to the ancien régime, the idea of a regime, throughout the history of visual culture stud-
ies, has been connected to the assumption of a deficit of legitimacy. Often, a regime of
any kind is often taken as equivalent to a ruling ideology, and so fair game for critique
and subversion. Jay, however, warns against both the fantastic belief in the transcen-
dence of scopic regimes as such, and the hasty assumption that such regimes are always
64 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

repressive or regressive. Political and ethical outlooks which many might regard as cred-
itable and constructive may well depend upon an ‘eye’, a way of seeing or a kind of direct
ethical apprehension. While it is important to understand the multisensory character of
human experience, Jay believes that ‘the most promising area of new enquiry remains
in visual culture.’
Michael Gardiner plots another, albeit closely related, route towards the funda-
mental concepts of visual studies. He begins by outlining some problems confronted by
much recent work in the area.
Intense interest in aspects of visual culture, and the popularity of the concept of
­visual culture itself, over the past three decades has often been accompanied by a ‘herme-
neutics of suspicion’, a tendency to associate the visual with undesirable aspects of the
modern and contemporary world. Gardiner sets this against the more nuanced historical
analysis advocated by Peter de Bolla, which uncovers different, often competing notions
and practices of vision at work from early modernity onwards (if not before), hence ‘het-
eroscopics’, an awareness of scopic pluralism.
This outlook echoes Jay and Bruno Latour’s critiques of simplistic, blanket con-
demnations of the baleful, unqualified power of the gaze. For Jay the belief that sight
is completely determined by its cultural context leads to the view that there can be
no meaningful translations between incommensurable groups. In fact cultures are not
‘clearly delineated entities with distinct expressive qualities’ but rather, ‘impure and
heterodox constructions, amalgams of myriad discursive impulses and forms, and are
­“always-already” complexly intertwined with natural processes.’ Gardiner proposes as an
alternative, a ‘relational or dialogical theory of vision’, for which the richest resource is
the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Gardiner poses three questions to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: Do important
aspects of visual experience resist discursive construction? Do we need to question the
suspicion characteristic of reductive culturalism? Can there be a ‘dialogical mode of see-
ing’ that does not simply enact given power relations, but which is ethically open to dif-
ferent forms of insight and recognition?
Merleau-Ponty consistently criticized the ‘philosophy of reflection’ or ‘high altitude
thinking’, in which a solitary, seeing subject gazes out at the external world. The con-
tents of this passive apprehension are then submitted to an organizing intellect to pro-
duce ‘knowledge’. For Merleau-Ponty, however, the underlying schema of subject/object
dualism distorts the mutual participation of self and other in a much more productive,
fluid and ambiguous historical and social reality. The philosophy of reflection makes the
observer debilitatingly abstract, seeking to defeat and possess the world by purifying and
objectifying it. The drive to omniscience—the God’s-eye perspective—inevitably fails.
The world now appears to the subject utterly hostile and alien, stimulating even more
desperate efforts to apprehend, organize and control.
Merleau-Ponty’s well-known alternative is a concrete ‘philosophy of embodi-
ment’. Our embodied being, shared with others, operates prior to all reflective forms
of consciousness. We first inhabit the pre-predicative world of perception before we
­engage in theory and systematic reflection. Further, the world exists only through our
Editorial Introduction 65

embodiment within it. We are, in Heidegger’s terms, beings already thrown into a
world. He believed, along with Husserl, that this primary reality could be experienced
‘pre-reflectively’ and described in terms that would respect the ‘nascent logos’ of concrete
visual experience. For Merleau-Ponty this was one of the fundamental tasks of a critical
phenomenology.
Gardiner admits that some of this may sound like the ocularphobia he has earlier
opposed, perhaps particularly when it comes to relations with the other, that is what
seems like the paranoia and controlling impulses of the gazing subject. Yet Gardiner ar-
gues that at critical junctures Merleau-Ponty departs form this model, opening up the
possibility of what Jay calls ‘dialogic specularity’. This possibility rests on the ontology
of embodiment proposed in Merleau-Ponty’s later work. This emphasizes the change-
ability of the world, a process of constant, radically unpredictable ‘becoming’, which he
sees positively in terms of fecundity, new life, new beginnings. This is our ‘being-in-the-
world’; this is the sense in which life—or living—is inherently open and hence dialogi-
cal, dialogue being the capacity to establish and reestablish connections, and to make
something of these discontinuities and unexpected turns, to transform these into new
possibilities of experience.
If the seer and seen are intertwined in the ‘flesh of the world’, how does the philoso-
phy of reflection come about? One difficulty is that the flesh, as a ‘general thing’ at the
junction of the finite individual and the other, cannot be described ‘in general’. This is
because the other is another opening of the world, which is not identical with the open-
ing that is ‘me’. This is not because we are two monads separated by different viewing
positions, but because our difference is itself an expression, a coming into being, of an
essential aspect of being itself, its incompleteness, its invisibility, its mystery. What, then,
of the origins of ‘dialogue’ as a movement against, or at least a mitigation of, the open-
ness and otherness of being? How can dialogue be both an instance of the otherness of
being and an effort to palliate its inhuman rigors, by symbolic re-embedding, re-estab-
lishing a semblance of connection and continuity, or perhaps by mutually binding or
ethical constructions of a world?
However, it is clear in Gardiner’s account that Merleau-Ponty is rethinking a very
influential idea about seeing, where what is purportedly obvious about the act of seeing
is transferred to the act of thinking. To the philosophy of reflection he opposes an ontol-
ogy of embodiment, in which the seer is a particular, finite expression of the flesh of the
world, unfathomable even to itself. Among the ‘things’ seen are other such expressions,
discontinuous with themselves in the flux of being. The openness of others, in which
I share, has a special place in and claim on my experience of the world. Seeing, then,
is dialogue, which seeks to interpret and make tangible the commonality of embodied
being. This suggests that perceptual avenues, including vision, are in principle multiple,
or we might say that when we view artefacts made in response to seeing they may also
have this as a possibility, this reference to other ways of seeing not just as difference but
as an attempt at connection, amplification, intensity. Merleau-Ponty tries to work out
what this might mean concretely in his justly famous essays devoted to the paintings of
Paul Cézanne.
66 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Nicholas Davey is interested in the clarity with which the objects of visual studies
are understood. He is particularly concerned with the place of works of art, or ‘aesthet-
ics’ understood from the point of view of philosophical hermeneutics, which he believes
offers the possibility of dialogue, a ‘fusion of horizons’ involving the artist, the work,
its forms and its spectators. He is concerned about a tendency in visual studies to ho-
mogenize all cultural artefacts into ‘signs and symptoms’ of the time, place and circum-
stances of their production and consumption; this anxiety leads him to question certain
prevalent analytical and methodological assumptions in influential approaches to the
artwork.
Davey argues that a failure to acknowledge the ontogenetic difference between the
artwork and the designed object imperils the veracity of visual studies and in particular
undermines the possibility of critique within the experience of art. In this way the plea-
sure or judgement of the seeing subject, which form the basis of neo-Kantian aesthetics,
are of reduced importance for both hermeneutics and visual studies, albeit for somewhat
different reasons. However, the claim of hermeneutics that the work of art is ontologi-
cally distinctive raises problems for the inclusivity of visual studies.
More concretely, Davey asks whether a Tizio lamp and a painting by J.W.M. Turner
can be treated as having the same cultural value? If not, can a distinction be maintained
without falling back into outmoded ‘bourgeois’ aesthetics? Davey argues that equalizing
the two misses an important ontological difference between artworks and designed ob-
jects, to the detriment of both cultural spheres and the common visual world in which
they participate.
Davey approaches these questions through a discussion of the iconography of John
the Baptist, who in Western art is usually presented as naked except for a sheepskin, a
covering which declares his biblical purpose: the announcement of the coming of the
Christ. This makes his sparse clothing the opposite of camouflage, whose purpose is
disguise and deception. Davey suggests that the existence of camouflage, and the famil-
iarity of its mechanisms to visual artists whose ostensible goal is visual truth, jolt our
natural confidence in our capacity to judge what we have seen. Indeed, the question is
raised as to whether a distinction possible between visual truth and convincing visual
rhetoric is viable?
The purpose of camouflage is to hide from view, and Davey concedes that even the
most successful work of art withholds the ‘full totality of its subject matter’. However,
in this second case, there is a connection or path leading from the visible appearance of
the work to the subject it depicts. The ‘how’ of appearance must cohere with the truth
of ‘what’ is shown. This is not the case with camouflage.
Culture as such is often understood as a set of different human practices, provid-
ing contexts in which questions of quality and value are meaningful. As practices with
their own outlooks, methods and canons, each of which may in certain circumstances
become questionable, producing an evolution in attitudes and canonical exemplars, fine
art and design are very similar. However, the facts that expectations about subject matter
and criteria of quality operate in broadly similar ways or even that typical examples can
be analysed ‘aesthetically’ do not make these practices identical.
Editorial Introduction 67

Davey points out that a painting like Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow both convinces
us that it represents an actual or at least possibly actual scene, but also inaugurates a way
of seeing the natural world as a ‘landscape’, that is in terms of a picture of a certain kind.
In hermeneutical terms, it introduces a historically effective way of looking, a new di-
mension of the human world, and for Hans-Georg Gadamer such representations exist
in intimate connection with the aspects of the world they reveal, such that violence to
the work of art is also violence to what it depicts, and visa versa.
Not to look at an artwork, or not to look at it in such a way that the question it con-
fronts, and which it poses to the viewer, about whether it brings something forth, is to
‘miss’ the artwork, not to encounter it at all. Conversely, it would be a mistake to ‘look’
at a designed object in such a way that prevented its consummation in use. Following
the thinking of hermeneutic philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur,
Davey summarizes the difference by saying that the artwork ‘calls a world into being’,
whereas the designed object ‘is called into existence by a world’. This difference in on-
togenetic backgrounds is the main difficulty faced by the methodological inclusiveness
of visual studies.
In his concluding section Davey analyses the kind of visual attention invited by the
artwork, a kind of ‘clearing the mind’ so that the subject matter can be properly ad-
dressed, but only via attentiveness to the concrete way, the ‘how’, through which the
subject matter appears at all. This openness may even invite shock, coming face to face
with something unexpected or disturbing. For Davey’s hermeneutical aesthetics it is the
work that actively questions the viewer.
In much visual studies, however, the suspicious spectator interrogates the object,
methodologically constructing it as yet another instance of ideology or political mecha-
nisms underlying cultural practices. This effectively silences the work as a dialogical
object, ironically reinstates the subject-dominated perspective of Cartesianism and neo-
Kantianism, and thus negates an important way in which art and symbols generally
can be a recurring basis for ‘festive’ gatherings in which communal bonds are both cel-
ebrated but may also be tested for vitality and relevance.
 1

Major Theoretical
Frameworks in
Visual Culture
Margaret Dikovitskaya

Visual culture, also known as visual studies, is a research area and a curricular initia-
tive that regards the visual image as the focal point in the processes through which
meaning­is made in a cultural context. An interdisciplinary field, visual culture came
together in the late 1980s after the disciplines of art history, anthropology, film stud-
ies, linguistics and comparative literature encountered cultural studies and poststruc-
turalist theory. The inclusive concept of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ (Raymond
Williams) has been the object of inquiry of cultural studies, which encompassed the
‘high’ arts and literature without giving them any privileged status. Deconstruction-
ist criticism showed that the academic humanities were as much artefacts of language
as they were outcomes of the pursuit of truth. Although visual culture has enjoyed a
proliferation in the Anglo-American­academy in the past decade, there is no consen-
sus among its adepts with ­regard to its scope and objectives, definitions and meth-
ods. Recent introductions to and readers of visual culture have spelled out a variety
of conceptual perspectives. At the May 2001 Clark Art Institute Conference, ‘Art
History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies’, the question was posed as to whether or not this
new field has reached a state of inconsistency by subsuming everything related to the
cultural and the visual. Some theorists are of the opinion that visual culture has no
object of study since it commenced with a disapproval of the ‘traditional histories of
art, film, photography . . . [and] their positivist attachment to their object as a dis-
crete given’ (Rampley 2002: 3). I envision my task to be to show how visual studies
avoids these two ontological perils and negotiates between the Scylla—the lack of a
specific object of study—and the Charybdis—the expansion of the field to the point
of incoherence. In what follows I offer an overview of this new area of study in order
to reconcile its diverse theoretical positions and understand its potential for further
research.
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 69

The Visual Turn

The term ‘visual culture’ first appeared on the covers of books whose topics were ­neither
Western art nor—in the spirit of their time—art with a capital ‘A’: Towards a Visual
Culture:­Educating through Television (1969) by Caleb Gattegno, Comics and Visual Cul-
ture: Research Studies from Ten Countries (1986), edited by Alphons Silbermann and
H.-D. Dyroff, and The Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse
Bay Bands of Odawa (1991) by James McClurken. Before he acquired a black-and-white
television set in 1966, Gattegno had studied the imagery of children’s drawings and
worked on films for teachers’ education. Marvelling at the efficacy of knowing through
sight, his book distinguished between ‘the clumsiness of speech’ as a means of expression
and ‘the powers of vision’. With sight, Gattegno states,

infinities are given at once; wealth is its description. In contrast to the speed of light,
we need time to talk and express what we want to say. The inertia of photons is nil
compared to the inertia of our muscles and chains of bones. (Gattegno 1969: 4)

This position reflects a utopian spirit: Gattegno posits that television would make the
greatest contribution in the area of education by ‘casting away our preconceptions, our
prejudices made explicit by the shock of the encounter of a true image and presumably
true belief ’. As such, it is obviously vulnerable to criticism from all quarters of contem-
porary scholarship: we need time to see what we gaze upon, and this meaning-making
process is unthinkable without language, after all. But Gattegno’s text was among the
first that emphasized the formation of subjectivity: ‘To talk of the medium of television
is a way to talk of man the perceiver, the responder, the expander, and the processor of
messages’ (1969: 4).
Visuality at present is dominated by the speed, the logic and the ubiquity of the
electronic screen: we have all become accustomed to scanning images instantaneously
in an environment dominated by sensory overload. There is a much greater fluidity of
transfer between the visual and other forms of knowledge, with more access to objects
through the visual. The condition of our culture in which visuality is centrally impor-
tant brought to the fore the new approaches to its academic study. The issues of visual-
ity and vision1 have been zealously explored across a broad range of the humanities and
social sciences—the trend called the ‘visual turn’ (Jay 2002).
Since the term ‘pictorial turn’ was coined in the 1990s by W.J.T. Mitchell, it has
served as a focus for the ongoing theoretical discussion on pictures whose status lies
‘somewhere between what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm” and an “anomaly” ’ and
which have emerged as a ‘kind of model or figure for other things’ in the human sci-
ences (Mitchell 1994: 13). Mitchell (1995b) has further posited that a new interdisci-
pline of visual culture has surfaced around the pictorial turn that runs through critical
theory and philosophy. I argue that if we are to accept Mitchell’s thesis that visual stud-
ies was born to the marriage of art history (a discipline organized around a theoretical
­object) and cultural studies (an academic movement echoing social movements) we
70 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

should recognize that it is the ‘cultural turn’ that made visual studies possible in the
first place.

The Cultural Turn and ‘Emergence’ of Visual Culture

From the early 1980s on, the study of culture became overwhelmingly significant in the
humanities.2 In general, we can distinguish between two research paradigms: one that or-
ganized the study of society on the model of natural sciences and another whose approach
belongs to the interpretative and hermeneutic tradition that emphasizes human subjec-
tivity and contextual meaning. Before the cultural turn, researchers did not much ques-
tion the meaning or operation of social categories themselves, nor did they pay attention
to individual motivation within social formations. Research projects based on a com-
monsense meaning of the social typically employed quantitative methods. In the end,

multimillion-dollar studies of census records . . . and thousands of individual case

studies came up with contradictory rather than cumulative results. Social categories—
artisans, merchants, women, Jews—turned out to vary from place to place and from
epoch to epoch, sometimes from year to year. As a result, the quantitative methods
that depended on social categories fell into disrepute. (Bonnell and Hunt 1999: 7)

The major theme needing revision was the status of the social. Historians began to
explore cultural contexts in which groups or individuals acted and to emphasize the in-
terpretation of symbols, rituals and discourses. The issue of subjectivity and the subjec-
tive side of social relations was given an important place on the research agenda. The
investigation of culture demonstrated, among other things, that all our approaches are
contaminated with ideological preconceptions. The previous paradigm, based on a be-
lief in the objective nature of social scientific inquiry, was subsequently displaced by a
standpoint that reveals culture—a representational, symbolic and linguistic system—to
be an instigator of social, economic and political forces and processes rather than a mere
reflection of them. Among the notable outcomes of these explorations was the forging
of a common language that uses the same concepts and terms—such as ‘culture’, ‘prac-
tice’, ‘discourse’, and ‘narrative’—across many disciplines that have become mutually
intelligible.
The cultural turn brought to the study of images a reflection on the complex inter-
relationships between power and knowledge. Perception has come to be understood
as a product of experience and acculturation. Representation began to be studied as a
structure and process of ideology producing subject positions. In the light of Louis Al-
thusser’s (1971) broadened notion of ideology—that it covers all aspects of societal life
and is analogous to systems of signs—the work of art came to be seen as a communi-
cative exchange. As a result, the concept of autonomy of art was replaced by the con-
cept of intertextuality. Art is now treated as a specific discursive system that during the
modern period created the category of ‘artwork’ as a repository for values (noninstru-
mentality, creative labor, etc.) that had been suppressed within the dominant culture of
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 71

mass production. Contemporary scholarship has disclosed the ways in which the work
of art has been traditionally presented as the object that rejects contingency and refuses
or ‘frustrates the grasp of discursive systems of knowledge through its relentless formal
self-transformation’ and has revealed how ‘formal meaning becomes the emblem of an
immanent, autonomous drive towards differentiation’ (Kester 2000: 2). The scholarship
that rejects the primacy of art in relation to other discursive practices and yet focuses on
the sensuous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual can no longer be called art history—it
deserves the name of visual studies.

From Art History to a History of Images

The field of visual culture or visual studies is not the same thing for all of its theorists and
practitioners. Moreover, one can speak of distinct schools of thought being formed at
the different institutions of higher learning in which these people teach and do research.
To start with, Michael Ann Holly, former chair of the Art and Art History Department
at the University of Rochester (home to the first US graduate program in Visual Studies)
and now director of research and academic program at the Clark Art Institute, thinks
of visual culture as a hybrid term that describes a situation when one fuses works of art
with contemporary theory imported from other disciplines and fields, particularly semi-
otics and feminism. For Holly, visual studies calls into question the role of all images in
culture, from oil painting to twentieth-century TV. These images can be contrasted and
compared on the basis of their working as visual representations in culture rather than
through the use of such categories as ‘masterpieces’ and ‘created by geniuses’ versus ‘low
art’ (Dikovitskaya 2005h: 194). As a historiographer interested in the intellectual his-
tory of art history, Holly has been concerned with how the practice of art history in the
United States was turning into an empirical discipline, preoccupied solely with facts and
frozen in place around the time of the Cold War. In the late 1980s, the influx of think-
ing that has fallen under the ubiquitous term ‘theory’ shook up those established proce-
dures and protocols of the discipline. Stephen Melville of Ohio State University pointed
to theory as the essential background for the origin of visual culture:

Shortly after the Second World War, and depending very much on a complicated set
of cultural and political developments through the 1960s, you have the emergence of
a very powerful line of thinking in France that ultimately gives rise to what is called,
briefly and mostly around the journal Tel Quel in France but much more sustainedly
in the United States, ‘theory.’ The developments that drive the emergence of theory
happened in a variety of fields—anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, intel-
lectual history, philosophy. There is a large body of shared references that bind them
together—to Saussure and linguistics, to the drift of post-Kantian European philoso-
phy, to some stakes in or near Surrealism. One shared feature of this work is its claim
to a thorough-going ‘anti-humanism.’ Some people think of it as a form of Marxist
ideology critique with the modifier ‘bourgeois’ understood to be integral to what’s
meant by humanism here; others, including myself, will take its force to be better
72 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

caught by reference to Nietzsche or Heidegger. It seems natural to take this as entail-

ing also some kind of critique of ‘the humanities.’ Visual culture, more or less inherit-
ing all this, would be part of an unprivileging of the humanities and the central place
they traditionally occupy in the university, and of course art history would be one of
the things in need of such undoing. (Melville 2001: 3)

More recently, two summer institutes on theory and interpretation in the visual arts,
funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Hobart and Wil-
liam Smith Colleges in 1987 and at the University of Rochester in 1989, aimed to lo-
cate art history within the context of theoretical debates taking place in other fields. To
this end, they examined new interpretative strategies developed by semiotics, linguistics,
psychoanalysis, feminism, queer studies and cultural theory. These institutes resulted
in the publication of two books edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and
Keith Moxey: Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991) and Visual Culture: Im-
ages and Interpretations (1994), which brought ‘theory’ on board. In the introduction to
Visual Culture, the editors suggested that since the collected essays strove for ‘a broader
understanding of their [artworks’] cultural significance for the historical circumstances
in which they were produced, as well as their potential meaning within the context of
our own historical situation,’ they could be understood as contributions to a history of
images rather than a history of art (Bryson et al. 1994: xvi, emphasis added). In short,
visual studies—the study of representations—pays close attention to the image but uses
theories developed in the humanities and the social sciences to address the complex
ways in which meanings are produced and circulated in specific social contexts. Holly
is convinced that considering images in light of new theoretical perspectives provides
new answers to old questions about art. An example of the transition to a more theoreti-
cal model of visual studies can be found in Paul Duro’s book The Rhetoric of the Frame
(1996). Duro, who in 2000 succeeded Holly at the University of Rochester, confessed
that the editing of this collection of essays on framing devices that condition the way we
view works of art enabled him ‘to move away from the point of view that isolates period
and historical context, to instead look at things theoretically, across disciplines, but also
across instances within the fine arts’ (Dikovitskaya 2005j: 146 – 7).
Holly and Moxey were especially interested in importing poststructuralist theory
widely employed in other humanities into the emerging field of visual studies. They saw
deconstruction not as an end in itself, but rather as a flexible mode leading to a reori-
entation, as opposed to the destruction, of art historical perspectives. In her response to
the ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’, Holly asserted that visual culture should study,
not objects, but ‘subjects caught in the congeries of cultural meanings’ (1996b: 40).3
She argued that while art history writing recognizes only linear time and aims at reveal-
ing the hidden ‘truth’, there is an awareness in the new field that all historical narratives
are invested with the values of the present. Self-reflexive visual studies preoccupies itself
with the way in which the objects under scrutiny reveal the ethical and political com-
mitments of those who study them (Moxey 1994, 2001). Visual studies makes it clear
that interpretation should be distinguished from the search for the meanings ‘concealed’
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 73

within images; instead, this new field breaks down established systems of interpretation
in order to find new meanings in the work of art.
Moxey charted two possibilities for the new research area: it could become the study
of all images ‘without making qualitative distinctions’ between them, or, preferably, it
might concern itself with ‘all images for which distinguished cultural value has been or
is being proposed’ (1996: 57). The use of the past perfect tense along with the present
tense in the last statement was not accidental: it spells out Moxey’s idea that aesthetic
criteria do not exist outside a specific historical context, and what was worth studying
yesterday might not be considered so today. This consciousness helped to undermine the
theory of universal response that has animated art history; indeed, it was the absence of
this universal epistemological basis for art historical activity that made the new academic
field of visual studies possible. Yet, while Moxey rejected the concept of immanent aes-
thetic value, he did not deny its existence as a social construct: aesthetic value had been
ascribed to the work of art by the culture of the European Enlightenment and has been
modified with the times. Far from supporting the canon, Moxey argues that visual stud-
ies should reenact a contestation between different forms, genres and mediums of visual
production as the embodiments of different cultural values. Hence, this new field will
have a selective focus, which will change over time.
There has been no unanimity among scholars about the relation of art history to the
study of image. For instance, Moxey suggests that visual studies has revived the disci-
pline of art history through the study and ‘the recognition of [images’] heterogeneity, the
different circumstances of their production, and the variety of cultural and social func-
tions they serve’ (Moxey 2001: 109). On the other hand, art historian Thomas Crow
does not welcome visual culture claiming that ‘a panicky, hastily considered substitu-
tion of image history for art history can only have the effect of ironing out differences’
(quoted in Heller 1996: A8). For Crow, the study of art acknowledges that art is a social
category, but asks that it cannot be equated with visual culture as a whole.4

The Visual and the Cultural in Visual Studies

To James D. Herbert of the University of California at Irvine, visual culture is a term
encompassing all human products with a pronounced visual aspect including those
that do not, as a matter of social practice, carry the imprimatur of art, whereas visual
studies is a name for the academic discipline that takes visual culture as its object of
study. Visual studies democratizes the community of visual artefacts by considering all
objects—and not just those classified as art—as having aesthetic and ideological com-
plexity. However, instead of leveling them or lumping them all together, visual studies
embarks on the scrutiny of the hierarchy of objects that has imbued and continues to
imbue some with a greater significance than others. I find a connection between this
view on visual studies and the concept of ‘World Art Studies’ initially put forward by
British art historian John Onians. When World Art Studies works against the art his-
torical canon by ‘taking the broadest view of what is visually interesting’, it, like visual
studies, involves ‘acknowledging the variation of concentration on different forms of
74 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

art through time and across cultures’ (Onians 1996: 206). As Onians notes, this should
ultimately help us understand such phenomena as the European privileging of fine arts
over decorative arts or the Chinese disregard of paintings not produced by the literati.
Onians underlines the possibility of what he calls a ‘natural’ history of art, whose task
would be to explore how the relationship of humans to their natural environment de-
termines the diverse character of art throughout the world. Herbert’s visual studies,
however, suspends itself somewhere between an art history that uses evidence of human
social practice to understand a work of art and an anthropology that regards material
artefacts as evidence of such practice.
In this formulation, visual studies reflects the impact of cultural anthropology, which
was responsible for the recent displacement of the elitist notion of culture based on ab-
solute models of aesthetic value (which needs to be cultivated in everybody but is avail-
able to only a few) by another concept that considers material, folk and popular cultures
as important signifying practices. This all-embracing and anthropologically more egali-
tarian notion of culture implies that all artefacts and practices are worthy of scholarly
study. It also encourages the application of methods and procedures that were previously
reserved for the study of ‘high’ culture to those artefacts that were thought to be outside
of it but which are cultural nonetheless.
Herbert’s desire for the expanded territory of visual studies also echoes somewhat the
concept of material culture introduced to art history some twenty-five years ago by Jules
David Prown, an art historian from Yale University where Herbert studied for his PhD.
The object-based theory of material culture premises that artefacts are primary data for
the study of culture and that they should be used as evidence rather than illustrations; it
thus deals with objects such as Chippendale sideboards or furniture because they have
symbolic meaning or symbolic capital in the antebellum United States. Through its at-
tendance to both art objects and artefacts, visual studies in Herbert’s formulation forges
an important bridge with material culture studies and thus escapes the danger of being
reduced to mere semiology of the visual sign.5 Additionally, visual culture pays special
attention to the study of modern manufactured goods (thus distinguishing itself from
art history).

The Verbal and the Visual

W.J.T. Mitchell of the University of Chicago describes visual culture as analogous to
linguistics: the former has the same relation to works of visual art as the latter has to lit-
erature. Art here plays the role of literature despite a fundamental difference between,
on the one hand, visual imaging and picturing and, on the other, linguistic expression:
language is based on a system (syntax, grammar, phonology) that can be scientifically
described whereas pictures cannot. In addition, while literature forms a part of the study
of language, visual art is just one area of visual culture: In ‘What Is Visual Culture?’
(1995a), Mitchell made the case for popular imagery.
Mitchell’s understanding of the image stems from the general notion that the world
is held together with figures of knowledge. In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), he
suggested that an image is not just a particular kind of sign, but a parent concept—image
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 75

as such. Mitchell treats textuality as a foil to imagery, a significant other or rival mode of
representation. Within this framework, the history of culture is the story of the struggle
between pictorial and linguistic signs, a history which reflects

the relations we posit between symbols and the world, signs and their meanings. The
image is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as (or, for the believer,
actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence. The word is its ‘other,’ the artifi-
cial, arbitrary production of human will that disrupts natural presence by introducing
unnatural elements into the world—time, consciousness, history, and the alienating
intervention of symbolic mediation. (Mitchell 1986: 43)

According to Mitchell, the word-image difference can be likened to the relation between
two languages that have been interacting for a long time: an ongoing dialogue between ver-
bal and pictorial representations. Mitchell condemns the current separation of the academic
humanities into verbal and visual factions6 and stresses that all media are mixed media.
For Mitchell, the emergence of visual culture is a challenge to traditional notions of
reading and literacy. Because the literary text consists of visible signs, the alphabet and
mode of inscription become issues: the researcher has to analyse writing as a system of
images. The Chinese character system, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Aztec writing have
very elaborate graphic conventions. All these symbols have historical origins; they be-
come the proper domain of visual culture, which stimulates an interest in typography,
graphology and calligraphy. Beyond this graphic level, there is a realm of what can be
called ‘virtual’ visuality in literature implied by the text that contains images, inscrip-
tions and projections of space. Traditional literary scholars, who are not interested in
how the text represents itself, usually read through novels, plays and poems for some-
thing else (plot, meaning, etc.) and are not very mindful of descriptive literary texts
where the projection of virtual spaces and places unfolds. Visual culture, on the other
hand, refers to this world of internal visualization that appeals to imagination, memory
and fantasy. Memory is encoded both visually and verbally and has a connection to
rhetoric. The psychological notions of vision—interior vision, imagining, dreaming,
remembering—are activated by both visual and literary means. Thus, the study of ­visual
culture allows all these aspects to come into view: one begins to look at and actually
­examine the process of visualizing literary texts.

Practices of Seeing
The focus of visual culture analysis is shifted away from things viewed towards the pro-
cess of seeing, insists Mitchell. In this light, visual representations are seen as part of an
interlocking set of practices and discourses. Mitchell chose the title ‘Visual Culture’ in-
stead of ‘Visual Studies’ for the first in the United States undergraduate course (in the
early 1990s) because he was interested in the constructedness of vision:

The name Visual Studies seemed to me too vague, since it could mean anything
at all to do with vision, while Visual Culture . . . suggests something more like an
76 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

anthropological concept of vision as artifactual, conventional, and artificial—just like

languages, in fact, which we call ‘natural languages,’ in the same breath we admit that
they are constructed systems on the borderlines between nature and culture. By calling
the field Visual Culture, I was trying to call attention to vision as itself prior to con-
sideration of works of art or images, and to foreground the dialectics of what Donna
Haraway calls ‘nature/culture’ in the formation of the visual field. Vision itself is a cul-
tural construction. (Dikovitskaya 2005l: 243 – 4)

‘Visual Culture: Signs, Bodies, Worlds’, an academic course at the University of Chi-
cago, generalized the institutional and technological conditions of the visible, including
both the arts and the vernacular understanding of ordinary visual experience. One of
the main questions which visual culture addresses is: what is it that you learn when you
learn to see?
According to Mitchell, works of art do not set the boundaries of the new field, nor
do images or representations. (For instance buildings and landscapes, which are neither
images nor representations, are nevertheless objects that are looked at in the course of
everyday life and are, therefore, legitimate objects of visual culture.) The way one sees
the world is important, and the visual field is the place where social differences are in-
scribed. Researchers who adopted Mitchell’s definition of visual culture as the study
of the cultural construction of visual experience in everyday life, as well as in media,
representations and visual arts (Barnard 1998; Mirzoeff 1999), use ‘cultural’ and ‘so-
cial’ interchangeably, and this calls for clarification. When asked during our interview,
Mitchell posited that visual culture is about the social formation of the visual field, or
visual sociality:

Raymond Williams suggests we think of society as designating the whole realm of rela-
tions among persons, classes, groupings, i.e. so-called ‘face to face relations,’ or imme-
diate relations. Culture is the structure of symbols, images, and mediations that make
a society possible. The concepts are interdependent: you could not have a society that
did not have a culture, and a culture is an expression of social relations. However, the
culture is not the same thing as the society: society consists in the relations among
people, culture the whole set of mediations that makes those relations possible—or
(equally important) impossible. Visual culture is what makes possible a society of peo-
ple with eyes. (Dikovitskaya 2005l: 245)

The epistemological centrality of culture does not imply that ‘everything is culture’
but means that every social practice depends on and relates to meaning, and culture is
the constitutive condition of that practice. One can conclude that visual culture is a field
for the study of both the social construction of the visual (visual images, visual experi-
ence) and the visual construction of the social, which apprehends the visual as a place
for examining the social mechanisms of differentiation. The interesting questions that
might be further asked here are, what is the absence of visual culture? and what is the
absence of cultural vision?
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 77

In this light, Janet Wolff, former director of the Rochester Visual and Cultural
Studies­Program and now professor of Cultural Sociology and director of the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at the University of Manchester, has argued that
the necessary project for the study of visual culture is an approach which combines tex-
tual analysis with sociological analysis of institutions. Such an approach emerged from
her own frustration with two modes of analysis—what she described as a

parallel experience and parallel dissatisfaction with two traditions: first, a sociologi-
cal tradition that looks at cultural institutions and cultural processes but never pays
attention to the text . . . and which is agnostic about aesthetic questions; and second,
textual analysis mainly in the humanities, which for the most part pays no attention to
institutions and social processes, but concentrates on readings—however interesting
but nonetheless just readings—of texts and images. My argument has been that the
best kind of work in visual studies manages to do both of those things and to integrate
them. (Dikovitskaya 2005e: 276 – 7)

Visual studies claims that the experience of the visual is contextual, ideological and
political. Douglas Crimp posits that objects of study should be determined by the type
of knowledge that one seeks to create and by the specific uses for that knowledge. When
he began thinking about the subject of AIDS about twenty-five years ago, he was inter-
ested in how US artists and the art world as a social matrix were responding to the crisis
brought on by the epidemic. Crimp became involved in a political movement fighting
AIDS. He soon realized that the initial questions he had been asking were inadequate
for the type of information he sought to produce:

To limit myself to fairly narrowly defined notions of art practice or the art world
would not suffice . . . This didn’t mean that I relinquished my interest in how art prac-
tices were dealing with AIDS, but it gave me a very different perspective on how peo-
ple might deal with it: what kinds of information they would have to understand in
order to deal with the subject adequately. (Dikovitskaya 2001c: 132)

Thus, Crimp began looking at wider ranges of cultural discourses, including popular
culture and medical discourse, that were outside the purview of contemporary art. This
is just one, albeit a vivid, example of how and why a researcher’s orientation has changed
from an art critical to a visual studies perspective.
The position of Douglas Crimp coincides with that of Gayatri Spivak and Irit Rog-
off, according to whom it is the questions that they ask that produce the new field of
inquiry (Rogoff 1998: 16). Rogoff ’s essay, ‘Studying Visual Culture’, appeared in The
Visual Culture Reader (1998), edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff and aiming to trace how a
critical examination of vision and the gaze over the preceding fifteen years had led to
the development of visual studies. As she pointed out, what was being analysed by The
Reader was a ‘field of vision version of Derrida’s concept of differance’ organized around
the following sets of queries: ‘Whom we see and whom we do not see, who is privileged
78 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

within the regime of specularity, which aspects of the historical past actually have circu-
lating visual representations and which do not, whose fantasies of what are fed by which
visual images?’ (Rogoff 1998: 15)

Visual Culture and the Postmodern

Mirzoeff, whose Introduction to Visual Culture 7 accompanied the reader, criticized those
art historians for whom ‘visual culture is simply “the history of images” handled with a
semiotic notion of representation (Bryson et al. 1994: xvi)’ as well as those for whom it
is ‘a means of creating sociology of visual culture that will establish a “social theory of
visuality” (Jenks 1995: 1)’ (1999: 4). According to him, visual culture was born in the
new art history8 departments set up in the British universities but it has begun to have a
much wider range of possibilities in the last twenty years (Dikovitskaya 2005i). The re-
cent developments in digital technology caused the immense cultural changes through-
out the world that earned the visual a preeminent place in our everyday life. Accordingly,
visual culture should concern itself with ‘events in which information, meaning, or plea-
sure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology’, embracing all ap-
paratuses designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from fine arts to
cinema and the Internet. On Mirzoeff ’s view, visual culture is both an approach to the
study of contemporary living from the standpoint of the consumer rather than producer
and a means of understanding the user’s response to visual media. I understand Mirzo-
eff ’s concept to be based on the Marxian postulate that the process of consumption itself
creates both the producer and the consumer. Michel de Certeau elaborated on this issue:
he regarded viewing productive insofar as the viewer or reader, by taking an image and
recirculating it, is engaged in artistic production.
Mirzoeff is convinced that ‘the disjunctured and fragmented culture that we call post-
modernism is best imagined and understood visually, just as the nineteenth century was
classically represented in the newspaper and the novel’ (1999: 3–4, emphasis added). He
argues that the new academic field should address the gap between the wealth of visual ex-
perience in postmodern culture9 and our inability to adequately analyse observations. This
field is new because of its focus on the visual as a place where meanings are created as op-
posed to the written word, which prevailed in nineteenth-century culture. In order not to
overestimate such a broad claim, however, I should like to refer to Mitchell’s earlier words:

Books have incorporated images into their pages since time immemorial, and televi-
sion, far from being a purely ‘visual’ or ‘imagistic’ medium, is more aptly described
as a medium in which images, sounds, and words ‘flow’ into one another . . . The in-
teraction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such . . . the impulse
to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism. (Mitchell 1994:
3 – 5, emphasis added)

Today Mirzoeff claims that visual culture needs to position itself as a critical study of
the genealogy and condition of the global culture of visuality. Globalization in its various
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 79

forms—TV channels and programs, visual infrastructures such as cable and satellite and
the World Wide Web—is one of the key features of our lives. Since the exploration of
these forms does not fit the disciplinary boundaries of traditional academic courses, a post-
disciplinary formation called visual culture comes to the fore. Mirzoeff calls visual culture
the interface between all the disciplines dealing with the visuality of contemporary culture
and studying the visual in the overlap between representation and cultural power. I argue
that the thesis of visual culture as an interface, that is the point of interconnection between
one network and another network (here between the disciplines), can be presented as the
answer to a recent criticism of visual culture put forward by Mieke Bal, who lays blame
on visual culture for ‘visual essentialism’ in its describing ‘the segment of that culture that
is visual, as if it could be isolated . . . from the rest of that culture’ (Bal 2003: 6, emphasis
added). Neither Mirzoeff nor other theorists mentioned in this essay would have suggested
such a narrow approach. Furthermore, stressed Mirzoeff, in talking about visuality

one has in mind a much wider field than that concerned only with the media, one
covering the present process of collapse of the media into each other, or convergence—
particularly in the digital realm—so that it no longer makes sense to organize our
study of visuality by medium. (Dikovitskaya 2005i: 227)

David N. Rodowick, a former professor at the Rochester Visual and Cultural Studies
Program and now the director of Graduate Studies for Film and Visual Studies, is mostly
interested in the critical theoretical study of the different visual and articulable regimes.
Contrary to Mirzoeff, Rodowick argues that the notion of visual culture is not only a
function of twentieth-century culture but needs to be applied historically. He based
his concept of visual culture on Deleuze’s (1988) understanding of Foucault’s theory.
Deleuze was able to see in Foucault what Foucault did not necessarily see clearly himself:
namely, that he had a unique sense of how the occurrence of epistemic changes from
early modern society and the industrialized era to the twentieth century took place. Fou-
cault revealed not only changing notions of subjectivity but also how such notions of
subjectivity themselves overlap different strategies of visualization and expression, which
Deleuze called le visible et l’énonçable, or the visible and the utterable.
Deleuze developed a periodization of the history of power—from a sovereign, to a
disciplinary, to what he calls a ‘controlsociety’. While each of these periods is marked
by different strategies of knowing and power, they are also articulated by means of dis-
tinctive mobilizations of the visible and the expressible. Rodowick states that the same
set of concepts can be used to explain both cultural and epistemological changes taking
place over long periods of time, and this is what visual culture ‘is all about: how these
different notions of power and knowledge change across different strategies of visualiza-
tion and expression, and how they are imbricated with one another in different complex
ways in different, relatively distinct, historical eras’ (Dikovitskaya 2005b: 263). Visual
­culture embraces modes of being and experiencing within distinct regimes, modes such
as ­subjectivities—subject positions that emerge through visual relations, the subject
within the ‘society of spectacle’—as well as industries of the visual.
80 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen and the
unseeable. Engagements with biomedicine and digital technology have allowed us to
form new conceptions of contemporary bodies. Lisa Cartwright, a professor of com-
munication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, explores the
optical virtuality of postvisual domains constituted by institutional discourses of science
and medicine. These employ such techniques as endoscopy, where simulation repro-
duces not merely the image but also behaviors and functions. Telepresent surgery, which
involves using virtual reality to perform surgery at a distance, is another example of a
possible object of scrutiny for visual culture.
To summarize, some researchers use the term ‘visual culture’ or ‘visual studies’ to
denote new theoretical approaches in art history (Holly, Moxey); some want to expand
the professional territory of art studies to include artefacts from all historic periods
and cultures (Herbert); others emphasize the process of seeing (Mitchell) across epochs
(Rodowick); while still others think of the category of visual as encompassing nontra-
ditional media—the visual cultures not only of television and digital media (Mirzoeff)
but also of science, medicine and law (Cartwright). Objects of visual studies are not
only visual objects but also modes of viewing and the conditions of the spectatorship
and circulation of objects. One can conclude that visual studies goes far beyond its
constituent object-oriented disciplines of art history, anthropology, film studies and
linguistics.10

Between Art History and Cultural Studies

The field of visual culture drew upon critical theory and cultural studies, the latter it-
self being a critique of the barriers between the humanities and the social sciences that
had been constructed in the nineteenth century due to the refusal of art to be subsumed
under scientific rationality.11 Customarily, in addressing the quartet of art, culture, his-
tory and visuality, one sets up different hierarchies of knowledge that stem from the
long debate about the relationships of their study: art and history are paired, as are the
cultural and the visual. From the standpoint of visual studies, this stance solicits criti-
cal reflection: a difference between art and culture can only be posited if art is given an
exceptional status, which would take us back to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), a
work that conceived of art as the highest cultural achievement of European society. Re-
search of the visual in art (Holly 1996a), in science and medicine (Cartwright 1995,
1998), among communities of the deaf (Mirzoeff 1995), and in surveillance practices
(Rodowick 1991) bridged the exploration of the arts and cultural analysis. In visual
studies, the relationship between the visual and the cultural (as two adjectives) is entirely
meshed, and the visual can only be understood through cultural meaning-making pro-
cesses. Therefore, visual studies makes use of the same social theories as cultural stud-
ies, social theories that hold that meaning is embedded not in objects but in human
relations—poststructuralism, Marxist theory, semiotics and psychoanalysis. However,
where the stress is placed will often be different: for instance spectatorship theory and
such texts as Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes (1993) would be more relevant to a program
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 81

in Visual Studies than they are to someone from the English Department working in
cultural studies.
Visual studies is neither a modernized art history nor cultural studies. Although
both cultural studies and visual studies question the firm stance art history takes with
regard to the authenticity of artistic expression at the level of high art, cultural studies
begins from the assumption that cultural expression at the level of popular culture is an
authentic expression of class or national identity, thus reversing the formula ‘high art
versus mass culture’. Visual studies, rather than making this reversal, historicizes the vi-
sual by promoting the view that the discipline of art history begs the fundamental ques-
tion, What is art? This question could not have been asked within art history because
the discipline itself—as its name presupposes—depends on the assumption that what is
worthwhile is already present. Herbert, trained as a social historian of art,12 had begun
his research by posing the problem, ‘Here’s a painting of peasants, and there is some his-
tory about peasants; let’s examine the connection’. In spite of the fact that social history
was a radical movement at the time, however, this research question did not yield a radi-
cally different insight:

If you study the social history of art, you end up measuring these ‘artistic’ things against
something else, and similarly if you are doing a formal analysis, or carrying out an in-
tertextual analysis of criticism. In each case, there seems to be this need for art or spe-
cific ‘artistic’ artifacts in order to justify the discipline . . . In writing my first book called
Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, I realized that by the very nature of the
topic I would not be able to answer certain questions because I begin by saying, ‘Let’s
start with Fauve painting’ . . . In my second book, Paris 1937: World on Exhibition,
I looked at six world exhibitions, taking place over an eight-month period in France;
some of them were art exhibitions and some were not. The idea of the book was to find
some way of holding all historical variables constant in order to see clearly what partic-
ular function and purpose the category of art has. At art exhibitions, the ‘art’ label is as-
sumed valid. How different it is when the label is absent! (Dikovitskaya 2005d: 186)

The field of visual studies enables us to ask questions that are not asked in art his-
tory: What does art do? What are the social and formal advocacies for the category of art?
Today, many scholars are convinced that the most socially effective aspect of painting is
to be found in a scrutiny of the constructedness of ‘art’, when the notion of art itself takes
precedence over the artwork in stipulating its reception. Visual studies has no interest in
finding some platonic definition of art that would hold true once and forever. Instead, it
views art as a human construct that functions in particular ways at particular times, and
analyses artistic production locally. The proper question for visual studies is: How are the
aesthetic categories in their various manifestations realizing themselves, being applied,
appropriated and redeployed in this local circumstance? Hence, the first task of visual
studies is to critique what has been historically valorized as art and to ruminate on the
differences between notions of art and non-art that have been created during particular
historic periods. Visual studies does not replace art history or aesthetics but supplements
82 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

and problematizes them both by making it possible to grasp some of the axioms and ide-
ological presuppositions underlying the past and current methodology of art studies.
Visual studies works to supplant the reified history of art with other cultural dis-
courses and covers a wider field of inquiry by embracing photography, film, media
and the Internet. However, visual studies does not pursue the goals of redefining all
­cultural artefacts as art, expanding the canon, or erasing the ‘high-low’ distinction. The
boundaries­—high, low and middle—still exist but their definitions are determined by
the type of materials (for example oil painting versus photography) rather than by the
degree of aesthetic sophistication.13 The discipline of art history, because it emerged
alongside the museum, is structured around the categorization of individual objects,
whereas visual studies is more interested in systems of visuality rather than singular ob-
jects; thus the competencies of the latter are expanded. At the same time, visual studies
is a narrower field than art history because the former uses a critical framework, a set
of assumptions, through which one assesses the object under analysis. Because of this
­approach, visual studies is able to reevaluate the past and rediscover aspects of personali-
ties and discursive practices. As W.J.T. Mitchell has noted, visual studies is an inside-out
phenomenon in its relation to art history because the former is

opening out the larger field of vernacular images, media, and everyday visual practices
in which a ‘visual art’ tradition is situated, and raising the question of the differences
between high and low culture, visual art versus visual culture. On the other hand,
­visual culture may look like a deep ‘inside’ to art history’s traditional focus on the sen-
suous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual. (Mitchell 1995b: 542 – 3)

The profound transformation of contemporary culture to which we are witnesses

demands a new history of modernity. The alternative forms of visualization used in the
nineteenth century were not much discussed in traditional histories because they did
not seem to bear on canonical art and literature. Such things as Charles Babbage’s in-
ventions of the Difference Engine, a calculating machine, and the Analytical Engine,
are now seen as precursors of the computer. Hence, a second task of visual studies is to
chart new inventories and write local histories that deal with names, issues and tenden-
cies from today’s perspective. Moreover, the field of visual studies is relevant to the ex-
ploration of culture of more distant eras in that it allows us to trace historic trends and
interrelationships. Instead of creating grand narratives, however, visual studies generates
situated and partial accounts of the past in which subjectivity is not hidden and authors
no longer evince a Kantian and Baumgartian disinterest.

Conclusion
One can conclude that visual studies is becoming a new historiography. By examining
the settings for spectatorship and working against the theory of the universal response,
it dispels the illusion that ‘art’ corresponds to some eternal standards. Visual culture
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 83

stresses the importance of contemporary visual technologies. It sheds light on those

things that were noticed only in passing in the standard histories of culture but which
had an enormous impact on our current condition. This new historiography requires an
interdisciplinary methodology, one which has developed through its reflection on ob-
jects falling between the cracks of compartmentalized academic disciplines and through
its use of cross-fertilizing methodologies that originated in discrete research areas.
Visual culture, by directing attention to the connection between what is seen and what
is read, mobilizes written culture and creates new spaces. It is important to stress here
that interdisciplinarity does not mean simplified comparative study, wherein differences
between the genres of artistic production are eradicated. Students of visual culture may
apply a methodology from literary criticism to a work of art, or from film studies to
architecture, but they pay equal attention to the ‘resistance’ of the one to the other. In
this regard, Paul Duro criticizes a model of cultural study that was based more on a
nineteenth-century Burckhardian idea, whereby the concepts of a particular culture are
made to cover both literature and art. He further explained, ‘I am interested in locating
this sort of resistance . . . to which end I approach the visual using a variety of different
methodologies—not to find some ultimate meaning, since I have never believed in that,
but to generate new meaning’ (Dikovitskaya 2005j: 149). Jay calls productive

the tension between a work of art, a text, or philosophical argument, that is produced,
and the enabling and disseminating of receptive contexts, a tension which should be
retained rather than resolved either in favor of the atemporality of the object, making
it transcendentally valuable for all time, or the utter reduction of the object to nothing
but an exemplar of its context. (Dikovitskaya 2005g: 203 – 4)

There is yet another potential methodological pitfall: insofar as we analyse the vi-
sual, as opposed to language-based information, then what we are doing is aesthetic.
Visual culture began with the rejection of Kantian aesthetics but it is now in danger
of reification of sensual perceptions, and in the long run it may turn into aesthetics
again, holds Laura U. Marks (Dikovitskaya 2005f ). This paradoxical situation might
be avoided, suggested Brian Goldfarb, if one takes into consideration semiotics along
with the theories of vision and thinks about images through both absence and pres-
ence. In this way, such an object as the telephone, for instance can be seen as a major
visual technology of the twentieth century for ‘it allows for associations of vision via
auditory presence much like the Panopticon’ (Dikovitskaya, 2005a: 163). This version
of a visual culture appeals to mental images rather than perceptible artefacts and pre-
vents the regression to Kantian aesthetics. Another way around the aesthetics dilemma
is being proposed by Rodowick who believes that cinema and the electronic arts—the
realm of visual culture—are ahead of philosophy (Dikovitskaya 2005b :260). Because
new images may have a conceptual basis not accessible via traditional aesthetical ap-
proaches, philosophical criticism has to find or invent new concepts as tools for under-
standing what is happening culturally.
84 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Further Reading
Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2005. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Herbert, James D. 2003. ‘Visual Culture/Visual Studies’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds),
Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edn. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1998. ‘What Is Visual Culture?’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Cul-
ture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 3 – 13.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 2002. ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture,
1/1: 165 – 81.
Moxey, Keith. 2001. ‘Nostalgia for the Real: The Troubled Relation of Art History to Visual
Studies’, in The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History. Ithaca, NY and
London:­Cornell University Press, 103 – 23.

Notes
1. In the academic literature, there are diverse opinions expressed about the privileging of vi-
sion. Thomas Gunning is convinced that separation of vision from a broader consideration
of the senses, particularly of sound, is not desirable. Visuality should be thought about in
terms of a matrix of experience that includes all of the five senses interwoven. Gunning is
concerned that ‘very often when people privilege [sight] they pick up on the old hierarchy
of arts, which is not necessarily being true to the modern experience’ (Dikovitskaya 2005k:
174). W.J.T. Mitchell responds to this criticism thusly:

The reason for isolating [vision] is that one can then determine much more precisely
the boundaries and interactions between the way we construct the world through sight
and the way we construct the world through sound and touch, in fact through all of the
senses other than sight. (Dikovitskaya 2005l: 246)

According to Mitchell, visual studies’ emphasis of vision allows the whole manifold of means
of reception to become objects of study.
2. Among the reasons for this occurrence, Simon During suggested, is the increased impor-
tance of cultural industries to postindustrial national economies and the rise in ‘the use of
cultural heritages and cultural consumption to maintain or stabilize identities by nations,
ethnic groups, and individuals (partly because socialism has been delegitimized, and people
cease to identify with a class)’ (1999: 26).
3. The ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’ was sent out to a number of art and architecture
historians, film theorists, literary critics and artists, and then appeared, along with their
responses, in the summer 1996 issue of the magazine October. This influential journal was
concerned with the role of cultural production within the public sphere and focused on the
intersections of cultural practices with institutional structures. The questionnaire was com-
posed of four open-ended questions. In a manner openly unsympathetic to visual studies,
the anonymous author (or authors) suggested that visual culture was organized on the model
of anthropology with result that visual culture positioned itself as antagonistic to art history.
Arguing that the precondition for visual culture is a ‘conception of the visual as disembodied
image’, the questionnaire alarmed that visual studies is helping ‘to produce subjects for the
next stage of globalized capital’ (‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’ 1996: 25). The response
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 85

of academics varied greatly—from the condemnation of visual culture as being ‘anamorphic,

junk-tech aesthetics of cyber-visuality’, through to a moderate resistance considering it to
be a ‘levelling of all cultural values’, to the acceptance of visual culture as ‘an updated way of
talking about postmodernism.’ Overall, three clusters of scholars were represented: the first
saw visual studies as an appropriate expansion of art history; the second group viewed the
new focus as independent of art history and more appropriately studied with technologies
of vision related to the digital and virtual era; and, finally, the third cluster considered visual
studies a field that threatens and self-consciously challenges the traditional discipline of art
history. The questionnaire did not eliminate the increasing interest among its students but
rather helped proponents of visual culture to articulate their positions and thus contributed
to the theoretical growth of the new field. The experience also demonstrated that, since the
issue of visual culture’s relation to anthropology, history and postmodern theory has had
very material effects on the perceived place of scholars of the visual in the university and
publishing spheres, there was increasing pressure within visual studies to define itself as valu-
able, relevant and distinct from other fields.
4. Another question was, ‘Where to look for the location of art in this new lunapark of visual
culture?’ (Sauerländer 1995: 391). Donald Preziosi condemns the very aspect of art history
that Saurländer suggests is missing from visual culture, claiming that ‘art’, the object domain
of art history, is

a virtual space populated by artifacts simultaneously historical and a-historical, docu-

mentary and monumental, semiotic and eucharistic, ethical and aesthetic, and never
entirely reducible to the one or the other. It is precisely this irreducibility which ­renders
the very idea of ‘art’ . . . so powerful, so seemingly natural, so apparently universal.
(Preziosi 1999: 94)

5. In the introduction to Visual Culture: The Reader, editors Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall
pointed to the reasons visual culture had been neglected: Mainly, ‘the privileging of the lin-
guistic model in the study of representation led to the assumption that visual artefacts are
fundamentally the same, and function in just the same way, as any other cultural text’ (Evans
and Hall 1999: 2). It is doubtful, however, that the introduction and prevalence of a linguis-
tic model and the textualization across the humanities and social sciences took as much of a
toll on the study of visual imagery as Evans and Hall would have us believe. In fact, far from
being lost in the endless chain of signification, artwork has come to be seen as a ‘thing’ (to
use philosophical jargon) in its own right. I argue that this was due to the semiotic approach:
for the first time in art studies, the work of art was talked about as having its own specific-
ity; that is as being neither an autonomous entity nor a mere reflection of social and political
processes but a maker of culture. As Keith Moxey put it,

The adoption of a socially and historically specific notion of the sign implies that the
study of visual representations will approach visual signs as if they were contiguous to
and continuous with the signifying systems that structure all other aspects of the his-
torical horizon . . . There is no attempt to look through the network of signs in order to
reify or fetishize the intentions of the artists involved in their production . . . A semiotic
approach would attempt to define the ways in which works of art actively worked to
generate meaning and thus to define the values of the society. (Moxey 1991: 991 – 5)
86 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Indeed, the semiotic approach provides an analysis of the artwork’s specificity based not on
some questionable inherent qualities but on its performance, distinct from any other text’s,
in a social setting.
6. Mitchell has questioned the difference between images and words, while also questioning
the systems of power and canons of value that underwrite the possible answers to these ques-
tions. Mitchell describes the difference between images and words as being ‘linked to things
like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other . . . between words (heard,
quoted, inscribed) and objects or actions (seen, depicted, described); between sensory chan-
nels, traditions of representation, and modes of experience’ (1994: 5). He called a purist’s
desire to separate the two ‘an ideology, a complex of desire and fear, power and interest’
linked to particular institutions, histories and discourses (1994: 96). As a public intellectual,
Mitchell addressed the tension between visual and verbal representations, suggesting this
tension to be inseparable from struggles in cultural politics, and he also built a curriculum
that emphasizes the importance of visual culture and literacy in its relation to language and
literature.
7. The second edition of Visual Culture was published by Routledge in 2009.
8. The new art history in both the UK and the US paid close attention to three issues related
to representation and centred around the relationship between individual subject (the artist,
the art historian) and social and power relations: (1) ideology, (2) subjectivity and (3) the
relationship between subjectivity and interpretation, specifically in reexamining the notions
of artistic authority, uniqueness of the individual work and priority of painting.
9. Martin Jay sees a connection between the postmodern and the visual turn, but does not wish
to reduce one to another. He contends that the study of visual culture did emerge out of the
context of what Jean-Louis Comolli ‘called the frenzy of the visible—the flood of images, the
spectacle, and our interest in surveillance, all of which seem to be characteristic of the post-
modern movement’ (Dikovitskaya 2005g: 205 – 6). Nevertheless, because postmodernism is
founded on the reflexive relationship between language as text and language as rhetoric, to
the postmodern the linguistic and visual aspects of language are considered of equal value.
10. The question is also whether or not those disciplines visual culture negates are as firmly for-
mulated today as these definitions might suggest. In order to do justice to these disciplines,
we must look at how they are themselves undergoing significant transformations along simi-
lar lines as visual culture.
11. Political concerns about class, culture and identity are characteristic in cultural studies whose
origins are associated with the names of Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy, 1957) and
Raymond Williams (Culture and Society, 1958). In the article ‘Cultural Studies: Two Para-
digms’, Stuart Hall (1980) compared the early model, based on the study of popular culture
as the articulation of the proletariat’s experience, with a later model that studies mass cul-
ture as meanings imposed on society—an oppressive ideological arrangement. According to
Jonathan Culler, the project consists in the negotiation of the tension between, on the one
hand, the analyst’s desire ‘to analyze culture as a hegemonic imposition that alienates people
from their interests and creates the desires that they come to have’ and, on the other hand,
the analyst’s wish ‘to find in popular culture an authentic expression of value’ (Culler 1999:
338). As time went on, cultural studies broadened the range of its inquiry, so that in the last
two decades it has developed a commitment ‘to the study of the entire range of a society’s
arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices’ (Grossberg et al. 1992: 4). However,
it is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political (Fiske 1996).
Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture 87

12. In the 1970s, the social history of art opposed the widespread tendency of scholars to isolate
works of art from the broader cultural circumstances of their production and reception. This
movement redirected the viewer’s attention to political and ideological contexts of image
creation. As a historical enterprise, it sought to restore the missing dimension of once exist-
ing social conditions and relations. Despite its desire to add to the standard canon, social
history failed to revise the category of art—the foundation for the entire enterprise of art
history.
13. In contemporary exhibitions these margins are continually being redefined: there are mix-
tures of the high and the low, and there are instances of border crossing in multimedia
works. At the same time, when mass culture items are placed in a museum, the border is
reset as much as erased because of the nature of the museum as an institution.

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 2

Towards a New Visual

Studies and Aesthetics:
Theorizing the Turns
Catherine M. Soussloff

I begin by proposing that the assumptions that have prevailed over the last twenty years
in the scholarly literature on both visual culture—including concepts of the image—
and visual studies—including its relationship to art history—have done little to further
a useful understanding of their intertwined histories. In the main, approaches to this
history have moved across a spectrum punctuated at one end by what I characterize as
the admonitory sensibility—as in critiques of the spectacle of the image—and at the other
by what I would call the redemptive impulse.1 Numerous accounts of the redemptive
value of visual culture may be found, from the recent elevation of social computing as a
practice ideally suited to provide alternatives to the dominant uses of ideologized imag-
ery and surveillance techniques by corporations and governments, to the contrarian idea
that the speed with which images can be delivered via the Internet decreases our depen-
dence on them, and therefore enhances our freedom from them, or at least re-invests in
us a measure of control in a society apparently dominated by those same images. I will
argue that a historiography of the intertwined histories of visual culture and visual stud-
ies suggests what might be gained by turning away from these sensibilities and impulses
towards a new form of aesthetics founded on a critique of the theoretical foundations
of visual culture and its attendant visual studies. Historiography refers us to both visual
culture and to visual studies but it insists on neither. Perhaps the very possibility of a
historiography of the two portends the end of an era of ‘perceptual faith’ announced by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible:

We do not know what to see is and what to think is, whether this distinction is valid,
and in what sense. For us, the perceptual faith includes everything that is given to the
natural man in the original in an experience-source, with the force of what is inaugu-
ral and present in a person, according to a view that for him is ultimate and could not
Towards a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics 91

conceivably be more perfect or closer—whether we are considering things perceived

in the ordinary sense of the word, or his initiation into the past, the imaginary, lan-
guage, the predicative truth of science, works of art, the others, or history. (Merleau-
Ponty 1968: 158)

Introduction
If the term visual culture may be said to encompass the creation, production and in-
terpretation of all visual artefacts and images, the significance of the field constituted
by these actions and materials requires no justification. Indeed, over the past twenty
years the ubiquity of visual studies, often understood as a loosely aligned grouping of
fields and approaches used to study visual culture, became a characteristic feature of
many disciplines. The two are separate, although often not perceived as such, result-
ing in a good deal of confusion in the assessments of each. Visual studies mirrors the
perceived centrality of the image mediated by and through technology in the culture
at large.2 This perception of the centrality of the image should be considered the foun-
dational historiographical presupposition of visual studies.3 Image-technologies con-
struct and serve virtually every aspect of society today: arts, entertainment, education,
business, science, politics and medicine. Images produce and construct popular knowl-
edge because they form the integral part of a global culture that both generates and
monitors information. The technologically mediated image has been acknowledged in
disciplines not previously focused on the visual, including cultural anthropology, soci-
ology, community studies, communications, aesthetics, history, comparative literature,
performance studies; in disciplines already constituted around the visual, preeminently
art history and film studies; and in the newer disciplinary formations constituted par-
tially as a result of this ubiquity, that is new media studies and the digital arts. The
significance of visual culture has also been adduced over this same period in the sci-
ences, particularly in the newer research in the areas of optics and cognitive sciences.
These other fields overlap precisely because of visual culture and through the study of
it, which accounts for the interdisciplinary character of visual studies and the variety
of methods associated with it—ranging from critical theory, to ethnographic analysis,
to phenomenology, to experimental psychology and linguistics. Just as the objects and
technologies associated with visual culture do not belong to any one particular disci-
pline or knowledge system, so too the attempts at understanding these and the turn to
visual culture do not exhibit the characteristics of disciplinarity. First, in visual studies
no distinction occurs according to traditional hierarchies of genre and media, mean-
ing that the objects of study may not be fixed according to a commonly held type or
using an agreed-upon method. Further, the singularity accorded or deemed necessary
to visual artefacts and processes—to art making and art production—by art history no
longer holds.4 The nature and situation of visual culture today encourages the study of
visualities and related performativities across media, time periods and geographies, that
is without the usual separations found within each traditional discipline, according to a
92 History and Theoretical Perspectives

doxa proper to it. One might claim at this point that visual studies has simply sought to
remain open to the present and to a world to which the proliferation of visual culture
gives us access. But this is too simple and prevents interpretations that seek an analysis
of both visual culture and visual studies wherein the characteristic superficial or surface
analogy between the two may be discerned as one of the perceptions that has prevented
a deeper, historiographical understanding of their situation in the operations of con-
temporary culture.
Many scholars have considered the freedom from disciplinary conventions of dis-
course and methods of analysis claimed by visual studies to be liberatory, a granting of
a sort of permission to ‘respond to the new urgency of the visual’ (Mirzoeff 2002: 6).
According to this view, visual studies actually required inventing in order to cope with
the unruliness of visual culture in the globalized world economy. These same so-called
liberatory characteristics of visual culture have also been used as a criticism against it.
In Hal Foster’s view, the breakdown of media and generic distinctions and boundaries
participates in and produces the procedures of the ‘service economy’, which then in-
corporates and aestheticizes unruly ‘aesthetic objects’ (Foster 2006: 195). In contrast,
W.J.T. Mitchell wrote: ‘The idea is to release the study of media from a misplaced em-
phasis on the material support (as when we call paint, or stone, or words, or numbers
by the name of media) and move it towards a description of the social practices that
constitute it’ (2005: 204).5 Here, again, a method of visual studies—the description of
social practices­—mirrors the unruly behavior or uncanonical status of the image itself.
According to Mitchell, the technological image must also be released from perspectival
space and, by inference, from the traditional methods of art history built upon the
methods of depiction in place since the beginning of the Early Modern period. A per-
ception of visual culture as transitory and unfixed, therefore, both engenders and justi-
fies the characteristic of interdisciplinarity claimed for visual studies. Being not confined
to the discussion of immanent objects or texts, such as those found in the disciplines
of art history and literature, and not united by any particular theory or method, visual
studies crosses cultural, historical, geographical and disciplinary boundaries. However,
this situation and these approaches have led, as might be expected, to a rather eclec-
tic assortment of conclusions regarding the functioning and meaning of the visual in
contemporary culture.6 Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s (2009) influential understanding of visual
studies­as a ‘tactic’ for negotiating the politics of visual culture implicitly admits of this
move away from fixed objects of study and commonly held approaches.
However conflated in the scholarship and criticism, the separation of the two usu-
ally intertwined strands of visual culture and visual studies emerges as necessary for the
historiographical analysis sought here. The relative maturity of the field of visual studies
today indicates that a historiography that addresses the conflation of visual culture and
visual studies may now be possible. Recently, Dikovitskaya asked whether a ‘common
ground for working in the field of the visual’ is even possible or desirable (Dikovitskaya
2006: 2). Rather than using visual studies for certain ends, or assimilating it to visual
culture, a critical historiography of it addresses the present historical situation in which
it is found.
Towards a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics 93

The Postmodern Turn

We must first locate visual culture in the predominant theories of postmodernity, which,
I argue here, have led to the intertwining of visual culture and visual studies in con-
temporary theoretical accounts and institutional contexts. Theories of or explanations
about postmodernity predate the turn to visual studies (see, e.g., Huyssen 1984). They
participate in the turn to visual culture.7 Two aspects central to the earliest theorizations
of the postmodern turn concern the intertwining of visual culture and visual studies:
the emphasis on visual culture itself as a marker of the era and the use of a concept of
interdisciplinarity as a means to understand knowledge production in this period. Sig-
nificantly, for many visual studies came to be considered the paradigmatic field of or for
interdisciplinarity in the university. Yet, the temporal correspondence of the ubiquity of
visual culture and of the implementation of the idea of interdisciplinarity by the uni-
versity has contributed to the difficulty of establishing a situated historiography of the
visual during this time.
Interestingly, considering the difference of their conclusions on visual studies indi-
cated here, both Foster and Mitchell view the predominance of visual culture in terms
of a theory of postmodernity based on Frederic Jameson’s (1984) seminal essay ‘Post-
modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. In this essay Jameson begins
with a list of visual and literary examples of the postmodern aesthetic. He goes on to
argue that:

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into com-
modity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves
of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of
turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aes-
thetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition
in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations
and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. (Jameson 1984: 56)

Jameson explicitly states that his approach to postmodernism is historical and not to
be confused with stylistics. That is, that visual culture, understood as the cultural objects
and artefacts of postmodernism, may be historicized and periodized, just as, we could
also say, the history of art historicized and periodized its objects in modernity. However,
the signal and distinguishing mark of postmodernism lies not simply in the unruly cul-
tural objects of contemporary visual culture—high, mass and commercial—but also in
the point ‘that every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stig-
matisation—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly
political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today’ (Jameson 1984: 55).
This is how, we might say with Jameson, that visual culture became political. Whether
complicit in the countering of a ‘true’ aesthetics, as understood by Foster, or operational
in revealing of the society that produced it, as Mitchell would have it, visual studies
emerged in the academy in the mid-1990s, just as Jameson’s critique of the ideology of
94 History and Theoretical Perspectives

postmodernism gained ascendancy in the academy in the new field of cultural studies.
Historiographically, then, the interdisciplines of visual studies and cultural studies may
be said to have the same roots.

The Turn to Interdisciplinarity

In the university these roots go deep. In the late 1970s the French philosopher Jean-
Francois Lyotard (1984) famously wrote about the effects of the ‘postmodern condition’
in the university as a destruction of knowledge. For Lyotard, the postmodern condition
‘designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of
the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts’
(Lyotard 1984: xxiii). In his view, the changes in culture in these areas resulted in a cri-
sis in the traditionally held view of the disciplines, which, in the postmodern era could
no longer contain these newer forms of knowledge. Marking the end of disciplinarity,
Lyotard understood interdisciplinarity as the preeminent ‘performative’ for the most
economically viable models, or ends, of the university. These ends could only result in
a destruction of knowledge production as the new and economically efficient model of
the university prevailed. Lyotard’s concept of the performativity of interdisciplinarity re-
mains a major factor in any analysis of its use and practice in higher education, includ-
ing research and scholarship, as Mark Franko and I have argued (Soussloff and Franko
2002). Institutional critiques of the university in the late twentieth and early-twenty-
first centuries have recognized to a certain extent this parasitic action of interdisciplin-
arity. Nonetheless, its usage has continued unabated as the justification for changes in
university structures related to academic programs and for the allocation and realloca-
tion of resources in diminishing economic times proliferated, fulfilling Lyotard’s proph-
ecy.8 Interdisciplinarity provides the university with an efficacious means of marketing
and positioning itself in the larger global economy. The paradox may be articulated as
follows: to the extent that interdisciplinarity presents a challenge to the authority of the
faculty member’s individual judgement, formerly guaranteed in the classroom and in
research, it also challenges the actual possibilities available in new areas of study, such as
visual studies, opened up only as a result of it.
The debates among art historians that surfaced in the 1990s over visual studies cen-
tred on the value of interdisciplinary methods found in early art history.9 Perhaps it is use-
ful here to understand visual studies as the product or proof of the significance of the
debate about the adequacy of the discipline of art history to interpret the objects and events
that had come to be known over the course of the last twenty years of the twentieth
century as the visual art(s) and culture. These debates served to perpetuate the justifica-
tion of the values that were assigned to disciplinarity in general in modernity—by Kant,
most famously—and to art history, specifically, while the interdisciplinarity of visual
studies could be maligned using this view (Kant 1979).10 Arguments supporting inter-
disciplinarity in visual studies cannot be considered frivolous when viewed in the light
of Lyotard’s critique of postmodernism, even if many of the points made in its defense
had already appeared earlier in art history’s modernist methodologies.11 In addition, the
aesthetic values traditionally given to art, and essential to its concept of the freedom
Towards a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics 95

of the artist, require us to understand these debates over interdisciplinarity as equally

­essential to what the art historian has done and continues to do.12 So too, the aesthetic
values practiced in art history give something significant to visual studies: its ability to
be performatively interdisciplinary in the Lyotardian sense.
Most of the conclusions concerning visual studies that I have drawn here have been
fed by arguments about the nature of culture in the postmodern era: broadly speaking,
that the present situation of interdependent, globalized economies has helped, if not
caused, both the constitution of visual studies as a field and the proliferation of visual
culture, particularly images and performances (Hardt and Negri 2000; Retort 2005). As I
suggested at the beginning of this chapter, when viewed across the range of the disciplin-
ary loci in which they have been posited and from which they have been taken up, con-
clusions in regard to visual culture in a globalized postmodernity may be characterized
in two ways: the admonitory, or the spectacular, and the redemptive.13 The recent ‘aes-
thetic turn’ in art history and visual studies, which I will explore for the remainder of this
chapter, helps to explain this situated historiography of visual culture. My view is that the
aesthetic turn contributes an explanatory framework towards certain problematic aspects
of the precedent historiography of visual studies, particularly its intertwined relationship
with visual culture and the resulting history of its configuration with and in art history.14
Jameson argued that: ‘The problem of postmodernism . . . is at one and the same time
an aesthetic and a political one’ (Jameson 1988: 103). Thus, given both Jameson and
Lyotard, we say that the present aesthetic turn must be viewed not as unexpressed earlier,
but as suppressed, until recently, in regard to its significance for the understanding of the
visual turn and its previous intertwining of visual culture and visual studies.

The Aesthetic Turn

The aesthetic turn belongs to the present, ‘post-metaphysical’, moment in philoso-
phy.15 This sense of the exhaustion of metaphysics emerged potently in poststructural
French philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century, particularly in the work
of ­Michel Foucault, who, throughout his life sought a reconciliation of aesthetics and
political theory, whether by studying the Western tradition of oil painting, as I have
­argued, or through an aesthetics of the self.16 Recently, and most famously, Jacques Ran-
cière has rearticulated what it means to have a politics of aesthetics:

The politics of aesthetics would more accurately be named as a meta-politics: a poli-

tics without demos, an attempt to accomplish—better than politics, in the place of
politics—the task of configuring a new community by leaving the superficial stage of
democratic dissensus and reframing instead of the concrete forms of sensory experience
and everyday life. (2009b: 326)

If we accept that traditional aesthetics, particularly in regard to the visual arts, ad-
dresses issues of value, judgement, beauty, the nature of perception and the affective,
then the contemporary aesthetic turn is precisely towards the contradictions in the con-
cept of aesthetics that have been uncovered by its presence in everyday life, or in what
96 History and Theoretical Perspectives

Foucault termed existence. Rather than focusing on ‘the waning of affect’, as did Jame-
son in his formulation of the postmodern turn, the aesthetic turn regards affect as cen-
tral to a politics of art and visual culture. Or, to take up a Foucauldian articulation, it is
affect that leads us to the understanding of the ethics in art and visual culture.
The new concept of aesthetics that has emerged embraces contradictions inherent to
it in order to understand the role of the political in art and culture. Some have argued
that such contradictions have been present in the history of art since the eighteenth
century. For example, Whitney Davis observed in his analysis of the first edition of
The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1999) that the conceptual structure of art today contains
both cultural/social/historical determinations together with ‘a necessary dynamic of au-
tonomous artistic identity’ adhering both to the subject in and the object of aesthetic
analysis. Indeed, the necessity of the dynamic of the absolute artist and the original art
object has its corollary in the apparently contrary, and relativistic, methods of historical
analysis employed by art historians. Davis called this ‘the palimpsest’, which he thought
art history must simultaneously reveal and penetrate using both its archeological and
critical-formal methods of analysis.17 In art history, the archeological method mentioned
by Davis pertains to the postmodern period and visual culture and the critical-formal
methods to the modern and its art history. According to Jameson, the very forms and
means of contradiction that had been present in modernity—including the action of
reflection itself—had been consumed and naturalized in postmodernity.18 The aesthetic
turn may be considered a refutation of this theory of consumption and naturalization.
Indeed, Rancière has suggested ‘disorder’ as another metaphor for the embracing of the
contradictions that characterize contemporary aesthetics:

Aesthetics is the thought of the new disorder. This disorder does not only imply that
the hierarchy of subjects and of publics becomes blurred. It implies that artworks no
longer refer to those who commissioned them, to those whose image they established
and grandeur they celebrated. Artworks henceforth relate to the ‘genius’ of the peoples
and present themselves, at least in principle, to the gaze of anyone at all. Human na-
ture and social nature cease to be mutual guarantees. Inventive activity and sensible
emotion encounter one another ‘freely’, as two aspects of a nature which no longer at-
test to any hierarchy of active intelligence over sensible passivity. (2009a: 13)

In such a view, cultural analysis cannot be separated from or privileged over an aes-
thetic one. So too, visual studies cannot be privileged over art history. Both form part of
the creation and reception of the work of art today. However, the present aesthetic turn
to both art and visual culture must do more than reflect their respective periods, it must
be understood as productive of its own historiography, one that can simultaneously re-
veal the ideological levels of past turns and offer something more visible: an ethics of the
interpretation of art and visual culture. I began this chapter with a long quotation from
Merleau-Ponty, whose late work on visuality and art marks a change from an earlier
modernist sensibility. With the aesthetic turn, Merleau-Ponty’s faith in seeing, or the per-
ception of the visual, that could be said to both initiate and be intrinsic to visual culture
Towards a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics 97

in postmodernity, ideally transforms into an understanding of the visual as a form or

medium of ethics. The efficacy of the ideal remains to be tested.
A historiographical method persists as the way that art history has of doing the kind
of critical archaeology called for by Davis.19 This approach allows a strategic interven-
tion in the historical record and in the story that history has written about art in order
to reveal the aesthetic investments that have been placed in art in the past. Some art his-
torians have used the revelation of aesthetic investments in art to argue narrowly, and
pessimistically, that they ultimately betray only the bad faith of the investor, that is the
art historian (Preziosi 1998). Others have rejected the value of traditional aesthetics by
arguing that the only ethical approach to the aesthetic in art would be to proclaim the
‘anti-aesthetic’.20 Coined over twenty years ago, the anti-aesthetic required the now out-
dated view of a noncontradictory aesthetics based primarily on the concept of aesthetic
value. The turn to aesthetics, I would argue, cannot be resolved from the specific posi-
tion of art history without the acknowledgement of the significance of the intertwining
of its historiography with that of visual studies over the last generation. I suggest that
without this prior turn in or away from the discipline of art history, the notion of an
aesthetic turn today would also not be possible. In other words, without the prior turn
to visual studies—in both its disciplinary and theoretical-temporal dimensions—the
extra-art historical turn of aesthetics today would not be a matter of note. By extra-
art historical I mean other disciplines named already in which the visual turn has been
noted, and in which the essential historiography through visual studies of the turn has
not been considered: ethics, law, sociology, political theory and philosophy. Whether
this visual turn and its possible echo, the aesthetic turn, have been of value to art history
as a discipline and to its audiences remains to be determined.

Towards a Dialectical Turn in Contemporary Visuality

In conclusion, a dialectical model of contemporary visuality emerges from my interpre-
tation here and the vacillation between visual culture and visual culture studies marks
its beginnings. Signaled by a confusion between the interdisciplinary methods found
in art history and the interdisciplinarity claimed for visual studies, the efficacy of this
indeterminacy inherent to it supported structural changes in the university that sought
to establish new programs and research devoted to visuality without acknowledging the
older ones that it already inhabited. In addition, the efficacy of this indeterminacy has
begun to bring about a reconceptualization of aesthetics, wherein the strength of the dia-
lectic in contemporary visuality provokes a movement away from the absolute idea of art
and towards the contingency of political actions, such that an aesthetics founded on the
characteristics of contemporary visuality may now be thought as the ideal politics for the
present. If this is so, we no longer live in the condition of postmodernity as defined by
Lyotard and Jameson. Where the aesthetic turn in visual studies will take us in the future,
of course, remains to be seen. For the present, we can but mark its actions and its sig-
nificance for both visual studies and art history through a historiographical analysis that
reveals a desire for ideal forms of history and visual culture in our globalized society.
98 History and Theoretical Perspectives

Notes
1. To cite the numerous theories of the image that insist on and warn about its danger would
be impossible here, but their lineage in critiques coming out of the French Situationists
must be acknowledged, if not explored here. See, most importantly, Roland Barthes (1973),
­Mythologies, first published in France in 1957; Berger (1972); and the texts assembled by
Martin Jay (1993) in Downcast Eyes.
2. ‘So, the real image revolution (if there was one) happened a long time ago, when images
lost the transcendent power they used to have and were reduced to mere records, however
expressive, of appearances’ (Aumont [1990]1997: 241). Jacques Aumont’s useful compila-
tion of the history of images is singularly disciplinary in its focus on film and art history and
Western oriented, thereby not addressing the ritualistic significance of images in local con-
texts, nor accepting the results of a global culture that has produced an ‘image-world’. See
Soussloff (2008: 145 – 70).
3. ‘This little incident expressed the formal condition of contemporary visual culture that I
call intervisuality, the simultaneous display and interaction of a variety of modes of visual-
ity’ (Mirzoeff 2002: 3). Susan Sontag was the first to attempt to understand the magnitude
of the significance that the image in culture would have for society and for future studies:
‘a widely agreed-on diagnosis: that a society becomes “modern” when one of its chief activi-
ties is producing and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to
determine our demands upon reality and are themselves covet substitutes for firsthand ex-
perience become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and
the pursuit of private happiness’ (Sontag 1977: 153).
4. On this singularity, see above all the writings of art historian Hubert Damisch, as explained
in ‘Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann’ (2005: 155 – 81).
5. In this section of the book Mitchell makes an extended plea for a theory of media, and by
extension of the image, that locates in the ‘vernacular media themselves’ (see p. 210).
6. I made an early attempt at explaining this turn, see Soussloff (1996).
7. Although some scholars have considered Habermas’s views on postmodernity central to art
history and visual studies, I disagree here. In Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History, the
author positions Habermas’s ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ (also ‘Modernity—An In-
complete Project’) (1980 and 1981) and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition
(1984) on the subject as the two key texts (Preziosi 1998: 280). Preziosi’s view appears based
on the appearance of Habermas’s essay in the collection The Anti-Aesthetic (1998). First pub-
lished in 1983 this collection appeared after the publication of the books on postmodern-
ism published by Lyotard and Jameson, discussed here. Over the intervening years, while a
number of these essays have proven exceptionally important for the field of visual studies,
Habermas’s is not among them. The reasons for this cannot be explored fully at this time,
but can be determined from the historiography given here.
8. See Soussloff and Franko (2002). Of interest for my argument here, Frederic Jameson calls
Lyotard’s analysis of postmodernism ‘prophetic’: ‘The ingenious twist or swerve in his own
proposal involves the proposition that something called “postmodernism” does not follow high
modernism proper, as the latter’s waste product, but rather very precisely precedes and prepares
it, so that the contemporary postmodernisms all around us may be seen as the promise of
the return and the reinvention, the triumphant reappearance, of some new high modernism
endowed with all its older power and with fresh life. This is a prophetic stance, whose analyses
turn on the antirepresentational thrust of modernism and postmodernism’ (Jameson 1988: 109).
Towards a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics 99

9. See, ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’ (1996). See also, articles by Ginzburg et al. (1995).
10. This essay has been amplified and put into the context of discussions of the humanities
­disciplines in the late-twentieth century by Jacques Derrida (1992). Significant to the histo-
riography I am developing here, the first version of the essay was presented in 1980 for the
centenary of the founding of the Graduate School of Columbia University.
11. For a good discussion of modernist methodologies in art history, see the introduction by
Kurt W. Forster to Aby Warburg (1999).
12. On the imbrications of the aesthetic value of art and the artist, see Soussloff (1997).
13. These terms differ from but are related to Jameson’s antimodern/propostmodern and
­promodern/antipostmodern formulations of cultural theory articulated in Jameson (1988:
103 – 13).
14. See Foster (2006: 195): ‘At times everything seems to be happy interactivity: among “aes-
thetic objects” Bourriaud counts “meetings, encounters, events, various types of collabora-
tion between people, games, festivals and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of
encounter and relational invention.” To some readers such “relational aesthetics” will sound
like a truly final end of art, to be celebrated or decried. For others it will seem to aestheticize
the nicer procedures of our service economy.’
15. See Milchman and Rosenberg (2008: 106) quoting van Buren (1994: 7): ‘Metaphysics
strives for perfection, completion, in the sense of having thought in the actualization and
presence of its end [entelecheia, perfectio], whereas the work [ergon] or text of postmetaphysi-
cal thinking puts itself forth as energeia ateles, i.e., being at work that never reaches its end
and is thus imperfect.’
16. The acknowledgement of the significance of Foucault’s thought for the aesthetic turn is
­recent and contested in its formulation, see Soussloff (2010) and Tanke (2009).
17. On this issue, see Summers (2003).
18. For the realism and Modernism thesis, see Jameson (1977).
19. See the introduction and essays in Holly and Moxey (2002).
20. As Foster and others seemed to argue in The Anti-Aesthetic (Habermas 1998).

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Davis, Whitney. 1999. ‘Formalism in Art History’, in M. Kelly (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Aesthet-
ics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2: 221–25.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, trans. Richard Rand and
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versity of Nebraska Press: 3 – 34.
Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2006. Visual Culture after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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1995. ‘Inter/disciplinary’, Art Bulletin, 77: 534 – 52.
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liamstown, MA: The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.
‘Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann: A Conversation’. 2005. Oxford Art Journal, 28: 155 – 81.
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Jameson, Frederic. 1977. ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, in Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso:
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Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
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Gregor. New York: Abaris.
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Claude Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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­History of Art and the Humanities: 1 – 75.
 3

Scopic Regimes of
Modernity Revisited
Martin Jay

‘What are scopic regimes?’ recently asked a curious, unnamed Internet questioner on
‘Photherel’, an official European e-learning Web site dedicated to the ‘conservation and
dissemination of photographic heritage’.1 Although noting that the now widely adopted
term was first coined by the French film theorist Christian Metz, the no less anonymous
site respondent ducked answering the question head on. He nonetheless could claim
that ‘the advantage of the concept of “scopic regime” is that it supersedes the traditional
distinction between technological determinism . . . and social construction . . . In the
case of scopic regimes, culture and technology interact.’ And then to offer a ‘simple ex-
ample’, he adduced the distinctions made by contemporary culture between fictional
and documentary versions of reality, which are created by a number of different devices,
such as the greater narrative coherence of fiction over the ‘possible fragmentation’ of
documentary. Other differences between scopic regimes, he continued, include the ef-
fects of gender—for example the ‘male gaze’—and class, which he defined in terms of
an opposition between the formalist look of bourgeois culture and the more politically
infused variant betraying the scopic regime of dominated classes. The remainder of the
entry stressed the important role played by photography in the generation of different
scopic regimes.
As this episode in random Internet knowledge dissemination demonstrates, there
are at least two things that can confidently be said about the concept of ‘scopic re-
gime’: first that it has begun to enter popular discourse, arousing curiosity on the part of
people who have heard about it, but are puzzled by its meaning, and second, that that
meaning is by no means yet settled. In l988, when I first composed an essay entitled
‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ for a conference at the Dia Art Foundation in New York,
which produced the widely read collection Vision and Visuality edited by Hal Foster
(1997), only the second of these conditions obtained, as the term was familiar, if at all,
Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 103

to devotees of esoteric French film theory. When Metz had introduced it in l975 in The
Imaginary ­Signifier, he had, in fact, used it in a precise and circumscribed sense, solely
to distinguish the cinema from the theatre: ‘what defines the specifically cinematic scopic
regime’, he wrote, ‘is not so much the distance kept . . . as the absence of the object seen’.
Because of the cinematic apparatus’s construction of an imaginary object, its scopic
­regime is unhinged from its ‘real’ referent. Representation is independent of what is rep-
resented, at least as a present stimulus, both spatially and temporally.
Metz’s distinction was suggestive, but it’s fair to say, if a bit of self-congratulation can
be excused, that ‘scopic regime’ remained only a restricted and obscure term until the
publication of ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ two decades ago. Inflating its meaning
and expanding its range, the essay suggested that there were three competing regimes
characterizing the era of history that has come to be called, with more or less precision,
modernity. The audacity—or was it foolhardiness?—to do so came largely from the in-
spiration of a seminal essay by Martin Heidegger, which was at once the stimulus to my
argument and its target. In ‘The Age of the World Picture’ of l938, Heidegger had taken
the German word Weltbild, which had been a close synonym of the more familiar term
Weltanschauung or ‘worldview’, and given it a more than merely metaphorical meaning
(Heidegger 1977).2 ‘Worldview’, a term popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey and developed
by later philosophers like Karl Jaspers, had pretty much lost its connection with vision
(still faintly audible in the Schau in Anschauung), and become a synonym for a philoso-
phy of life. Freud, for example could define it in an essay of l933 as ‘an intellectual con-
struction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one
overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which
everything that interests us finds its fixed place’ (1964: 158).
Paying more attention to the expressly visual nature of Bild (image or picture in
­German), Heidegger explored the meanings of both ‘world’ and ‘picture’, at least as he
understood them. And then he posed the question, does every age have a world picture?
Or is it only characteristic of the age we call ‘modern’? Mobilizing his special vocabulary,
Heidegger explained that Welt is ‘a name for what is, in its entirety. The name is not lim-
ited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to it. Yet even nature and history, and
both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not ex-
haust the world.’ (Heidegger 1977: 129).3 This somewhat cryptic statement was clarified
in the appendix to the essay in which he linked ‘world’ to the ontological question of
Being, which was of course the fundamental theme of his entire philosophy. What it did
not mean, Heidegger contended, was the reduction of everything that exists to ­objects
standing opposed to subjects viewing them from afar. This distortion was accomplished,
much to his dismay, only with the introduction of the modern ‘world picture’, when ‘the
world’ became primarily a visual phenomenon, available to the allegedly disinterested
gaze of the curious subject.
As for ‘picture’, Heidegger made it clear that he did not mean a copy of something,
an image of the world. Instead, he wrote, it suggests ‘the world conceived and grasped as
picture’. Crucially, Heidegger continued, not every age grasps the world in this way. It
is only a function of the metaphysical biases and impoverished cultural practices of the
104 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

modern era, in which the broader reality he called Dasein, whose major trait was its con-
cern for the question of Being, had shriveled into a subjectum, a punctual subject with
all the myriad connotations of that word. Correspondingly, ‘the world’ was reduced to
mere objects standing opposed to that subject, objects understood solely in ontic rather
than ontological terms, as objects to be represented in a frame, as if through a window.
Thus, Heidegger emphasized, ‘the world picture does not change from an earlier medi-
eval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is
what distinguishes the essence of the modern age (Neuzeit)’. (Heidegger 1977: 130).
Strictly speaking, according to Heidegger, neither the ancient nor the medieval
worlds had a picture of themselves in this sense. Neither of them posited a punctual
viewing subject outside of a welter of discrete objects in its visual field. For their inhab-
itants, still immersed in a richly meaningful world before the split between subject and
object, the mode of representing the world as if it were in a picture to be viewed through
a window-like canvas was not yet prevalent. The vice of curiosity for its own sake, an ex-
pression of voyeuristic inquisitiveness distracting us from attending to more important
matters, was still kept under control. Only with the rise of modern technology, in which
the world was reduced to a standing reserve for human domination, did a true Weltbild
arise. Only with the fateful advent of Descartes’s dualist metaphysics did the radical op-
position of viewing subject and viewed object supplant earlier ontological ways of being
immersed in the world. ‘The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of
the world as picture,’ Heidegger boldly asserted. ‘The word “picture” (Bild) now means
the structured image (Gebild) that is the creature of man’s producing which represents
and sets before’ (Heidegger 1977: 134). In the terminology he would adopt elsewhere, it
meant putting the world in a frame (Gestell), an act of ‘enframing’ that turns the world
into a ‘standing reserve’ for human exploitation.
Heidegger, in short, made two very broad claims in ‘The Age of the World Picture’,
both of which inspired my own attempt to conceptualize the scopic regimes of moder-
nity and yet seemed to me at the same time problematic. The first was his assertion that
only the modern age could be understood to have possessed a true ‘world picture’ in the
sense he gave those terms. Modernity was radically different from what had preceded
it, at least in terms of the domination of representational enframing and the primacy of
the subject over the object. Cartesian philosophy, the technological domination of na-
ture and the rise of modern science were all factors in the creation of that outcome, or
at least symptoms of the change, which involved the forgetting of Being and the privi-
leging of the subjectum over Dasein, whose mode of relating to Sein had been care, not
domination.
Heidegger, however, himself provided a clue to the inadequacy of this conclusion,
which too categorically differentiated historical epochs. Although insisting that ‘in the
age of the Greeks the world cannot become picture’, he acknowledged nonetheless,
‘that the beingness of whatever is, as defined for Plato as eidos [aspect, view] is the pre-
supposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in concealment, for the
world’s having to become picture’ (Heidegger 1977: 131). That is in the Platonic system
of Ideas, visible to at least the mind’s eye, there is already the kernel of the world as a
picture, which anticipates in some sense the radical departure that was the modern age.
Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 105

Premodern cultures could therefore be understood in part to possess inchoate ‘world

pictures’, even if they were not yet fully hegemonic.
As I tried to show in the book that followed a few years after the Dia Foundation
conference, Downcast Eyes, Hellenic attitudes towards vision had been in fact often ocu-
larcentric, even if not uniformly so (Jay 1993a: 21 – 33). The Platonic eidos was not as
idiosyncratic a concept in classical Greece as Heidegger suggested. What exists ‘in con-
cealment’ in a culture can, in fact, often disrupt the apparent coherence of that culture,
even perhaps, to repeat Heidegger’s own phrase, ‘long ruling indirectly’. So although
Heidegger may well have been right to stress the uniqueness of the modern era in terms
of its clear-cut privileging of the world picture, it would be wrong to ignore the antici-
pations and manifestations in premodern cultures, both in the West and elsewhere, of
that outcome. And, in fact, a good deal of subsequent scholarship on scopic regimes, as
we will see, was to investigate precisely these prior historical instances.
The second bold conclusion of Heidegger’s essay which seemed questionable was his
characterization of the modern era entirely in terms of one dominant visual culture, that
which he identified with Cartesian dualism, the technological domination of nature and
the punctual subject representing a world of objects at the other end of a visual field. To
be sure, what might be called ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ was arguably the most preva-
lent model of visual experience in the modern era, as Richard Rorty had also contended
in his influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). In fact, Heidegger’s
case would be strengthened if we add post-Albertian perspective in the visual arts to
the philosophical and scientific/technological evidence he provided. Although in ‘The
Age of the World Picture’, Heidegger did not focus on aesthetic issues, elsewhere he in-
dicated that treating works of art as objects for the aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) of a
subject rather than as vehicles for the disclosure of Being also characterize the modern
Weltbild (Heidegger 2008). The revolution in painting during the Renaissance associ-
ated with the invention or discovery of perspective can be understood, among many
other ways, as supporting this general conclusion. And perhaps we might also add, as
Jacqueline Rose has urged, the development of the bourgeois subject in the early mod-
ern era, which from a certain political perspective might even be understood to underlie
the entire epochal shift that Heidegger described (Foster 1997: 24).
But however persuasive Heidegger’s critique of the hegemonic Cartesian perspectiv-
alist Weltbild or scopic regime of the modern era might be—and, of course, there are
many critics sceptical of the underlying premise of his argument about the alleged ‘for-
getting of Being’ in the West—a closer analysis of the complexities of the era we call
modernity suggest that it was not quite as all-pervasive as he implied. As a result, ‘Scopic
Regimes of Modernity’ sought to pluralize his monolithic argument and bring attention
to two other less prominent, but still important scopic regimes of modernity. This is not
the place to rehearse the argument in all its details, but suffice it to say that they were
characterized as the Dutch ‘art of describing’, a term taken from an important book of
that name by the art historian Svetlana Alpers, and that of ‘baroque reason’, whose char-
acteristics had been developed by the French philosopher and cultural critic Christine
Buci-Glucksmann (Alpers 1983; Buci-Glucksmann 1994). Each of these was a mani-
festation of what Jacqueline Rose had called the ‘moment of unease’ in the dominant
106 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

scopic regime of an era (Rose 1986: 233). Each manifested a different combination of
philosophical, aesthetic and technological assumptions and practices. Indeed, as a later,
expanded version of my initial essay tried to argue, each might also be extended to the
competing urban design patterns of modern cityscapes (Jay 1993b).4 And perhaps, as
I sought to show in a still later effort dealing with the threatened transformation of St.
Petersburg’s skyline, they might even be helpful in our understanding of the different
skyscapes of modern cities as well (Jay 2008: 158 – 9).
It would, of course, have been possible to multiply other examples of plausible candi-
dates for modern scopic regimes, and in fact in several responses to the essay, a number
were quickly suggested. One commentator, for example pointed to the importance of
the ‘criticisms of Cartesian perspectivalism offered by twentieth-century art and artists’
(Green et al. 1989: 37)5 thus drawing our attention to late-modern rather than early-
modern visual cultures, those informed by that crisis of integrated subjectivity, repre-
sentation, three-dimensional perspective and realism we identify broadly with aesthetic
modernism. It would be easy to locate philosophical correlates in twentieth-century
thought, such as phenomenology or the later Wittgenstein’s theory of language games,
for this plausible fourth modern scopic regime. And with the emergence of postmodern-
ism still later in the twentieth century, it would be possible to posit a new scopic regime
expressing its major traits, such as the triumph of simulacra over reality abetted by the
digital revolution, which correlates with the philosophy of figures like Jean-François Ly-
otard or Gilles Deleuze, although some might argue that it really was better understood
as a revival of the ‘baroque reason’ of the early-modern period.
It would also be worth pausing to consider objections that have been made to the
characterizations of the three scopic regimes or their relative importance in the original
essay. For example the philosopher Margaret Atherton has questioned the elevation of
Descartes by Heidegger and Rorty, which I then appropriated, into the philosophical
inspiration for the dominant ocularcentric regime of the modern era. Doing so, she ar-
gues, ‘often results in a dual oversimplification: it reduces the highly complex thought
of Descartes to a caricature, and it removes attention from events that do not fit neatly
the Cartesian mold. In discussions of vision, what can often get ignored is the alterna-
tive account of George Berkeley’ (1997: 140).6 She goes on to claim that the camera ob-
scura model of vision, in which the corporeal intervention of the spectator is bracketed
out in the service of a formal, geometric model of visual experience, does not accurately
describe either Descartes or Berkeley, as recent commentators like Jonathan Crary have
also mistakenly assumed. ‘For all of Descartes’ praise of vision of (sic) the beginning of
the Optics, what he produced was an account that encouraged a distrust of vision, which
was continued by later Cartesians like Malebranche’ (148). Thus, using his name as a
shorthand way to label the perspectivalist regime akin to Heidegger’s notion of the mod-
ern ‘world picture’ is to do Descartes a disservice.
Focusing instead on the implications of the alternative modern scopic regime
called ‘baroque reason’, Christopher Braider, a scholar of comparative literature, ac-
cepts Buci-Glucksmann’s general description of its characteristics, but questions its al-
legedly subordinate status in comparison to the dominant one associated—rightly or
Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 107

wrongly—with Cartesian perspectivalism. ‘The baroque’, he claims, ‘marks indeed at

once the apogee and crisis of early modern visual experience, simultaneously magnify-
ing and deprecating human sight and the modes of depiction calculated to model and
enhance it’ (2004: 42). By focusing on the gender relations enacted in baroque visual-
ity, violent and disruptive, he suggested that even Baconian science is characterized by
a self-undermining of the claims it makes on the surface to visual mastery. ‘Perhaps the
essential point is just the difficulty of saying or showing as such. The Naked Lady that
images both nature and truth is an idea in Kant’s strict sense, a principle that guides
us precisely because it can never be realized in the realm of representable experience’
(67). It is therefore a mistake, he concludes, to date the terminal crisis of the dominant
Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime to the advent of Impressionism in painting and
Bergson in philosophy, as I had done in Downcast Eyes, for it was already in crisis at
the outset (69).
Rather, however, than speculate on the alternative candidates for scopic regimes of
modernity or try to fine-tune the ideal types presented in the original essay, I want to use
this opportunity to think a bit more reflectively on the larger issues raised by the concept
itself. That is what can we now say about ‘scopic regime’ as a tool of critical analysis some
two decades after its introduction into visual culture studies? How has it been used and
what are the implications of that usage? Luckily, Internet search engines make it possible
to canvas a wide variety of different cases, which might otherwise have slipped through
the cracks, to arrive at a tentative answer. These include not only publications, but also
university courses, academic conferences and even artistic production inspired by the
concept, or at least illuminated by it.7
What first becomes apparent after such a search is the range of applications in terms
of scale. We might for shorthand purposes speak of a division into ‘macroscopic’ and
‘microscopic’ regimes. At one end are attempts to characterize epochal configurations,
inevitably coarse-grained and bold in the manner of Heidegger’s critique of the Neuzeit’s
‘world picture’. Such were the three scopic regimes of modernity introduced in my 1988
essay. They should be understood, it bears repeating, as heuristic devices or ideal types,
which allow many exceptions to whatever rules or patterns they claim to discern. The
temporal and spatial boundaries of these macroscopic regimes are, of course, impossi-
ble to limit with any rigour, as is the case with all period categories used by historians.8
But attempts to provide large-scale generalizations about the visual cultures of a period,
however imprecisely defined, provide at least benchmarks against which deviations and
variations can be measured. They alert us to the ways in which untheorized and often
unconsciously adopted background practices may inform a wide variety of phenomena
during a period, from urban design and the conventions of painting to philosophical
and theological doctrines to interpersonal interactions and self-images. How uniformly
they may follow the patterns established is, of course, difficult to say, nor is it likely
that the same pattern permeates every aspect of a regime. As is the case with all ideal
types, there will always be refinements that will modify original characterizations, which
are never to be understood as adequate to the reality they can only approximate.9 But
enough rough coherence may characterize an epoch in ways that still allow us to speak
108 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

with heuristic value of a macroscopic regime, such as ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’, ‘the art
of describing’ or ‘baroque reason’.
At the other end of the spectrum are those usages that focus on a very narrow and
circumscribed set of visual practices and designate them as a scopic regime. To take
some examples at random, the term has been used to describe visual dimensions of ‘the
war on terror’ and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Darts et al. 2008;
Stanbury 1997; Ly 2003). It has been mobilized to investigate landscape styles under
the rubric ‘land-scopic regimes’ (Getch Clarke 2005) and to describe the erotic imag-
ery of early-modern Japanese prints called Shunga (Screech 2004). It has been com-
pared with the ‘spectro-scopic domains’ within the rarefied science of spectrochemistry
and identified with the visual experience of shopping malls (Falk 1997; Hentschel
2002: 434). It has been introduced to make sense of orientalist encounters with the
colonial other in Egypt, postcolonial photography in Mali and the antihegemonic,
‘subaltern’ novels of Bolivia (Sanjinés 2000; Pinney 2003; Gregory 2003: 224). It has
been employed to understand Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale in the fourteenth century and the
poetry of John Ashbury in the twentieth (Stanbury 1997; Dimakopoulou 2004). And
the list could easily be extended in a way that would make Borges’s heteroclite Chi-
nese encyclopedia, made famous by Foucault in The Order of Things, seem coherent by
comparison.
It would be tempting to condemn these motley uses as a misapplication of the term,
which ought to be restricted only to the most extensive macroscopic regimes, such as
those postulated in ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’. They are certainly less fleshed out in
terms of all the possible elements in a force field, nonvisual as well as visual, metaphoric
as well as literal. But insofar as no culture is homogeneous and consistent, allowing many
different subcultures to flourish or compete, it would be healthier to learn from the wider
and less rigorous use of the term, which, after all, has no strong claim to intrinsic, ob-
jective validity on any scale. What might be profitably explored are the congruences or
lack thereof between macro and microscopic regimes. Do they reinforce or challenge the
more expansive fields in which they are situated? Are they the moments of unease on a
micro-level of which Jacqueline Rose spoke? Can, for example there be a comfortable fit
between the historical regime identified by Christine Buci-Glucksmann as ‘baroque rea-
son’ and certain representatives of contemporary, postmodernist art, as exemplified by a
recent gallery show in London with that very title?10 Can films like Sally Potter’s Orlando
or Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract, The Belly of an Architect, A Zed and Two
Noughts, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Baby of Mâcon and The Pillow
Book be understood according to the same template, as one critic has suggested (Degli-
Eposti 1996a,b)? Are the visual protocols of postcolonial photographers in Mali best
understood as an ‘art of describing’ challenge to Cartesian perspectivalism, a vernacular
modernist ‘surfacism’ (Pinney 2003)? Can the new media as a whole be reckoned as in-
clining towards a resurrection of the baroque scopic regime (Manovich 2001)? Or are
there aspects of these contemporary phenomena that may ­escape or even contradict some
of the traits Buci-Glucksmann attributed to the Baroque in its original form?
It also may be worth addressing the issue of what elements need to be present to con-
struct a complex of visual practices and habits that constitute what might justifiably be
Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 109

called a full-fledged scopic regime, macro or micro. In visual culture studies, we have
learned to expand our focus beyond images, whether traditional easel paintings, devo-
tional icons, printed illustrations, photographs or the like, which were for so long the
primary preoccupation of canonical art historical discourse, to more complex, histori-
cally variable force fields of visuality. What Rosalind Krauss called in her classic essay of
1979, the ‘expanded field’ of sculpture, which emerged with installations and site speci-
ficity, has been extended to all visual artefacts. Within those force fields of relational
elements, we have learned to question the protocols of seeing and the techniques of ob-
servation, the power of those who have the gaze, the right to look, as well as the status of
those who are its objects, the obligation to be on view. The latter we have come to under-
stand not only in terms of weakness and vulnerability, but also at times as the privilege
to exhibit, to attract, solicit or demand the gaze of others in a struggle for recognition
and attention. We have also learned to ask what is visible and what is invisible in a par-
ticular culture and to different members of the culture. We have explored what Walter
Benjamin famously called the ‘optical unconscious’ revealed by new technologies, reg-
istering the expansion, augmentation and/or distortion produced by prosthetic devices
enhancing the natural powers of the eye. We have learned to situate those technologi-
cal innovations in more complicated apparatuses and practices of visuality that include
cultural, political, religious, economic and other components. All of these meanings are
folded into the notion of the ‘scopic’, which thus extends beyond more limited concepts
such as a ‘regime of perception’. (Singy 2006: 57).
But what precisely is added to the more generic notion of visual cultures or subcul-
tures by the terminology of a ‘regime’? As the etymology of the term itself suggests—it
is derived from the Latin regimen, which means rule or guidance—it implies a relatively
coherent order in which protocols of behaviour are more or less binding. As such, it fits
well with what can be called the political turn in visual culture studies, in which rela-
tions of power are understood to be expressed in or reinforced by visual interactions.
‘Regime’ suggests, however, more than just a governmental form with norms and rules,
regulating behavior, enforcing conformity and setting limits. To cite one eminent ob-
server, the political theorist Leo Strauss,

regime is the order, the form, which gives society its character. Regime is therefore a
specific manner of life. Regime is the form of life as living together, the manner of
living of society and in society, since this manner depends decisively on the predomi-
nance of human beings of a certain type, on the manifest domination of society by
human beings of a certain type. Regime means that whole, which we are today in the
habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form: regime means simultaneously the
form of a life of a society, its style of life, its moral taste, form or society, form of state,
form of government, spirit of laws. (1959: 34)

Strauss’s remark about the ‘manifest domination of society by human beings of a

c­ ertain type’ gives away something important about the inevitable connotation of the
word ‘regime’. Implying coercive or disciplinary constraint, it may tacitly suggest the lack
of full legitimacy based on the absent or manipulated consent of the governed. Because
110 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

of the long-standing habit of calling prerevolutionary France, the France of the late Valois
and Bourbon dynasties, the ancien régime, it may connote an autocratic, unjust and un-
popular order, which constrains and exploits those under its control. We rarely talk of a
democratic government based on popular sovereignty as a regime. As a result, it may also
inspire thoughts about deliberately subverting and discrediting it, extrapolating from the
recently fashionable idea of ‘regime change’. Indeed, merely exposing what had hitherto
been an unconsciously followed regime may be seen as a step on the road to subverting
it. Take, for example the usage in an essay on the painter Paul Klee whose ‘private visual
language’ is said to have ‘offered a “scopic regime” that challenged ­National Socialism’s
mimetic reproduction of mimetic myths’ (Kramer 1996: 182).
Although Metz’s original use of the term to describe the cinema may not seem ex-
plicitly intended to discredit it, it is worth recalling nonetheless that he coined it at the
very same time that he and his colleagues at the Cahiers du Cinéma were developing
what became known as ‘apparatus theory’ to criticize the ideological function of film as
a whole.11 Typically, as two of their number, Marcelin Pleynet and Jean Thibaudeau put
it, ‘the film camera is an ideological instrument . . . [which] produces a directly inherited
code of perspective, built on the model of the scientific perspective of the Quattrocento’
(1969: 10). In other words, it is complicit with the Cartesian perspectivalist worldview,
which was so much a target of the anti-ocularcentric discourse of the era.
It is thus not surprising to see the very idea of a dominant or hegemonic scopic re-
gime, no matter what its actual content, employed as a frequent target of critique, as
much ethical as political. For example in 2008, a blogger named Y. H. Lee suggested
that tagging and graffiti can be understood as a way of ‘resisting the (sic) scopic regime
by taking control over the visual landscape’.12 Similarly, in a recent book on Marcel
­Duchamp and John Cage, Jonathan D. Katz wrote:

From the perspective of postwar gay (that is to say, closeted) culture, there is some-
thing deeply, resonantly queer here: this sense of interrupted or blocked desire; this
unwavering, implacable self-control; this persona staged for public consumption; and
most of all this consuming awareness of audience, of a life lived under a scopic regime.
(Roth 1998: 58)

In a comparable vein, a University of Kansas literary critic, Kathryn Conrad, deliv-

ered a paper at a Canadian Association for Irish Studies conference in Toronto in 2008
on ‘Queering the Scopic Regime in Northern Ireland’.13 In all of these uses, the very
existence of a regime suggests that subversion or resistance will have progressive im-
plications. With a kind of implicit anarchistic distaste for regimes of any kinds, com-
mentators like these advocate subverting whichever one is in place. A regime becomes
equivalent to an ideology, whose exposure and subversion are sought in the name of
something truer or more just.
But insofar as the fantasy of living outside of a scopic regime at all is posited as the
unstated alternative to being coerced by the present dominant one, the project of sub-
version or resistance loses, I would argue, its plausibility. For as in the parallel case of
Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 111

Foucault’s concept of a discursive regime, a pervasive ‘episteme’ defining an age, the only
alternative is another regime, another more or less coherent form of visual life with its
own internal tensions and coercive as well as liberating implications. There may never
be an ‘outside’ beyond a cultural filter, allowing us to regain a ‘savage’ or ‘innocent’ eye,
a pristine visual experience unmediated by the partial perspective implied by the very
term ‘scopic’.14 Nor is it always clear that the politics of a specific scopic regime are pre-
dominantly sinister with, say, surveillance and the spectacle serving the domination of
those who are victimized by them, as Chris Otter has prudently argued in his detailed
exploration of the liberal implications of ‘the Victorian eye’ (Otter 2008).
The inherent parallel with ideology critique thus falters. Some rules may be chal-
lenged and new ones introduced, although the effort may itself be less easy to realize
than is the case when the rules are explicitly legislated, as in the political arena. But it
is hard to imagine living with no rules at all. Heidegger to the contrary notwithstand-
ing, the hope of ending the age of the world picture, all world pictures, and somehow
forging a new or restoring an old nonvisual order of interaction between humans and
their environment would be very difficult to achieve. There may well be an ineluctable
modality of the visual, to borrow Joyce’s familiar phrase, even though the dominance
of specific modalities can vary. The culturally and technologically abetted hegemony of
the eye may, of course, be challenged by other senses, or at least the balance tilted back
away from its domination. But it difficult to imagine that another sense can ever become
dominant enough to allow us to talk of a hegemonic haptic, vocative, gustatory or olfac-
tory regime with the same plausibility we can assume for scopic regimes. Or at least no
compelling cases have emerged so far, at least to my knowledge.
The example of multiple, competing scopic regimes does, to be sure, suggest that
seeking other patterns in the relationship between the different senses and larger cul-
tural wholes may well be fruitful.15 But for the moment, the most promising area of new
inquiry remains in visual culture, where major questions about the coherence and inte-
gration of practices and protocols of interaction remain to be resolved. Although we are
still groping around in the dark for ways to articulate the relationships between micro
and macroscopic regimes and have by no means exhausted all the possible coherent re-
gimes that might plausibly be found, we have certainly come a long way since Christian
Metz first floated the idea that we might distinguish between the cinema and the theatre
according to the absence or presence of the object seen and defined each in terms of a
unique scopic regime.

FURTHER READING
Brennan, Teresa and Martin Jay, eds. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Per-
spectives on Sight. London: Routledge
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick
Camiller. New York: Sage.
Jay, Martin. 1993a. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
112 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Jay, Martin. 1993b. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993b)
Melville, Stephen and Bill Readings, eds. 1995. Vision and Textuality. London: Macmillan.

Notes
1. See http://www.photherel.net/notes/relationships/ideas/re19aiii. When the same question
was asked of Yahoo! Answers on 9 November 2008, by a student who needed to know
for a class in cultural studies, the answer was the same example. http://answers.yah.com/
question/index?qid=20081109202323AAW0eaJ.
2. Weltbild implied more of a scientific view of the world, whereas Weltanschauung can also
refer to prescientific intuitions. The term had been introduced by Wilhelm Dilthey. See the
discussion in Makkreel (1975: 349 – 54). He thought it was more strictly cognitive than a
Weltanschauung.
3. For an account of Heidegger’s use of the word, see the entry on it in Inwood (1999).
4. It was first published in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman eds., (1992) and then in my col-
lection (Jay 1993b).
5. For an attempt to do just that, see Jacobs (2001).
6. In an essay in the same volume, ‘Discourse of Vision in 17th-century Metaphysics’, Cath-
erine Wilson also argues that seventeenth-century metaphysicians had a more nuanced un-
derstanding of vision than is implied by the term ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’.
7. At the 2003 annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technol-
ogy, there was a panel on ‘Visual Containment of Cultural Forms: An Examination of Epis-
temologies and Scopic Regimes’. In September 2007, the 24th International Conference of
the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand was devoted to the theme
of ‘Paradise: Scopic Regimes in Architectural and Urban History and Theory’. At the Uni-
versity of Amsterdam in 2008 – 2009, there was an MA theme seminar on the topic ‘Scopic
Regimes of Virtuality’.
8. For an attempt to wrestle with the vexed question of historical periodization in general, see
Jay (2008/2009: 160 – 1).
9. It has, however, been noted that perspective in the early-modern period was itself ambigu-
ous, sometimes implying a single transcendental subject, sometimes a plurality of different
subjects. See Somaini (2005 – 2006: 38).
10. The show at the Keith Talent Gallery in London from February to April 2009 was entitled
‘Baroque Reason’, which it explained in these terms: ‘This is a neo-baroque reflecting the
dynamics of hybridity and difference. These artists celebrate the dazzling, the disorientating,
and revel in baroque’s fascination with opacity, unreadability and the indecipherability of
the reality they depict. This collection of paintings present a conception of reality in which
the instability of forms in movement creates a duality; an enchanted illusion and a disen-
chanted world. The title of the exhibition is taken from the French philosopher Christine
Buci-Glucksmann’s book on the aesthetics of modernity. Buci-Glucksmann claims “If one
had to single out a scopic regime that has finally come into its own in our time, it would be
the madness of vision identified with the baroque.” ’ (http://www.re-title.com/exhibitions/
KeithTalentGallery.asp).
11. For an account, see my Downcast Eyes, chapter 8.
12. See http://leeyh85.blogspot.com/2008/03/scopic-regimes-graffit.html.
13. See http://people.ku.edu/~kconrad/.
Scopic Regimes of Modernity Revisited 113

14. As Hans-Georg Gadamer notes, scopi or perspective was a metaphor implying partial knowl-
edge in rhetoric ever since the time of Melanchthon. See Reason in the Age of Science, trans-
lated by Frederick G. Lawrence (1983: 125).
15. See, for example, Classen (1993).

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Falk, Pasi. 1997. ‘The Scopic Regimes of Shopping’, in Pasi Falk and Colin B. Campbell (eds),
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 4

Phenomenology and Its

Shadow: Visuality in the Late
Work of Merleau-Ponty
Michael E. Gardiner

Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irre-
spective of differences in physical and social circumstance, all manifest in their
behaviour and their relationship that very spark which makes us recognize them,
which makes us crave their assent or criticism, the spark which means we share a
common fate.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2004: 88 – 9)

The very existence of the present Handbook of Visual Culture confirms the widespread
impression that the explosion of scholarly interest in vision and visuality over the last
twenty-odd years shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, at the same time, there has still
been an influential tendency, at least in the more critically engaged literature, to foster a
scopic ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that regards the visual register as linked inextricably
to an abstract, totalizing and decontextualized form of power/knowledge that denigrates
and undermines the bodily, affective and intersubjective qualities of contemporary so-
ciocultural life. This occurs through such phenomena as the technological mediation
and manipulation of sight, and the overdetermination of vision by the commodity form,
as registered in such familiar tropes as Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ or Baudrillard’s
‘simulacrum’. Typically, such a diagnosis is accompanied by a call to ‘de-throne’ sight
as a privileged sense—which, in the feminist literature, often takes the form of a mas-
culinist prerogative that seeks to contain or vanquish women’s differential embodiment
and agency—and to explore alternatives to what Martin Jay has, in a series of important
works (1993a,b), usefully termed ‘ocularcentrism’.
More recently, there have emerged a number of important criticisms of such ocu-
larphobic accounts that address the implications of the sort raised by Fredric Jameson
when he writes: ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’ (1990: 1; my italics). For instance,
116 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Peter de Bolla (1996) makes the effective point that the Enlightenment is all too often
and easily pegged as the Ur-ground of modern hegemonic conceptions and operations
of the visual. But what is lacking in such narratives, which rely far too much on ab-
stract, sweeping generalizations, is a more nuanced and specifically historical sense of
the relationship between the Enlightenment, modernity and vision, especially the vari-
ous countertendencies that inform all of these. De Bolla argues that if we can historicize
successfully the organization of visual perception, we typically discover that there are
multiple, often antagonistic paradigms about vision (or any sensory regime) operating
at any given point in time/space. This is not to deny that there might well be dominant
or hegemonic perceptual forms in effect during any historical period. But it does mean
that, insofar as vision is always inflected by such factors as socioeconomic class, gender
or locale, we should instead strive to develop a ‘heterotopics’ that is aware of scopic plu-
ralism, one that pays sufficient attention to relevant historical details.
There are other, equally salient concerns vis-à-vis such ocularphobic approaches. In
particular, whilst it is important to uphold a critical orientation, what is problematic
about assuming that the ‘gaze’ always, and inextricably, ensnares the Other in a matrix
of subjectifying power is that such approaches cannot uphold the possibility of a con-
ceptual and normative space of contrast or difference, wherein there might be a relative
suspension of power imbalances in the dialogical interchanges of an ‘ideal community
of embodied subjects’ (Merleau-Ponty 1970: 82). In combating ‘visual essentialism’ (Bal
2003), which supposes that seeing is a ‘pure’ and transparently unmediated experience
that is not influenced by wider discursive factors, it is important not to move too far in
the opposite direction, and embrace uncritically a kind of cultural reductionism which
says there is nothing primordially ‘given’ or experiential about sight. For, as Jay (2002)
argues convincingly in his recent essay ‘Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn’, the as-
sumption that sight is determined unilaterally by the specific cultural or discursive situ-
ation in which given visual events occur, and that there can be no possibility of fostering
the conceptual reinscription or translation of meanings across existing cultural boundar-
ies, is deeply suspect. For one thing, it falls prey to the Romanticist (or ‘left-Herderian’)­
notion that the human world consists of utterly distinctive and discrete groups and
cultures—whether of nationalities, as in the older counter-Enlightenment account, or
multiple and dispersed ‘neo-tribes’ and subcultures, as in the updated Postmodernist
version. Each such cultural formation, according to this account, has a quasi-organic,
tightly integrated character, and they foster meanings that are essentially incommensu-
rable vis-à-vis other groups.
The key objection here is that cultures are not, and never have been, clearly delin-
eated entities with distinct expressive qualities. Jay draws on the work of Bruno Latour
to develop an alternative position: that cultures are always impure and heterodox con-
structions, amalgams of myriad discursive impulses and forms, and are ‘always-already’
complexly intertwined with natural processes. Instead of the absolute relativism of Lyo-
tard’s brand of Postmodernism, which is in reality a simple reversal of the Enlightenment
belief in a natural universalism, Latour promotes a ‘relational relativism’. The goal of the
latter is to conceptualize human sociocultural formations as hybridized, ‘quasi-objects’
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 117

that always strive to translate localized codes into meta-codes (regardless of whether they
are ultimately ‘successful’ in doing so), move constantly beyond established symbolic
boundaries, initiate novel conceptual and practical connections with other processes and
entities and so forth. In the view of Latour and Jay, the subject is always imbricated with
the object, the material with the immaterial, nature with culture. Although sight might
seem to alienate us from the world, provide a simulacrum of ‘distance’, it is part and
parcel of a compound, hybridized world no less than any other sense or human activity.
In questioning such a cultural relativism, concludes Jay, we don’t have to fall back on an
earlier transcendental naturalism, but we do have jettison the notion that ‘culture goes
all the way down’. As he writes:

[T]he persistent disruption of the organic, holistic concept of culture by visual expe-
rience reveals, we can do without choosing between extremes and live comfortably
within the negative dialectic of culture and nature, knowing that neither term can
­suffice without the other. Relativism, cognitive and normative, may not be overcome,
but the assumption that cultural difference is its source cannot be plausibly sustained.
(Jay 2002: 276; also Latour 1993)

For our purposes, what is most germane about these sort of counter- or post-
ocularphobic­arguments is that they raise the possibility of a more relational or dialogical
theory of vision. Which brings me to the central argument of this chapter: that we can
locate the rudiments of such a dialogical account of sight most fruitfully in the work of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The sort of questions to be pursued here include the following:
does Merleau-Ponty provide us with some of the conceptual tools to avoid visual essen-
tialism, but without falling prey to the errors of cultural reductionism? Are there aspects
of visual experience that are not determined completely by discursive factors, and that
suture bodies, natural processes and sociocultural factors together into complex, hybrid-
ized, multilayered wholes favoured by Latour et al.? Should we be ‘suspicious’, as it were,
of the supposition that the hermeneutics of suspicion must always, and everywhere, ‘go
all the way down’, analogous to the manner in which culture is treated in the theoretical
narratives Jay calls to account? And, aligned closely with the latter, can there be a specifi-
cally dialogical mode of seeing that does not isolate the visual or insert the subject into a
prevailing system of power and domination, but carries with it instead the possibility of
an ethically charged moment of mutual recognition that is at least potentially enriching
for all participants?

The ‘Philosophy of Reflection’ and Its Discontents

By way of addressing these sorts of queries, I will attempt to sketch out the basic
­elements of a dialogical theory of vision through an examination of Merleau-Ponty’s
writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially his final, unfinished text The Vis-
ible and the Invisible (1968). Despite shifts in thinking over the course of his career,
Merleau-Ponty’s chief adversary was remarkably consistent. He referred to it variously
118 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

as ‘high-altitude thinking’, Cartesian dualism and objectivism—or, perhaps most com-

monly, the ‘philosophy of reflection’. What he meant by such appellations was the
position, so well-entrenched in Western thought, that the production of knowledge in-
volved a solitary subject gazing on an external world of discrete things or ‘facts’, which
are then reflected or ‘possessed’ in thought by a sovereign act of cognition. In so doing,
we understand the world as externalized projections of our own ideations. Our capacity
for abstract, rational thought is, in this schema, considered to be the ‘highest’ and most
admirable human faculty, one that is facilitated by the ‘noblest’ of the senses: namely,
sight. What the philosophy of reflection strives for is a kind of magical transcription:
to substitute a rigorous and irrefutable system of crystalline logic and conceptual rigour
for a ‘messy’, inconstant and ambiguous reality, to ‘take out an insurance against doubt’,
as Merleau-Ponty puts it, although he is quick to add that the premiums that must be
paid to secure such a clarity ‘are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify
us’ (1968: 36).
For Merleau-Ponty, the translation of the world into an algorithm is a move fraught
with immense repercussions. In the philosophy of reflection, the subject that grasps the
world in a solely cognitive manner, so as to generate timeless and universal truths, is ef-
fectively a disembodied entity, a ‘pure’ observer with no real or constitutive connection to
the world around him. The egological self ‘makes itself “indifferent”, pure “knower”, in
order to grasp all things without remainder—to spread all things out before itself—and
to “objectify” and gain intellectual possession of them’. The world lies prostrate before
this omniscient subject’s purview, like captured booty and slaves paraded before an vic-
torious warrior-potentate. Nothing is hidden from its gaze: ‘He [sic, and passim] always
was, he is everywhere, he is king on his desert island’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 162, 14).
The external world in toto presents itself as a collection of inert facts that is wholly Other,
completely exoteric vis-à-vis my existence—and indeed, it represents a distinct threat to
my self, unless I can master it and transform it into something that I can use. Conse-
quently, we are encouraged to relate to others and to the world in an instrumental fash-
ion: the world becomes a kind of blank screen upon which the interests and desires of
the egological, transcendental self are projected. The logical terminus of such an attitude
is the rapaciously domineering project of modern scientific rationalism and the cult of
high technology that accompanies it.
Yet, Merleau-Ponty suggests (if somewhat optimistically) that ‘the philosophy of
God-like survey was only an episode’ (1964b: 14). In the wake of its hoped-for demise,
he strives to jettison the epistemological fetish of modern Western thought, which re-
lies on a peculiarly atrophied and fetishized notion of vision, in order to make the pas-
sage back to what he terms an ‘intra-ontology’. In so doing, we do not strive to possess
and dominate the world through the exercise of abstract Reason, but rather attempt to
‘understand from within’ our embodiment in and of the world, so as to foster ‘commu-
nication with a way of being’ (Merleau-Ponty 1974: 168). Merleau-Ponty’s work of the
1940s, especially his monumental study The Phenomenology of Perception, was intended
to inaugurate this move towards such a ‘philosophy of the concrete’, and to offer a
­decisive challenge to the logic and methods of high-altitude reasoning. In pursuing such
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 119

a strategy, he was not suggesting that all the achievements of Western science, philoso-
phy and aesthetics were wholly illusory. However, he did want to say that the philosophy
of reflection offered us only a narrow and often destructive template for thinking and
acting, especially because it failed to realize that the ultimate well-spring of genuine un-
derstanding lay in grasping the world of ‘raw’, prereflective experience and primordial
sociality, in the context of what Husserl designated as the Lebenswelt, or lifeworld. The
phenomenological method that Merleau-Ponty envisaged as a replacement for the para-
digm of reflection is a ‘search for a philosophy which shall be a “rigorous science”, but
[that] also offers an account of time, space, and the world as we “live” them’ (1962: vii).
The false clarity engendered by objectivist epistemologies must be countered by a phe-
nomenology of the body that emphasizes our somatic ‘openness’ on to the lived environ-
ment. We must, in short, ‘plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must descend
toward it such as it is instead of working its way back up toward a prior possibility of
thinking it—which would impose upon the world in advance the conditions for our
control over it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 38 – 9).
Thus far in my account, it might seem that Merleau-Ponty is participating fully in
the critique of ocularcentrism sketched out above. It is certainly true that he set out to
challenge a particular manifestation of ‘specular consciousness’, which supposes that vi-
sion is a pure and ‘ubiquitous’ presence that captures and objectifies the entire world at a
glance. This is the seeing of the absolute spectator, an ‘eagle-eye view’ in which ‘there can
be no encounter with another: for [this] look dominates; it can dominate only things,
and if it falls upon men it transforms them into puppets which move only by strings’. If
we espouse a philosophy of pure vision and abstract reflection, then the relation between
self and other can only be one of contestation, a struggle for supremacy, whereby the
‘other can enter into the universe of the seer only by assault, as a pain and a catastrophe’
(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 77 – 8). However, his approach departs, albeit subtly at times,
from the central axioms of the ocularphobic theories of Bataille, Foucault and others,
mainly because his phenomenology of embodied perception opens up the distinct pos-
sibility of what Jay (1993a: 169) calls ‘dialogic specularity’. In such an account, the look
of the Other, Sartre’s l’regard, is not out of necessity an act of entrapment or contain-
ment, but can be an invitation to reciprocal exchange, an inherently ethical attunement
and receptiveness to others that encourages a radical questioning of the egological self.

Vision, Reversibility and ‘Perspectivalism’

To understand more fully the dialogical properties and potentialities of vision, however,
it is necessary to take a closer look at Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to rethink the nature of
the human perceptual apparatus and how it manifests itself in the world. In developing
alternatives to ‘high-altitude thinking’, Merleau-Ponty argues that what we require is an
intensified awareness of our carnality, our situatedness in actual time and space, and our
introjection into the material and sociocultural worlds. For it is only through our bodily
connection to the world and to others that we construct a meaningful whole, a gestalt,
out of our lived experience. This is a theme he pursued in many of his investigations; for
120 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

instance as he put it in The Primacy of Perception, ‘the body is much more than an in-
strument or means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions’
(1964a: 5). However, it is in The Visible and the Invisible that Merleau-Ponty effects his
most decisive break from the phenomenology of consciousness, inherited from Bren-
tano and Husserl, that arguably hobbled his earlier work (see Dillon 1988: 85). At this
late stage in his career, Merleau-Ponty’s thinking is grounded more thoroughly in pro-
cess philosophy, and he proffers an image of the world that is always in a state of Heracli-
tean change and flux, birth and death, transformation and ‘becoming’—but in a utterly
unpredetermined manner, lacking any sort of overarching Hegelian telos or dialectically
driven necessity (see Gardiner 2000). The lived world, unlike the idealized world pos-
tulated in egological philosophies, is ‘unfinished’, pregnant, fecund, literally erupting
with new life and novel potentialities. Moreover, this insight equally applies to us: ‘the
perceiving subject undergoes continued birth; at each instant it is something new. Every
incarnated subject is like an open notebook in which we do not yet know what will be
written’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 6). Because the world is a living and constantly develop-
ing whole, and hence inherently responsive and interactive, our ‘Being-in-the-world’ is,
to Merleau-Ponty’s way of thinking, constitutively interrogative or dialogical in nature.
It is also important to note, following Merleau-Ponty, that vision in inescapably
­‘synaesthetic’—that is to say, ‘always-already’ entangled with other sensory modalities,
the social world of interacting bodies, communicative impulses (especially language)
and natural events and processes. The incarnate subject partakes of the overarching ‘be-
coming’ of the world because it is radically intertwined rather than separate from it, as
the dominant modes of Western philosophy have always maintained: ‘we are at the junc-
tion of Nature, body, soul, and philosophical consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b:
177). There can be no hierarchy of sense domains; to isolate vision and treat it as the
‘highest’ or ‘noblest’ sense implies precisely that. Through the apertures of our percep-
tual apparatus we open on to the widest possible range of sensations, sights, sounds and
smells—but this sensory system is also the avenue through which the world simultane-
ously enters into our body in transverse fashion. Inasmuch as ‘the world is made of the
same stuff as our body’ (1964a: 163), we are part of the ‘flesh of the world’, to evoke one
of Merleau-Ponty’s most provocative metaphors. He intends this to be much more than
a useful analogy: it is a genuinely novel way to (re-)conceptualize our lived embodiment,
our reciprocal connection to the natural world and other selves through the vehicle of
the human sensorium. This flesh is a ‘general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal
individual and the thing . . . a sort of incarnate principle . . . an “element” of Being’. It
constitutes the inescapable horizon of our existence: a milieu that envelops us and sus-
tains us, much as aquatic life is surrounded by and lives within the medium of water.
My body, he writes, is ‘shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and
it encroaches upon the world . . . they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping’
(1968: 139, 248).
World and body overlap in a most peculiar way, however. Again, I do not surveil
the world around me from an Olympian height through vision alone, and passively
register in my consciousness the colours, shapes and sounds of this world, like images
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 121

formed automatically on a photographic plate when it is momentarily exposed to light.

My body, my senses reach out to the world, respond to it, actively engage with it, shape
and configure it—just as the world, at the same time, reaches into the depths of my sen-
sory being. Merleau-Ponty implores us to cultivate a sharper awareness of the ‘percep-
tible world’s explosion within us’ (1964a: 20). Hence, the human perceptual system is
not a quasi-mechanical apparatus that exists only to facilitate representational thinking,
to produce reified ‘concepts’ and ‘ideas’ that mimetically copy inert things and objects
in the world; it is, in a very real and profound sense, enmeshed with the world itself.
Furthermore, my bodily and perceptual introjection into the world makes possible a
self-perception, a mode of reflexivity that is not merely cognitive but corporeal, what
Merleau-Ponty refers to as reversibility. As I view and experience the world around me,
I am simultaneously an entity in the world: the seer is also the seen, I can touch my-
self touching, hear myself speaking and so forth. Seen, heard and touched by myself,
certainly; but also by other subjects, and by the world in general, a ‘universal Being’ that
is simultaneously active and passive, proactive and reactive, and that ruptures the imagi-
nary boundaries separating the egological subject from the world:

[When] I touch myself touching . . . my body accomplishes ‘a sort of reflection’. In it,

through it, there is not just the unidirectional relationship of the one who perceives to
what he perceives. The relationship is reversed, the touched hand becomes the touch-
ing hand, and I am obliged to say that the sense of touch here is diffused into the
body—that the body is a ‘perceiving thing’, a ‘subject-object’. (Merleau-Ponty 1964b:
166 – 7)

If such an account is accurate, suggests Merleau-Ponty, we are compelled to en-

gage in an ‘ontological rehabilitation of the sensible’. But the world is not experienced
by me alone, even if in an reversible or reciprocal manner, and therefore any such at-
tempt at rehabilitation must also address what he terms the ‘problem of other people’
(1982 – 1983: 34). (As it is not a ‘problem’ in the Sartrean sense, Merleau-Ponty’s tone
here is probably at least somewhat ironic.) The crux is that my point of view is not the
only possible opening on to the flesh of the world, and hence we must supplement our
perspective with a ‘second openness’—that of other selves. However, to grasp the sig-
nificance of this, we must backtrack a little. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is presented
to me in a strangely ‘deformed’ manner—that is my perspective is always inflected by
the precise situation I occupy at a particular point in time/space, the idiosyncracies of
my personal psychosocial development, relevant sociocultural factors and so forth. In-
sofar as I am ‘thrown’ into a universe lacking intrinsic significance—the world does not
simply consist of self-evident ‘things-in-themselves’—the existential task that confronts
me is to make the world meaningful, to create, in architectonic terms, coherent patterns
out of the chaotic rhythms, events and fluctuations of lived experience. ‘The world’, he
says, ‘is something to be constructed’ (1982 – 1983: 39). But the accomplishment of
this task is necessarily a limited, partial and perennially unfinished one. Reality, as it is
available to a given body-subject, is therefore full of gaps and invisibilities, lacunae and
122 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

blind-spots; it is filtered through my concrete particularity, the precise aperture through

which I open on to the world. Hence, to utilize Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, the world
is an admixture of immanence and transcendence. It is immanent because I am onto-
logically part of the world that I inhabit, perceive and ultimately reflect upon. But it is
simultaneously transcendent, because there is always an aspect of the world that escapes
my sensory exploration of the world and post-facto cognition of it. There is a vast, invis-
ible world that lies beyond my sensory and ideational grasp. The conclusion Merleau-
Ponty draws from this is that no two individuals will experience the world in exactly
the same way: I perceive and experience things in a manner that another cannot fully
duplicate or re-experience, and the reverse is equally true. The following quotation from
The Primacy of Perception expresses this point very well:

[The] subject, which takes a point of view, is my body as the field of perception and
action [pratique]—in so far as my gestures have a certain reach and circumscribe as
my domain the whole group of objects familiar to me. Perception is here understood
as a reference to a whole which can be grasped, in principle, only through certain of
its parts or aspects. The perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of the
intellect, like a geometrical notion. (1964a: 16)

One might be tempted to think that Merleau-Ponty’s position here merely recapitu-
lates Nietzsche’s famous argument regarding perspectivalism. But this would be a pre-
mature conclusion. Although both thinkers are adamant that our access to the world is
always mediated by our lived body, and that our situatedness in concrete time and space
makes each of our perceptual openings on to the world singular and irreplaceable, the
crux of Nietzsche’s argument is that the world is qualitatively distinct for each observer,
because it is determined solely by the interpretative strategies brought to bear on the
world by each and every individual. In other words, Nietzsche’s untrammelled individu-
alism precludes him from accepting that there is a common world shared by a multiplic-
ity of persons outside the perspective of any given subject-position. This is precisely the
conclusion that Merleau-Ponty would want to avoid. While Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian ma-
terialism’ (Sloterdijk 1989) is a definite improvement on Cartesian dualism, because it
affirms the embodied character of the subject, in the final analysis it constitutes yet an-
other version of dogmatic solipsism, and hence does not accomplish the decisive break
from the long history of Western metaphysics of the sort Nietzsche himself envisaged.
For Merleau-Ponty, the decisive issue is this: although the meaning of the world for each
of us is constructed from the vantage-point of our embodied point of view, and hence
irreducibly pluralistic, in an important sense we continue to inhabit the same world—
that is we are co-participants in a universe that ultimately transcends any particularistic
perspective (see McCreary 1995: 9; also Schenck 1985). As he puts it, the world can best
be understood as ‘a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number of perspectival
views which blend with one another according to a given style, which defines the ob-
ject in question’ (1964a: 16). This emphasis on ‘blending’ or inter-individual synthesis,
this intertwining and overlapping of human bodies and sensoriums through which we
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 123

collectively participate in and create a shared sociocultural and physical environment, im-
plies that the world has the ontological status of an ‘in-itself-for-others’, and not simply
an ‘in-itself-for-us’. Merleau-Ponty’s desire to think through the many ramifications of
the principle of a fully lived unity-in-diversity (as opposed to pure, abstract ‘difference’
as such), and to supersede the solipsistic tendencies of Western thought, is what marks
his thought as distinctive and fundamentally at odds with those Postmodernist and
Poststructuralist thinkers who find in Nietzsche a fundamental source of inspiration, no
less than the debilitating nostrums of scientific positivism.

Alterity and ‘Primordial Being’

What the preceding discussion indicates is that I do, in actuality, have access to a world
that others perceive and experience: ‘What I see is not mine in the sense of being a pri-
vate world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 57). This is the central conundrum that he tries to
think through in his late writings: that although my placement in the world is unique
and not shared identically by another person, this is no absolute barrier to a reciprocal,
mutually enriching relationship between self and other and the world at large. For him,
the very presence of another self in my perceptual horizon forces me to reassess my re-
lationship to the world, invites me to question the supposition that I alone have the ca-
pacity and the right to arrogate to myself a privileged access to Being, and to realize that
the boundaries of my self are not rigid and sacrosanct. The very proximity of the other
in my field of activity is akin to a calling, an invitation to co-participate in primordial
Being and to short-circuit our egocentric insularity, inasmuch as the sensory extension
of our bodily presence into the world intersects, cross-cuts, and is ensnared by the same
objects and processes in the same world as other people. Merleau-Ponty believed firmly
this is a summons that we can ignore only at our own peril:

The gaze of the other men on the things is being which claims its due and which en-
joins me to admit that my relationship with it passes through them. . . . The other’s
gaze on the things is a second openness. . . . I as it were do everything that depends on
me in order that the world lived by me be open to participation by others . . . since I
put into the arena of the world my body, my representations, my very thoughts qua
mine, and since everything that one calls me is in principle open to a foreign gaze,
should it but be willing to appear. (1968: 58 – 9)

Because we are so habituated to thinking in accordance with the tenets of Cartesian

dualism, it is difficult for us to grasp this crucial point: that we are in ourselves and in
others and in the world simultaneously, and vice versa. This, for Merleau-Ponty, implies
that such perceptual openings on to the world have multiple points of entry, ‘effected
at the crossing of avenues’ (1968: 160), not a singular, monocular one. It is important
to realize that this reciprocal and transgressive encounter between self, other and world
does not ‘annihilate’ the self, or dissolve each of us into some kind of undifferentiated,
homogeneous ‘substance’. Rather, this transivity promotes a decentring, a heightened
124 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

awareness of the presence of the other in ourselves, and, inter alia, ourselves in others,
an ‘intercorporeality’. It is this eternal confrontation with a radical and irreducible oth-
erness that allows us to surmount egocentricity, to escape the gravitational pull of solip-
sism: ‘the experience of the other is necessarily an alienating one, in the sense that it tears
me away from my lone self and instead creates a mixture of myself and the other’ (Mer-
leau-Ponty 1964a: 154 – 5). Or, as he puts it succinctly in The Prose of the World, ‘Myself
and the other are like two nearly concentric circles which can be distinguished only by
a slight and mysterious slippage’ (1973: 134). Again, our co-participation in the flesh
of the world does not take place solely (or even primarily) at the level of abstract, reflec-
tive cognition—I cannot ‘flatter myself ’ that I think the same thoughts as another, that
I have some sort of privileged access into another’s inner, psychic life, and the reverse
is equally true. Rather, this common enfolding into the world’s flesh is something that
I sense or intuit at the level of ‘wild being’, whereby I come to realize that my perceptual
opening on to the world has not only an inner, subjective dimension, but a visible ‘ex-
terior’. I cannot fully ‘inhabit’ another body, for this would only create another myself,
a ‘second dwelling for me’, which is, needless say, impossible. The key lies in the ‘in-
betweenness’ of the ontological linkage between self and other, an ‘interhuman’ realm
where there is a perpetual exchange and reciprocity of perspectives, an endless, circular
transcendence and returning to self, which always occurs on the border between two or
more interacting subjects. ‘It is in the very depths of myself that this strange articulation
with the other is fashioned’, writes Merleau-Ponty.

The mystery of the other is nothing but the mystery of myself. A second spectator
upon the world can be born from me. I make this possible myself if I take account at
all of my own paradoxes. That which makes me unique, my fundamental capacity for
self-feeling, tends paradoxically to diffuse itself. It is because I am a totality that I am
capable of giving birth to another and of seeing myself limited by him. For the miracle
of the perception of another lies first of all in that everything which qualifies as a being
to my eyes does so only by coming, whether directly or not, within my range, by reck-
oning in my experience, entering my world. (1973: 135)

My embodied perceptions are therefore the means through which I gain entry to a
world shared by other selves. The body-subject, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is a ‘vehicle
of a relation to Being in which third parties, witnesses can intervene’. I enter into the
totality of the world, its flesh, but only occupy a part of this totality, because my situ-
ation, my thoughts and my body are all delimited by time and space, by the physical
arrangement of my perceptual apparatus, my subjective idiosyncracies and so forth.
The arrogance of the philosophy of reflection lies in its tacit refusal of the right of oth-
ers to gain access to this universal, primordial Being, and to suppose that a monocu-
lar, God’s-eye view on the world is infinitely superior and preferable to a multiplicity
of overlapping perspectives. Such a stance cannot ‘comprehend how a constitutive
consciousness can pose another that would be its equal, and hence also constitutive’
(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 62). What must be affirmed strenuously is that the world is not
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 125

merely an object-world; it is a domain filled with other subjects, each with his or her
own unique experiences, perspectives and life-projects. Modern Western societies have
been marked by a desperate and ultimately self-defeating desire to insulate themselves
from the world that surrounds us, except through our capacity for abstract cognition
and instrumental control. We refuse to answer the invitation to open ourselves to pri-
mordial Being, to plunge into its rich, complex and ambiguous depths, and respond to
its solicitation with our body and soul. Yet, Merleau-Ponty reminds us, there are always
moments when our connection to the flesh of the world is revealed starkly to us, which
might conceivably jolt us out of our inward-looking complacency, force us to confront
the inherently ethical responsiveness of the human condition, and envisage the possi-
bility of an entirely different way of relating to the world and to other selves. We can
come to the realization that the other is not an object, nor another ‘me’, an extension
of my own consciousness, but rather another body-subject with equal rights to myself
with respect to the constitution of the world and the creation of existential meaning.
This is because, ultimately, the ‘other is born from my side, by a sort of propagation by
cuttings or by subdivision, as the first other, says Genesis, was made from a part of Ad-
am’s body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 58 – 9). Since the mind is incarnate, and all human
beings co-participate in the material world, the ‘problem of other selves’ ceases to be
the conundrum that has bedevilled philosophers for centuries.

It is . . . indeed true that the ‘private worlds’ communicate, that each of them is given
to its incumbent as a variant of one common world. The communication makes us the
witnesses of one sole world, as the synergy of our eyes suspends them on one unique
thing . . . And it is this unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world common to us that is
the seat of truth within. (Merleau Ponty 1968: 11)

The cultivation of openness to a shared, primordial Being requires that we partially

transcend our egocentric situation, to live in the interstices between self, other and world,
including that of the inorganic—or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, on the ‘margin of non-
being’ (1968: 74). Again, however, the operative notion here is ‘partial’ transcendence:
there is no question of a complete fusion or identity between self and other, regardless
of the fact that we co-participate in the same world. ‘We should’, writes ­Merleau-Ponty,
‘return to this idea of proximity through distance, of intuition as auscultation or palpa-
tion in depth, of a view which is a view of self, a torsion of self upon self, and which calls
“coincidence” in question’ (1968: 128). The dialogical relation between self and other
is a synthesis, albeit a tensile one, of communion and distance. Our respective view-
points descend on the same world, it is true, but always from dissimilar angles. There is
no possibility of abandoning arbitrarily my embodied location in concrete time/space
through an act of sovereign will; the body-subject and its environs constitute the ines-
capable horizon of my life. My vision is inscribed in the world, and the world upon my
vision; the perceiver is not alienated from the world he or she gazes upon. However,
the vision of the other does not necessarily threaten this reversibility; on the contrary,
it complements it, ‘doubles’ my vision by supplementing it with another perspective, a
126 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

‘second openness’. The cross-cutting and overlapping gazes that emanate simultaneously
from self and other ‘announce an open and indefinite series of complementary percep-
tions which we would be able to fulfill if we were to change our vantage point. Percep-
tion is the synthesis of all the possible perceptions’, writes Merleau-Ponty (1982 – 1983:
36 – 7). The other is my mirror, as I am of them; the images are reversible, and they are
not two distinct images, but rather ‘one sole image in which we are both involved’. The
other sees what is invisible to me, things that I can never witness directly, but the reverse
is also true—and therefore our respective gazes are not necessarily antagonistic but at
least potentially complementary. They overlap, intertwine and together give each of us
a more complete opening on to the world: ‘Since the total visible is always behind, or
after, or between the aspects we see of it, there is access to it only through an experience
which, like it, is wholly outside of itself ’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 82, 136). As an aside,
it might be asked legitimately at this stage whether Merleau-Ponty breaks as decisively
with Cartesianism’s subject-object ontology and the ‘philosophy of reflection’ that un-
derpins it as he might have liked. After all, much of the preceding discussion still relies
on the conventional metaphorics of reflection, the ‘mirror’ and so forth. The lived body
certainly mediates between subject and object, but perhaps does not dissolve them en-
tirely. This is a complex issue that cannot be resolved here. Suffice to say that although
he may not have articulated a full-blown ‘post-Cartesian’ paradigm (although in fairness
it should be noted that The Visible and the Invisible was, after all, an unfinished work),
Merleau-Ponty was certainly acutely aware of the issue, and my sense is that he identi-
fies so forcefully the crucial issues at hand, and assembles so many of the key concep-
tual building-blocks, that his work lies on the cusp of such a transition—and, indeed,
is difficult to imagine without. This conceptual exploration is witnessed most directly
in such characteristically Merleau-Pontyian notions as ‘intertwining’, ‘chiasm’, ‘revers-
ibility’ and, most provocatively, the ‘flesh of the world’. All such tropes and metaphors
point to a posthumanism, or at least a ‘relational’ humanism, in which self, other and
world are conceived of as overlapping parts of a complexly differentiated and meaning-
fully patterned whole that Merleau-Ponty labels the ‘Gestalt’.
In any event, Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion after reviewing the nature of alterity is that
we need the other, in a profoundly ontological and ethical sense, to be able to answer
the solicitation of the world, to imagine ourselves as coherent and meaningful entities
capable of responsible actions, and to be able to gain access to primordial Being. As he
bluntly puts it: I ‘borrow myself from others’ (1964b: 159). This is a debt that we must
continually repay. Without access to the other’s point of view, we remain ‘flat’, one-
­dimensional creatures lacking depth, more object than active subject. Yet again, there is
no overarching fusion, no finalizing synthesis or coincidence between self and other in
such encounters; there can be no ‘arbitrary intrusion of a miraculous power transport-
ing me into the space of another person’ (Merleau-Ponty 1982 – 1983: 44). Difference in
alterity is preserved in this schema, but otherness is not an inherently hostile or incom-
prehensible force, as such Poststructuralist thinkers as Derrida, Foucault or Lyotard tend
to suggest (see Gardiner 1996; Kearney 1993). Again, the body-subject has a ‘double
reference’: it is a thing in the world yet simultaneously what sees and touches this thing.
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 127

I cannot literally see behind my back; but it is ‘seen’ nonetheless, by the generalized
­vision of Being that is part of the sensible world. Accordingly, our own being is ‘a means
to participate in the other, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the other
because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh’. It is
only in encountering another self that I have access to an external viewpoint, and can
visualize myself as a meaningful whole, as a gestalt: ‘for the first time I appear to myself
completely turned inside out under my own eyes’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 137, 143).
The upshot is that reversibility, visual or otherwise, is never realized in some sort of
totalizing or all-encompassing way for Merleau-Ponty. As expressed earlier, self and other
form concentric circles that nearly overlap, but can never completely usurp each other’s
situated existence. Although intercorporeality facilitates a communicative transivity be-
tween myself, another and the world, there is no possibility of an absolute transcendence
from my own unique embeddedness in concrete space/time. On the contrary: dialogue
(in all of its manifestations) presupposes a radical difference between interlocutors,­be-
cause there would be no point in communicating at all if myself and another were
not uniquely embodied and located in the world, each with divergent but overlapping
­experiences, perspectives and so on. There would nothing of value to exchange, no pos-
sibility of a communicative reversal of perspectives, without difference. ‘We will arrive
at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of
reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually
understandable’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it. ‘It is our very difference, the uniqueness of
our experience, that attests to our strange ability to enter into another’ (1974: 168).
As such, there is always exchange, transversal contact and reciprocity between different
body-subjects as they interrelate. In Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, an enhanced awareness of
this primordial connectivity, or ‘hinge’, signals the emergence of a new, post-Cartesian
form of being, one marked by ‘porosity, pregnancy, or generality [. . .] before whom the
horizon opens is caught up, included within it. His body and the distances participate in
one same corporeity or visibility in general, which reigns between them and it, and even
beyond the horizon, beneath his skin, unto the depths of being’ (1968: 149).

Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I’ll return briefly to Martin Jay’s critique of cultural reductionism.
Again, his key point is that the object or image is never fully reducible to the discur-
sive, because any visual experience is always synergetically and simultaneously materi-
ally embodied, symbolic and natural. Indeed, there seem to be certain images or visual
modalities that are able to cross cultural barriers with relative ease, which indicates that
however much images ‘are filtered through such a [discursive] screen, however much
they are connotatively deflected by the magnetic field of culture, they remain in excess
of it’ (Jay 2002: 275). The world-wide visceral reaction to the now infamous Abu Graib
photographs might be such an example of such a excess or surplus, one that taps into a
specularity that generates identification and empathy in part because it is dialogical, tak-
ing the interrogative form of ‘question and response’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 131), rather
128 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

than a distanciated, quasi-pornographic titillation and seduction of the sort Jameson

and others have fixated on. But such a surplus, as I have taken pains to argue here, does
not have to negate difference or erase the situated particularity of individual and group
experiences. Insofar as any properly dialogical account of specularity must vouchsafe
‘unity-in-diversity’ for Merleau-Ponty, it echoes Agnes Heller’s concept of ‘radical toler-
ance’, whereby we open ourselves up to the possibility of self-transformation through
contact with the other, and vice versa, rather than simply ‘put up’ with difference, as lib-
eral forms of tolerance are prone to do (Heller 1987). Expressed differently, the recogni-
tion of otherness does not inevitably entail subjection (see Melville 1996), but can be an
invitation, however hesitant, contingent and open-ended, to collaborate on exploring
the rich possibilities of ‘wild being’. As Merleau-Ponty himself noted in a radio address
to the French nation in 1949, shortly after the horrors of the Second World War, the
ethical and ontological onus always remains on us to seek out and cultivate ‘those rare
and precious moments at which human beings come to recognize, to find, one another’
(2004: 90).
In The Visible and the Invisible and related works, we are sensitized to certain com-
monalities of vision that enfold all of us into the world’s flesh, and provides the sem-
blance of a shared experiential ground that connects, rather than divides, by virtue of
our being humanly embodied entities. Nonhuman species, with their differently orga-
nized sensoriums and cognitive capacities, have primordial relations to the world that
undoubtedly depart significantly from ours—although not in utterly incommensurate
ways, Merleau-Ponty might be quick to add, inasmuch as the presence, experiences and
activities of animals (and other organic forms) overlap with our own. Again, we are all
part of the flesh of the world. In this sense, our perceptual apparatus is something of an
a priori, the necessary means by which we gain access to, engage with, and come to un-
derstand our lived environment and other selves. Technological advances can extend or
mediate our senses, but can never completely negate or supplant them. The instrumental
rationality and ‘high-altitude thinking’ promoted by the central tendencies of modernity
does bolster a rarified ‘specular consciousness’ that abstracts from and seeks to dominate
the world. But this is not an essential feature of vision per se, and, as de Bolla reminds us,
there are always multiple sensory regimes at play in any given historical period, and an
enhanced awareness to this might well encourage what Helga Geyer-Ryan calls a ‘theory
of polyscopy’ (1996: 123). In challenging the monocular, abstract and disengaged ‘see-
ing’ of Cartesian perspectivalism, Merleau-Ponty holds out the possibility of just such a
‘polyscopic’ perceptual system, one that teases out and encourages rather than suppresses
the ‘multiple, even contradictory potentials’ of vision, evoking a ‘plural metaphoricity
that resists reduction to a univocal master trope’ (Jay 1993a: 104, 511). Merleau-Ponty
suggests that we can aspire to an embodied, intersubjective form of reason that engages
all of the human senses, but without denigrating the visual register, in a manner that
privileges an open, mutually enriching and ethically responsible relationship between
self and other and between society and the natural world. This has profound implica-
tions for the study of visuality: amongst other things, it forces us to consider the relation-
ally situated, ethical and embodied character of seeing; sensitizes us to the necessarily
Phenomenology and Its Shadow 129

mediational role of the human – nature connection in any visual experience (see Cataldi
and Hamrick 2007); and, finally, prompts us to develop a much more nuanced and
complex account of power and domination as it relates to scopic practices. The ultimate
goal would be the full efflorescence of what Herbert Marcuse once called a ‘new sensibil-
ity’; that is a perceptual and experiential regime that ‘instead of being guided and perme-
ated by the rationality of domination, would be guided by the imagination, mediating
between rational faculties and the sensuous needs’ (Marcuse 1969: 30).

Further Reading
Heywood, Ian and Barry Sandywell, eds. 1999. Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the
Hermeneutics of the Visual. London and New York: Routledge.
Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press.

References
Bal, Mieke. 2003. ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual
Culture, 2/1: 5 – 32.
­

Bolla, Peter de. 1996. ‘The Visibility of Visuality’, in Martin Jay and Teresa Brennan (eds), ­Vision
in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 65 – 79.
Cataldi, Suzanne L. and William S. Hamrick, eds. 2007. Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Phi-
losophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Dillon, M. C. 1988. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gardiner, Michael. 1996. ‘Foucault, Ethics and Dialogue’, History of the Human Sciences,
9/3: 27 – 46.
Gardiner, Michael. 1999. ‘Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception’, in Ian Heywood and
Barry Sandywell (eds), Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the
­Visual. London and New York: Routledge, 57 – 73.
Gardiner, Michael. 2000. ‘ “A Very Understandable Horror of Dialectics”: Bakhtin and Marxist­
Phenomenology’, in Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov (eds), Materialising Bakhtin: The
Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s
Press, 119 – 41.
Geyer-Ryan, Helga. 1996. ‘Imaginary Identity: Space, Gender, Nation’, in Martin Jay and Teresa
Brennan (eds), Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. London
and New York: Routledge, 117 – 25.
Heller, Agnes. 1987. Beyond Justice. New York: Blackwell.
Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Signatures of the Visible. London and New York: Routledge.
Jay, Martin. 1993a. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
130 Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Jay, Martin. 1993b. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique. New York and
London: Routledge, 99 – 113.
Jay, Martin. 2002. ‘Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1/3:
267 – 78.
Kearney, Richard. 1993. ‘Derrida and the Ethics of Dialogue’, Philosophy and Social Criticism,
1/19: 1 – 14.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.
McCreary, Mark. 1995. ‘Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche: Perspectivism in Perception’, Metaphysi-
cal Review, 2/3: 1 – 11.
Melville, Stephen. 1996. ‘Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contem-
porary “Theory” ’, in Martin Jay and Teresa Brennan (eds), Vision in Context: Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. London and New York: Routledge, 101 – 16.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964b. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1970. Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952 – 1960.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The Prose of the World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1974. Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected Essays of
Merleau-Ponty. London: Heinemann.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1982 – 1983. ‘The Experience of Others (1951 – 1952)’, Review of Exis-
tential Psychology and Psychiatry, 28/1 – 3: 33 – 63.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2004. The World of Perception. London and New York: Routledge.
Schenck, David. 1985. ‘Merleau-Ponty on Perspectivalism, with Reference to Nietzsche’, Philoso-
phy and Phenomenological Research, 46/2: 307 – 14.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1989. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Minnesota: University of
­Minnesota Press.
 5

Hermeneutical Aesthetics
and an Ontogeny
of the Visual
Nicholas Davey

Introduction: On Clarity and Distinctiveness

Do we have a clear and distinct understanding of objects at the centre of attention
within visual studies? Over the recent decade the academic expansion of visual stud-
ies has been extensive. Courses in design, film, visual culture, art history and aesthetics
abound. Compared to forty years ago, awareness of the sheer variety of visual languages
is now acute and sophisticated. The rapidity of this almost universal shift has led some to
proclaim the demise of literary culture. More vocal, however, have been those who assert
that it is both conceptually correct and culturally appropriate that the traditional studies
of art history and fine art are subsumed within the more broadly envisioned disciplines
associated with visual studies. The assertion has the useful consequence of demytholo-
gizing the status of the artwork stripping it for the most part of its association with elitist
attitudes and educational privilege.
Despite notable detractors, such shifts in intellectual perspective have initiated
major alterations in how aesthetics and its relation to the study of art is understood (El-
kins 2007: 171–8). Discussions of the nature of taste and the character of beauty have
been displaced in favour of debates devoted to the social construction of aesthetic atti-
tudes and the cultural formation of art discourses. My own work in aesthetics has made
its contribution. In the essay, ‘The Hermeneutics of Seeing’, I argued that hermeneutic
aesthetics exemplifies how philosophical and existential determinants configure them-
selves in our perceptions of art (Davey 1999). What addresses us in art is not what we
come to see but what shows itself to us. What displays itself is not reducible to subjectiv-
ity alone but depends upon historical and cultural forms (Sachen) which transcend the
subjective and yet achieve personal perceptual instantiation within individual aesthetic
­experience (Davey 1999). Aesthetics understood within the framework of philosophical
132 History and Theoretical Perspectives

hermeneutics is no isolated monologue on personal pleasure but a complex dialogical

achievement involving the fusion of horizons surrounding the artist, the work, its sub-
ject-matter and its spectators (Davey 1999). Hermeneutical aesthetics presents the art-
work as a dialogical space and sounds a critical note concerning the tendency of visual
studies to reduce artworks to being mere objects of analysis, to signs and symptoms of
the circumstances of their production. We will reflect on this criticism below.
Hermeneutical aesthetics shares with visual studies a decentring of traditional sub-
jectivist aesthetics. It does so by reminding us that an artwork is in itself a dialogical re-
sponse to a subject-matter and demands too that the spectator responds to its answering
of that subject-matter. The spectator is reminded that an artwork can never exhaust its
subject-matter and is thereby constantly exposed to possibilities of thinking and seeing
other than those that he or she is accustomed to. Self-criticism and review of response
is integral to a dialogical conception of the artwork. A clear strength of visual studies is
that through its demystification of the artwork it both widens the participatory fran-
chise of dialogical interaction with the artwork, and through its own analytical methods
strives towards greater rational inclusivity and a wider consensus of judgemental norms.1
In summary, one of the most powerful reasons for supporting a more inclusive
approach to the visual arts is that it escapes from the subject-based aesthetics of neo-
Kantian thought that tended to privilege individual responses to the artwork. Her-
meneutical aesthetics steers thought about art in another direction, emphasizing
aesthetic experience as a space of dialogical interaction in which priority is given to
the address of the artwork. Hermeneutical aesthetics achieves this by emphasizing
the ontological basis of dialogical interaction. It is this turn to the ontological which
causes problems for the methodological inclusivity of visual studies. The ontologi-
cal basis of hermeneutical aesthetics poses a telling question to the broad aspiration
of visual studies. Can the claim within critical visual discourse that designed objects
and artworks should be treated in the same way be profitably sustained? Has the new
discourse of visual studies overlooked significant differences of ontogenesis in the ob-
jects of its world? This chapter will argue that visual studies has neglected a funda-
mental distinction between the ontogenetic characteristics of the designed object and
the artwork and that this failure not only threatens the variety of study within visual
culture but also disrupts the possibility of radical critique within aesthetic experience.
The implicit issues are weighty. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that visual studies promotes
the ‘ability to become critical viewers’ (cited in Dikovitskaya 2006: 89). Hans-Georg
Gadamer is sanguine about the educative and political significance of teaching and
research in the arts.

We should have no illusions. Bureaucratized teaching and learning systems dominate

the scene, but nevertheless it is everyone’s task to find his free space. The task of our
human life in general is to find free spaces and learn to move therein. In research this
means finding the question, the genuine question. (Misgeld and Nicholson 1992: 59)

This chapter will contend that hermeneutical aesthetics is of strategic importance

for bringing to light what is at stake within the study of visual culture. It offers a way of
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 133

understanding the social application of visualized meaning, of appreciating why subject-

centred theories of the aesthetic cannot appropriately work in the case of what is delim-
ited as visual culture and why critique, reflective space, hermeneutical movement and
the visual are all interlocked in a mutually determining way. At the same time, herme-
neutical aesthetics insists on making an important ontological distinction within visual
discourse between a designed object and an artwork. This does not involve a retreat into
either obscurantist or socially privileged accounts of art. To the contrary, hermeneuti-
cal aesthetics offers an important methodological qualification to modern visual studies
which must be recognized if the latter are to remain true to their aspiration of widening
the critical community within the visual arts. Having established the strategic ambition
of this chapter, let us now turn to the pivotal questions of our debate.

1. Over-rigid conceptual boundaries can hinder fruitful interdisciplinary coopera-

tion. An advantage of deploying philosophy in the realm of the visual arts is its
ability to probe conservative assumptions about the nature of art. On the other
hand, if conceptual borders become too porous, does such elasticity hinder the
formation of identities, weaken the honing of clear distinctions and inhibit the
very process of definition and clarification upon which provocative dialogue
and exchange depend?
2. The development of visual studies over the last twenty years has challenged the
relevance and tractability of Kantian and neo-Kantian aesthetics to contempo-
rary visual culture. Contemporary theorists of visual culture have questioned
the range and extent of art history arguing that the latter offers far too narrow
a conception of what the discipline should include. Why are Porsche designs
excluded from the history of sculptural art? Is not the silver tail fin of a Boeing
727 as aesthetically pleasing as the steely geometry of David Smith’s sculptures?
Why should the Mont Blanc pen, the Olivetti typewriter or the angle-poise
lamp not be treated as art? The tolerant catholicism of visual studies promotes
a ready interchangeability of aesthetic and design perspectives and, plausibly,
since the aesthetic form of motorways, bridges, railway stations and building
gantries celebrates the sheer visuality of both our environment and our exis-
tence in it. Has this new inclusiveness become too loose in conceptual terms?
Can the composition of Turner’s seascapes be negotiated hermeneutically in the
same way as the Tizio angle-poise desk lamp? In Gadamer’s terms, are the two
objects equally historically effective in terms of their transformative educational
and cultural power?

It would surely seem counterintuitive to object to a Turner canvass and an angle-poise

lamp being treated differently but, as we shall see, our argument will take some surpris-
ing turns. There is much within hermeneutic analysis to suggest that a work of Turner
and a designed object can indeed be treated in the same way aesthetically. In terms of
symbolic function, both objects render inwardly visible to aesthetic reflection the cul-
tural horizons that nurture them. This, however, makes our principal question even
more urgent and, indeed, generates a second important issue. Can the Turner painting
134 History and Theoretical Perspectives

and the Tizio lamp actually be treated as visual objects of comparable cultural and edu-
cative value? If not, is there an articulable and defensible distinction between them that
does not fall back on to customary bourgeois characterizations of fine art objects? The
second issue is whether there is a serious misconception within any equalization of the
artwork and the designed object. Does the fact that the angle-poise lamp can be analy-
sed hermenetically in exactly the same way as can a Turner canvass render the lamp an
artwork? There is a tendency in recent cultural theory that reaches back to Nietzsche
which supposes that discourses are power practises: the mode of analytic predetermines
the mode of the analysed. Visual studies has good methodological reasons to dissolve the
distinction between the designed object and the artwork but does this suffice to dissolve
the distinction? The reasons against such dissolution are offered below.
We shall argue that the tolerant inclusiveness of visual studies overlooks a key on-
tological difference concerning the specificity of the designed object and the artwork.
Conflating the two as beings of equal value in a unifying methodological field has two
negative consequences. (1) The equalization ignores a central claim of philosophical
hermeneutics that an artwork is a participatory event and not an object for detached
methodological analysis. Visual studies threatens an injustice to the speculative charge
of the artwork. (2) The methodological equalization obscures what, arguably, is of value
i.e. an understanding of how the designed object and the artwork are complementa-
ries. Understanding the extent to which a designed object is not an artwork and vice
versa does not re-establish arcane exclusionary distinctions between artworks and other
visual phenomena but allows for the articulation of a difference which enriches the vi-
sual world and its philosophical and cultural significance. This will demand, unavoid-
ably, a reflection on the most canonical question in hermeneutical aesthetics: what is
an artwork?
Questioning the range and extent of traditional art history and aesthetics leads to
our central question: ‘Did John the Baptist wear camouflage?’ If visual studies has the
elastic conceptual tolerance claimed for it, it is not absurd to ask whether the arts of
camouflage can be considered as a distinct visual regime as aesthetically potent as the
arts pictorial presentation. The question is intentionally mischievous but philosophical
and intellectual probity require that it be asked, not least to the end of seeking to ar-
ticulate a strategic differentiation between the designed object and the artwork which
if successfully made will enrich an understanding of the visual world. However, let us
first contextualize the methodological issues which govern the framing of our central
question.

The Revolutionary Road

My earlier essay ‘The Hermeneutics of Seeing’ formed part of a collection which under
the guiding eyes of Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell made a notable contribution to
the evolution of what has now become known as the discipline of visual culture. Mar-
garet Dikovitskaya in her book Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural
Turn, a historical ­review of the research field, comments that ‘Heywood’s and Sandywell’s
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 135

book makes a genuine effort to move away from (the) . . . staple feature of the literature
presenting visual ­culture’. It is not a series of negations of traditional art history, soci-
ology and so on. Interpreting Visual Culture is a success because it makes an attempt
to ground the new field by showing the persistent philosophical interest in the visual
throughout history (Dikovitskaya 2006: 29). She argues that ‘the cultural turn brought
to the study of images is a reflection on the complex interrelations between power and
knowledge. Representation began to be studied as a structure and process of ideology
that produced subject positions’ (Dikovitskaya 2006: 28). Thus, the scholarship that re-
jects the primacy of art in relation to other discursive practices and yet focuses on the
sensuous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual can (seemingly) no longer be called art
history. Visual studies, Dikovitskaya argues, questions the role of all images in culture.
It suspends reverence for masterpieces and deals with the analysis of images as the orga-
nizational vehicles of different visual regimes. This, it must be noted, is a distinctly ana-
lytic move: the object of the enquiry is treated as a semiotic element within larger social
functions. The image is no longer an object of taste or discernment but an ideological
product in need of deconstruction. Visual studies necessarily involves a critique of the
humanities though Dikovitskaya too readily judges them as zones of uncritical institu-
tionalized privilege, of elite if not effete views of art and literature. Dikovitskaya claims
that visual studies has not so much replaced art history or aesthetics as supplemented
and problematized them by exposing their axioms and ideological presuppositions.2 In-
stead of creating grand narratives, visual studies is charged with generating situated and
partial accounts of the art historical past in which subjectivity is not hidden and authors
no longer evince a Baumgarten-like disinterest (Dikovitskaya 2006). The educational
importance of this shift is well noted.
An eloquent case for expanding conventional art history into the broader pedagogi-
cal remit of visual studies is put forth by Nicholas Mirzoeff whose work explores the
role of the visual image in fine art, advertising, television, writing and film. Deploying
specific art historical examples, he introduces students to the practices of reading visual
images in the everyday seeking to train students to acquire the ‘ability to become criti-
cal viewers’.

Given that our culture is now so intensely visualised, if students don’t get this ability
from universities then they’re going to regard universities as not providing them with
the tools they need. (cited in Dikovitskaya 2006: 89)

The levelling of the elitist and canonical prejudices of fine art, traditional aesthetics
and art history is in many respects commendable. A certain educational inclusivity is
achieved. Permitting the boundaries of art history a greater porosity allows a wider range
of visual phenomena to become legitimate objects of study. The subject-centred tradi-
tion of aesthetic preference is by-passed allowing images to be analysed not in terms of
their capacity to induce individual responses but with regard to their objective status as
signifying elements within socially constructed visual discourses. Individual powers of
subjective discernment are displaced by a universal instrumentality of analytic method
136 History and Theoretical Perspectives

which locates the effectiveness of a work not in the consciousness of the spectator but in
the cultural structure out of which it operates. However, the logic of such inclusiveness
forces the return of our defining question: ‘Did John the Baptist wear Camouflage?’ Do
the visual attributes of this biblical figure’s iconography have the same pedagogic ­status
as the elements of camouflage? For those who oppose the assimilation of fine art by
­visual studies, the considerations will initially prove disarming.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

‘Camouflage’ is a term which emerged during the First World War and denotes the dis-
guising of military equipment and personnel with painted patterns and patterned cloth-
ing so as to either make them indistinguishable from their surroundings or, as in the use
of visually disruptive patterns, to confuse an opponent as to the size and character of
the deployments under observation. The word derives from the French verb camoufler
meaning to disguise, to deceive or to confuse by using such theatrical effects as blowing
smoke into the eyes of the spectator. Such principles of deception operate similarly in
nature where fauna disguise themselves to hide, hunt and hound. Nevertheless medieval
and renaissance depictions of John the Baptist as a wild man of the desert, naked but for
a sheep skin, have no associations with wolves hunting in sheep’s clothing. His sparse at-
tributes are a prescient symbol of Christian discipleship and the future coming of agnus
dei. Whereas camouflage clothing has the purpose of rendering its wearer either indis-
tinct or less distinct within her surroundings, the function of John the Baptist’s sartorial
wooliness is not to hide but to reveal precisely who he is. The task of one is to dissemble,
the purpose of the other is to announce.
Art is indissociable from the production of appearances. Plato may have fretted over
the ability of art (poetry) to convince us that the objects of its representation are con-
vincingly real but military defenders know that life can depend on the success of such
deceptions. Decoy military installations must be convincing in their deception in order
to be effective. The Luftwaffe once complimented a not-so-successful Allied decoy depot
in North Africa by dropping a wooden bomb on it. The practices of camouflage reveal
something here about the disciplines of visual representation. Both the artist and mili-
tary engineer require the imaginative capacity to mentally construct what they anticipate
the visual expectations of their respective opponents to be. The evolution of camouflage
practices is inseparable from the development of visual technologies deployed by the
opposing observers. ‘Hiders’ must anticipate what, where and how ‘seekers’ look. ‘Hid-
ers’ need to imagine how a disguised object might appear within the parameters of an
observing visual regime.3 Much First World War military equipment was painted in
startling colours and violently angular patterns. When photographed from a distance,
however, the patterns when duplicated in black and white became surprisingly less dis-
tinct. The stark patterns appealed to the modernist sensibilities of such artists as Franz
Marc, Marcel Bain, Paul Nash, Georges Braque. Timothy Newark notes how Roland
Penrose, artist and camoufleur of the Second World War, recounted a conversation be-
tween Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau over camouflage in the Great War.
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 137

‘If they want to make an army invisible at a distance’, said Picasso, ‘they have only to
dress their men as harlequins’. Penrose understood immediately what Picasso meant
by this seemingly ridiculous idea. ‘Harlequin, Cubism and military camouflage had
joined hands,’ Penrose concluded. ‘The point they had in common was the disruption
of their exterior form in a desire to change their too easily recognised identity.’ (New-
ark 2007: 72)

A sign of painterly maturity lies in the skill of anticipating how a work will ‘look’
in the eye of its beholders. Just as painters acquire a practical knowledge of how assem-
blages of pigment and various brush strokes configure themselves as flower petals in the
eye of the beholder from a certain distance, so Frans Marc, the Blaue Reiter painter and
First World War military camoufleur, remarked,

The business has a totally practical purpose . . . to hide artillery emplacements from air-
borne spotters and photography by covering them with tarpaulins painted in roughly
pointillist designs in the manner of bright natural camouflage. The distances one has
to reckon with are enormous—from an average height of 2000 metres—your enemy
aircraft never flies much lower than that . . . I am curious what effect the Kandinskys
will have at 2000 metres. (Newark 2007: 68)

During the Second World War, Roland Penrose brought a painter’s understanding of
surface and texture to the discipline of camouflage.

In order to obtain concealment . . . it would appear at first sight that resemblance in

colour is the most important factor. Actually this is not the case . . . a smooth surface
reflects more light than a rough surface. In consequence, supposing we have a smooth
board and a rough piece of bath towel, both painted with exactly the same colour, the
smooth board will inevitably look light in tone. (Newark 2007: 92)

Penrose understood that it was more important to match the texture of the back-
ground than its colour (Newark 2007: 92). Thus, paradoxically, when seen against con-
trasting backgrounds, many aircraft camouflage patterns actually confirmed the type
and provenance of the aeroplane. Penrose, himself a surrealist artist though less well
known than his partner, the photographer Lee Miller, understood the inverted principle
well. The disruptive pattern painted on his wartime car made it as distinctive and con-
spicuous a vehicle parked on a London street as any Rolls Royce (Newark 2007: 92).
If art works upon what Nietzsche describes as a science of effects, then a grasp of
the arts of camouflage is as central to the achieving of convincing effects in painting as
an understanding of painting is to the ability of camouflage artists to produce effective
deceptions (Nietzsche 1986: 145–6). Considerations from Heidegger’s later aesthetics
make this parallelism even more convincing: part of the function of the artwork for
Heidegger is, indeed, to withhold something from the viewer. Furthermore, from Gad-
amer’s perspective the shock of an artistic revelation is of the same order as the dismay
138 History and Theoretical Perspectives

caused by the revelation that camouflage has successfully deceived us. It is curious that
he actually speaks of aesthetic experience as an instance of becoming undeceived (Gad-
amer 1989: 356). In both instances, belief in our ability to judge what we have actually
seen is seriously challenged. The effects of camouflage and pictorial art offer ethical cau-
tion against the rush to judgement. As Nietzsche remarks, it is not the senses that de-
ceive us: ‘it is what we make of their evidence that introduces the lie into it’ (Nietzsche
1968: 36). There is, in summary, considerable merit to the suggestion that the study of
camouflage and other visual regimes whether film or fashion should be considered as
having equal merit with the study of painting. However, there is a philosophical objec-
tion to this equation and two other related concerns about the philosophical founda-
tions of the methodological inclusiveness of visual studies that demand attention.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

It can be conceded that both the camouflaged surface and the painted canvass with-
hold something from view: the camouflaged surface intends to hide something and the
painted canvass hides, metaphorically speaking, the full totality of its subject-matter.
However, this is where the analogy fails. Whereas in the case of camouflage, what is
hidden is completely inconsistent with what hides it (the self-propelled howitzer is in
no sense comparable to the netted surface that disguises it as part of a hillside), what is
withheld from view by the painted canvass must, when revealed, remain consistent with
the visual logic of that canvas. Otto Dix’s painting Jüdenfriedhof in Randegg (1935) an-
nounces itself superficially as a traditional landscape which would have conformed to
the narrow nationalistic horizons of National Socialist aesthetics but it also utilizes an-
other and not-so-hidden visual code which allows it to be read as a romantic allegory for
rebirth, renewal and stoic German individualism (Löffler 1960: illus. 150). The visual
logic of the hidden code must be consistent with that of the surface code or else the im-
plicit meaning cannot announce itself from within the explicit meaning. This is to the
advantage of the satirical or ironic artist. For the political censor to demonstrate that un-
palatable meanings are ‘within’ the painting would be to concede that the explicit view
of politically acceptable meaning actually contained unacceptable meanings. Ian Hamil-
ton Finlay’s image Arcadia exemplifies the need for a consistent visual logic to bind both
the disclosed and the withheld meaning.
The camouflage pattern on the Panzer in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Arcadia (1973) is
neither to hide the vehicle nor to visually confuse us about its presence: it serves as an
attribute of origin revealing that this war machine also is a child of arcadia, an exile from
a lost or broken order. The leaf pattern displayed on the vehicle is explicitly appropriate
for an engine of war but is also implicitly to be read as a reference to the leaves of arca-
dia’s gardens. Hamilton Finlay’s work relies on the logical compatibility of two visual
regimes, one referring to the military and the other invoking paradise. The work of the
military camoufleur, however, seeks to conceal the logical incompatibility of two visual
regimes. Probing the question ‘Did John the Baptist wear Camouflage?’ may not lead
to a substantive definition of what an artwork is, but it at least enables us to achieve a
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 139

better grasp of the different visual dynamics in the logics of disclosure and withholding
operating in the visual world. In this respect, the disciplines of camouflage and painting
may not be treated in the same way. They clearly do complement and inform one an-
other in ways that support the claim for a greater academic inclusivity of content within
the visual studies but logically they cannot be treated as the same.

Cultural Archetypes
One of the strongest arguments in favour of dissolving the distinction between fine art
and designed objects concerns the subsumption of the different modes of practice under
the general term ‘culture’. Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans-Georg Gadamer are philoso-
phers who defend the view that human culture is constituted by a series of related ­practices
(MacIntyre 1993: ch. 15; Gadamer 1989: 9–19, 81–8; see also Davey 2006: ch. 2).
Practices very loosely defined as ‘ways of doing things’ generate their own historical
­narratives and criteria of excellence. An artistic community like an education commu-
nity establishes through its own activity benchmark levels of what it regards as excellent
performance. The pursuit of excellence is always controversial: it engenders a dynamic
of expectation, criticism and aspiration. A practice will hold up certain ways of perform-
ing a task or producing a work as exemplary. The status of a canonical work is by no
means arbitrarily established. A community of practitioners will develop through trial
and error a sense of its best practice. Thinkers and artists will gravitate to such ‘centres of
learning’ where the values of a practice are regarded as best as applied. As such practices
establish themselves historically, certain of their creations achieve the status of master-
pieces. Works become canonical because they come to be regarded by practitioners as
almost defining the practices that produce them. It would, for example, be almost im-
possible to think of the history of Western drama without reference to Greek tragedy, to
Shakespeare or indeed to Anton Chekov. Practices, like cultures, are self-forming histor-
ically constituted productive processes which understand and judge themselves accord-
ing to their own creations. However, some would argue and with good reason, that there
is a productive instability inherent in the pursuit of excellence. For a work to be judged
as canonical, it has to be seen to fulfil much of what a practice community esteems as
exemplary practice. This suggests that the community already has an ideal sense of a ‘vir-
tuous’ practice. Goethe’s quip that the work of genius is one which hits a target which no
one knew was there does not contradict the point: the target has to have been implicitly
recognized if it was known post factum to have been hit. The canonical work does not to
have be judged ‘ideal’ or perfect in every respect. It may have recognized shortcomings.
Not all of Shakespeare’s plots are convincing, not all of Mozart’s libretti are coherent.
­Excellence is divisive in that good practice within a discipline will be contested and, at
the same time, it will also set a benchmark for future performance. The differential be-
tween ideal and questionable performance drives subsequent performance (Iser 2000:
ch. 6). Each cultural practice will have its own self-generating Bildungsformen. In this
respect, there is indeed little to distinguish between fine art and design history. This is
where the subsumption is indeed at its strongest.
140 History and Theoretical Perspectives

If poetry, philosophy and art have their canonical works, design practices too have
their archetypes. In the ‘Golden Age’ of piston-driven aircraft, the Mitchell ‘Spitfire’
and the North American P51 Mustang became icons of excellence in aerial engineering.
Both had the same Merlin engines and both came to serve as an icon for two nations.
These aircraft did not so much emerge from aeronautical design history as redefined it
until the appearance of the jet engine. Both aircraft became practice archetypes with
technical parameters that subsequent designers found difficult to better. A change of pa-
rameter can, however, prove inspiring for other designers. A military example concerns
the Mauser General Purpose Machine Gun (MG 34) or Spandau, which was built to es-
cape the prohibition of Maxim Guns in post–First World War Germany. It is a weapon
still acceptable to contemporary armies because of its lightness, rate of fire and ease of
barrel maintenance. The small superfluities in the Spandau’s design were removed in the
MG 42, a weapon that went on as the MG 1A3 in Pakistan, the MG 3 in Persia and
the Sarac M53 in Yugoslavia. The MG 34 is the model for Ian Hamilton Finlay’s bronze
Flute (1991) and the many variants of that image.
The emergence of archetypes with design history is where the subsumption argu-
ment concerning design objects and fine art objects is most convincing. The evolution of
archetypal forms in painting and poetry follows a similar developmental logic. Whether
a sonnet form or an engine type, both evolve in response to questions and challenges to
the limitations of their respective idiom. On this basis, the argument in favour of treat-
ing artworks and design works as the same is almost persuasive. Each area of reflection
involves the evolution of practices and dialogical exchange over standards and that evo-
lution is in ontological terms discipline constituting.

What Is That All About?

The case for a less exclusive approach to fine art and design objects can be put if we con-
sider the question of visual language. Why are the sculptural features of a designed ob-
ject such as Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair excluded from the history of sculpture? Why
should the Mont Blanc pen, the Olivetti typewriter or the angle-poise lamp all not be
treated as artworks? Are they not all visual archetypes which have come to define their
genre in exactly the same way as a Schubert sonata or a painting by Egon Schiele have?
Those who reject such an equation might insist that the artwork has a clear language of
convention, expectation, canonical reference and symbolic syntax. But, in his instructive
essay The Language of Things, Deyan Sudjic has cogently argued that the designed ob-
ject is no different from the artwork in this respect.4 It too is very much an articulation
of a language: the object can be read. The language evolves and changes its meaning as
rapidly as any other, ‘it can be manipulated with subtlety and wit or with heavy handed
obviousness’ (Sudjic 2008: 51).

If you question the premise that objects mean anything beyond the utilitarian, just
think for a moment about all the emotional content so far beyond legibility that we
can read into the minute nuances that shape a typeface and give it personality. The fact
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 141

that it is called a face at all is certainly not a coincidence. Type is fully capable of show-
ing the character and personality of the human face. (Sudjic 2008: 37)

There is an interesting asymmetry of conceptual languages here. Kant and Colling-

wood have accustomed us to a principle beloved of many Marxist critics of art, namely,
that art is utterly useless. A Brancusi bronze might serve as a handsome cudgel but in
itself it has no practical value: art may be utilized for secondary ends but it is not a pri-
mary utility. What can be asked of it is what is it about rather than what it is for? This
asymmetry used by many who would preserve a difference between the artwork and the
designed object is not as stark as it seems. One asks for the function of a designed object
certainly but one can also ask of it: ‘What is that all about?’ What do Gucci handbags
or Rolex watches communicate when carried or worn? Like an artwork, they are meant
to be read. They display a clear hermeneutic stratagem: the wearing of such objects re-
veals assumptions about how others will read the wearing of such accessories. The wearer
may regard these items as signs of a luxurious life hoping, perhaps pretentiously, that the
wearing of them will lead onlookers to see the wearer as being of such an opulent world.
The designed object insofar as it has a specific hermeneutic resonance speaks of and to its
world. It embraces both the language of expressive intention and the language of origi-
nating purpose. How far can the equation of designed objects and artworks be taken?
As we argued the desire within much contemporary visual studies to transcend the
exclusivity of traditional approaches to art is in many ways laudable but, philosophically
speaking, can the attempt at greater inclusivity work? Can or should the discipline of
camouflage be treated on the same level as the productive activities which generate an
artwork? The quick answer to this is, ‘Yes, of course’. Camouflage, as other objects of
human artifice, lends itself to aesthetic analysis in exactly the way that L. Campbell Tay-
lor’s painting of a dazzle ship Herculaneum Dock (1918) does. Any product of human
artifice articulates the hermeneutical horizons of meaning from which its meaning and
intelligibility derives. A camouflaged building and a painting by Eric Ravillious of a
camouflaged installation both address and express a world of distinct meaning albeit
a rather anxious one. There are many virtues of reading designed objects aesthetically.
They are as hermeneutically articulate as the paintings of Paul Nash. They offer a huge
amount to learn but the question remains: does the fact that an object can be read aes-
thetically make it art? We shall answer in the negative.
That we are comparing the designed object with the artwork already speaks of a
common sense differentiation. I may relish the opportunity of visiting the Duxford Air
Museum in order to admire the ingenuity of Clarence Johnson’s design for the Lock-
heed Lightning. I do not go to Duxford to view Van Dyck’s astonishing rendition of
lace work. But even here the common sense differentiation is not informative. Are not
both items worthy of equal admiration as instances of real ingenuity and creativity in
overcoming a whole range of technical and visual issues? Do not both objects equally
represent ‘the effort and intelligence that have been brought to bear in their creation’
(Sudjic 2008: 173)? What does it matter that one is an aeroplane and another is a can-
vas? What makes one an artwork and the other not? Is the distinction as indefensible as
142 History and Theoretical Perspectives

many advocates of visual studies claim? This is the point in the argument where defence
is more difficult than attack for to successfully defend the distinction between art and
design, the question of ‘what is an artwork?’ can no longer be avoided.
Were I an essentialist, getting the answer to this right would be a heavy responsibility.
Hermeneutical thought emphasizes that, sometimes, the posing of a question is more
useful for what subsequent reflection on it produces rather than because it achieves what
can only ever be, historically speaking, a tentative answer. In this respect, considering
the artwork along side the designed object is useful as it deploys an Aristotelian tactic
of debating what something is (in this case the artwork) against what it is most likely
not (i.e. the designed object). To proceed with the argument involves the tactic of going
back to some aspects of recent hermeneutic thought and Kantian aesthetics. As Nietz-
sche might have observed, the bricks of one philosophical argument often bear more
weight when reassembled in another. We shall see that though the text of philosophical
hermeneutics is visibly opposed to Kant’s aesthetics in one key respect, it actually serves
to strengthen the contentious notion of disinterestedness.

Use It or Lose It
Jürgen Habermas argues that, ‘Interest in general is the pleasure that we connect with
the idea of the existence of an object or action. Interest aims at existence, because it ex-
presses a relation of the object of interest to our faculty of desire’ (1978: 198). Kant’s ar-
gument concerning disinterestedness suggests that the existence of the object represented
in a painting is inconsequential aesthetically since what matters is the pleasure we take
in the representation per se, that is not as a copy of a real object but as a composition
in its own right (Kant 1978: 62–5). The landscape shown in Brueghel’s painting Hunt-
ers in the Snow does not exist. The painting is not a representation of an actual place but
a visualization of a setting more likely described in a traveller’s tale. Though Brueghel’s
landscape does not indicate a known geographical location, there is another sense in
which what the painting indicates i.e. a mental phenomenon, certainly does exist. The
painting informs the development of the existent visual regime ‘landscape’. Indeed, the
historical evolution of this artistic genre allows us to look at a geographical environment
as if it were a landscape, i.e. something picturesque. Brueghel plays a part in the devel-
opment of this culturally transmitted visual regime which has inscribed itself in our way
of seeing to such an extent that we now talk about the physical environment as if it were
composed as a painting. This historical development is a practical exemplification of
Heidegger’s argument that the artwork brings a world-into-being: it inaugurates a his-
tory, initiates a historically effective way of seeing, so much so that we forget that we are
not looking at actual objects rather than deploying a very distinct ‘way of looking’.
Before we turn back to the question of designed objects, we should note a crucial dis-
tinction between Kant and Gadamer on the ontological consequences of disinterested-
ness. For Kant the destruction of the represented object is of no consequence. Aesthetic
pleasure derives not from the actual object (the original) represented but from the nature
of the representation (copy) itself. The destruction of the representation would have no
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 143

bearing upon the being of the actual object represented: it would remain unaffected by
the disappearance of the painting. However, the outcome of this argument in Gadam-
er’s thinking is tellingly different: the destruction of the artwork has the consequence
of ­diminishing the reality of the artwork’s objective correlative i.e. what it is about, its
subject­-matter. To destroy Brueghel’s painting would be to destroy an element of the
form landscape. It would do violence to the reality (the world of landscape) which that
painting brought into being. That world—the world of landscape—would be dimin-
ished by the loss of the painting through which that world comes into being.
The different ontological consequences of Kant’s and Gadamer’s aesthetics impact on
the differentiation between the designed object and the artwork in the following way.
This point can be negotiated via two related questions: (1) What is the worst insult you
can offer an artwork? (2) What is the worst harm you can do to a designed object?
The answer to the first question is not to attend to the work, to prevent it from work-
ing on one, and to pass it by with a cursory glance. If we take Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s
eventual account of the artwork seriously, its task is to bring something forth. It there-
fore demands that the spectator tarries (verweilen) with and attends to its epiphany. Not
to ‘watch with’ the work is effectively to betray its nature. If, as Heidegger and Gadamer
argue, the task of the artwork is to bring forth a world and set it into play, the artwork
can be ontologically effective only if it is allowed to operate as a window of epiphany
or, in other words, if it is looked at. The being of the artwork and the being of what
it discloses are interdependent: the artwork functions only insofar as it brings forth a
world and insofar as that which is brought forth is invariably larger than the work, its
existence is also partially dependent on that of the work. There is an ontological reci-
procity between the being of a work and what it brings forward such that to harm the
existence of the painting is to do violence to the being of what comes forward. This
clarifies why G­ adamer is so deeply interested in the symbol. The materially constructed
symbol brings forth a world which is not reducible to the nature of its construction and
yet it is made present by that construction. The symbol relies on its materiality for its
manifestation in the world though its nature or content is not describable in terms of
its materiality alone.
The second answer is the reverse of the first and reveals a most telling point. The
worse you can, arguably, do to a designed object is to look at it as if it were an artwork,
that is to look at it and not use it. To look at the designed object as if it were an artwork
instead of using it is to prevent it from exercising the purpose for which it was designed.
Of course, it does the object no good if it is destroyed but the world of purposes that
brought it into being would remain unaffected. This gives rise to a critical distinction.
Quite unlike the artwork, the designed object has to be taken up by and subsumed
within the world that calls it forth. There is a parallel between the ontological charac-
teristics of the sign and the designed object. The being of the road sign is fulfilled in the
execution of its designated task: it must point beyond itself to the anticipated danger
or place of arrival. The sign that drew attention only to itself would be a potential haz-
ard. There is, it would seem, something tragic about a designed object: if it succeeds in
fulfilling its designated task, it must self-negate. Like a tool or piece of equipment, it
144 History and Theoretical Perspectives

must be completely absorbed within the performance of the task it was brought into
being to address. The artwork, however, calls a world into being. It is not called into
existence by a world. The artwork simply cannot be absorbed into a preexistent world
of purposes without contradicting its disclosive nature. In contrast to the self-effacing
nature of good design, artworks are indisputable show-offs wishing to be the centre of
attention all the time. Of course, both the artwork and the designed object can be seen
as dialogical objects. Both forms of object instantiate answers to questions. The designed
object embodies a response to challenging operational difficulties. The artwork too re-
plies to a question raised by a certain content or subject-matter. Indeed, both types of
response can transform our understanding of the question they address. Nevertheless, a
fundamental difference in ontogenesis remains. The world of technical needs and pur-
poses calls the designed object into being and it is that world which subsumes the tool
in the pursuit of its purpose. The artwork, however, does not disappear into the world
that it and it alone brings into being. To revert to a former point: the destruction of the
designed object does not affect the being of the world of purposes that brought it into
being. The destruction of the artwork, however, has a direct impact upon the effective-
ness and influence of the world that it brings into being. The very different ontogenetic
backgrounds of the designed object and the artwork constitute a major objection to the
inclusiveness of visual studies.
There are without doubt many cooking utensils that are a delight to look at and a
pleasure to use, knives with handles that perfectly match the curvature of the palm in
which they are held. Their visual qualities can excite and attract, drawing their user
into the execution of the tasks the equipment is intended to fulfil. However, a kitchen
utensil cannot be so beautiful so as to become a distraction, possibly, a dangerous one.
Of course, the better the design, the more effortless and graceful the performance of
the task. However, like the function of a sign, the designed object fulfils its objective
by disappearing into the task it was intended to fulfil. The road sign which does not
point beyond itself but only to itself would cause chaos on the motorways. Further-
more, unlike the art object which for it to hermeneutically function has to maintain
itself at the centre of the spectator’s gaze, the designed object no matter how aestheti-
cally pleasing it might be has to disappear within the performance of its function.
The exquisite kitchen utensil may indeed be glorious to look at. It may indeed also
be hermeneutically charged in that in the act of looking at it, a whole world of asso-
ciations may come to mind. We may indeed be greatly excited by the transformative
possibilities that are brought to consciousness. Nevertheless, the raison d’être of the
utensil is that it has to be used whilst the raison d’être of the artwork is that it has to be
contemplated. There is, then, something almost religious about the designed utensil:
it has to sacrifice itself entirely to the purposes it addresses. The Leica camera must, in
a certain sense, disappear into its photographs in the same way that a Stradivarius vio-
lin disappears into being played. We do not mean that the camera literally disappears
in spatio-temporal terms. In being used the equipment might be said to fulfil itself by
withdrawing from the focus of attention. The well-designed tool may indeed attract us
to the task it is designed to undertake but to perform the designated task it must not
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 145

distract from that task and withdraw from being an object of aesthetic attention. Ga-
damer makes an analogous observation about writing. Writing, though beautiful, does
not try and be understood or noticed as such. Its role consists in drawing the reader
into a course of thought. It is not an end-in-itself but a means of bringing something
to mind. If a writing style is an obstacle to such an occurrence it is in effect bad writing­
(Gadamer 1989: 394).
In contradistinction to the ontological quality of purposeful disappearance intrinsic
to the exercise of the designed object, an artwork that is self-negating or whose raison
d’être is affirmed in its purposeful disappearance seems a contradiction in terms. Like
Purcell’s song title ‘Music for a While’, the majority of artworks demand that we ‘tarry’
with them. In order for the artwork to operate hermeneutically, it has to command at-
tention. The properties of diversion and distraction are, however, potentially disastrous
for a piece of equipment. Of course an artwork may be used as propaganda but such
a deployment is incidental to its primary raison d’être, which is to work as a bringing
forth—to be an annunciation. The artwork cannot disappear into itself but to rather an-
nounce itself and what it brings forth ever more fully.
J. M. W. Turner’s Fishing Boat with Hucksters Bargaining brings forth an aspect of the
subject-matter ‘seascape’ (1837/38). It is not meant primarily to depict a scene but in
Gadamer’s language to bring an aspect of the sea to the picture. This it does exquisitely
well. The work not only translates into painterly form the heaving liquid power of the
sea but by unsettling the eye it allows the massive welling of the sea to come forth. For
this and other paintings to work, there can be no disappearing into the exterior world.
The work must command attention as a painting and if it works it does so because it
brings forth its world and manages to hold it in place. As we argued above, in the case of
the artwork, the work and its subject-matter are indistinguishable. Destroy the work and
you destroy something of our understanding of seascape. By way of contrast, however,
destroying the tool does not destroy the world of purposes that brought it into being in
the first place. In conclusion, the argument within visual studies for treating art and de-
sign as the same visual studies overlooks what is a crucial ontogenetic difference between
the two types of object.

Hermeneutical Aesthetics and a Kind of Looking

Hermeneutical aesthetics and visual studies share an antipathy towards subject-centred
aesthetics. Both regard the visual object as hermeneutically charged in that it can speak
of and speak to the horizons of meaning which form the circumstances of their being.
Both approaches esteem the artwork and the designed object as a ‘dialogical response’
to questions of content and subject-matter. Here the parallels between these two ways
of seeing cease. Once the ontogenetic differences between artwork and designed object
are recognized, other differences become apparent. To turn a visual item into an object
of visual study is to subordinate it to methodological presuppositions which are quite
different from those which apply to any approach to the object as the focus of a visual
contemplation. In the case of the artwork, the spectator is subject to its address. In
146 History and Theoretical Perspectives

contrast, the designed object if treated as a sign or symptom of visual culture is subject
to the methodological regime of the spectator. The question then arises as to how criti-
cal of reflexive methodology can visual studies can be? Let us first consider Gadamer’s
account of aesthetic contemplation.
Hermeneutical aesthetics appeals to a form of contemplative attentiveness. It regards
the artwork as a space of world-emergence. Gadamer argues,

In the puzzling miracle of mental wakefulness lies the fact that seeing something and
thinking something are a kind of motion, but not the kind that leads from something
to its end. Rather, when someone is looking at something, this is when he or she truly sees
it, and when one is directing one’s thinking at something, this is when one is truly
pondering it. So motion is also a holding oneself in being, and through this motion
of human wakefulness (Wachseins) there blows the whole breath of the life-process, a
process that ever and again allows a new perception of something to open up. (Palmer
2007: 367)

The object of attention for Gadamer is the subject-matter invoked by the work. It
is not a question of the artwork being a neutral object on to which several interpreta-
tions can be projected. To the contrary, the artwork addresses the spectator. Hermeneu-
tical aesthetics presents aesthetic attention as a form of kenosis, the practice of clearing
one’s mind and stilling one’s will in order to become receptive to what comes forth from
within a subject-matter. Clearing the mind is not understood in Cartesian fashion as
an emptying. Following Heidegger, Gadamer is committed to the view that there is no
such thing as pure consciousness or a mind equivalent to a tabula rasa. Consciousness
is always awareness of something and in as much as consciousness is aware of an object
actual or virtual, the latter will always be given within a linguistic and a cultural hori-
zon. Clearing the mind is, then, not a question of emptying it of its contents but of
preparing it to be attentive. It is more a question of ‘clearing the (mental) decks’ for im-
manent action. Everyday issues and immediate projects are suspended so that the mind
can become receptive to what emerges before it. Like certain spiritual practices, aesthetic
contemplation releases the observer from inattentive entanglements in the world not in
order to escape it but rather to achieve a cultural space for developing an enlarged sense
of the subject-matters that shape our cultural being (Wright 1998: 187). Plainly, this
is not a return to Kantian disinterestedness. Becoming open to the movement within a
subject-matter is to give the dialogical initiative to the artwork allowing it to question
the assumptions of the spectator. This is why Gadamer occasionally describes the aes-
thetic impact of a work as a real shock. The procedure is somewhat different with visual
analysis.
Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that visual studies promotes the ‘ability to become critical
viewers’ (cited in Dikovitskaya 2006: 89). This is not in dispute. What remains prob-
lematic is the philosophical structure of methodic visual analysis. If its aim is to relate
the visual object to the social circumstances that produced it or if it endeavours to ac-
count for the construction of a painting by referring to a specific scopic regime, the
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 147

visual is explained by reference to determinants that exist independently of the object

under scrutiny. The visual object is exemplified as an instance of a political ideology or of
a specific social practice. In such cases the object is subjected to a methodological engine
that interprets it according to a designer’s or artist’s intentions, according to archaeo-
logical or genealogical assumptions or with reference to other ideological determinants.
In other words, the object of analysis serves as a vehicle for demonstrating something
beyond itself. Insofar as the visual object is subjected to a method of analysis, it is not
accorded any autonomy of address. It is, in effect, silenced. It is not allowed, therefore,
or cannot force the spectator to review his or her assumptions.
The dynamic which governs the relationship between the visual object and the spec-
tator is quite distinct in the cases of hermeneutical contemplation and visual analysis. In
the case of hermeneutic aesthetic reflection, the spectator is subject to the interrogative
address of the artwork. Where visual studies operates, it is the visual object that is sub-
ject to the interrogation of the spectator. If so, how critical can visual studies be? Recent
protagonists for visual studies celebrate the discipline’s ability to nurture critical social
and cultural responses to visual objects. This is commendable but how reflexive can the
discipline be? If the methodological terms of a visual analysis are never brought into
question by its object, how critical can visual studies be? What is gained if the blindness
attached to subject-centred accounts of aesthetic response is only replaced by the reflex-
ive blindness of culturally based forms of visual analysis?
Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics seeks ‘free spaces’ and the ability to move therein
(Misgeld and Nicholson 1992: 59). There is a real question as to whether method in the
visual studies promotes either. There is no doubt that reductive analyses of artworks and
designed objects can be extremely illuminating. The work of a brilliant visual critic can
transform one’s view of art and literature offering an innovative paradigm of interpreta-
tion. However, having one’s view of the visual changed is not the same as being changed
by the visual object. If different methods generate different views, then, ‘bureaucratized
teaching and learning systems dominate’ (Misgeld and Nicholson 1992: 59). If so, the
hermeneutic practice of attentive looking which allows a space for the artwork and its
subject-matter to come forth is much better suited to challenge that domination. A fur-
ther irony remains.
The emergence of visual studies has been in part inspired by the conviction that fine
art and elite aesthetic attitudes estranged the less educated or socially privileged. To
counter such alienation, critical methods of analysis have sought to deconstruct and de-
mythologize the artwork. Unfortunately, a cure can be as troublesome as the malady. A
potent argument within Truth and Method concerns the thesis that a ‘methodological at-
titude’ entails a form of Cartesian alienation: the cognitive subject is always at a distance
from the object of investigation. The methodological attitude prises the art object out
of its world and treats it as an isolated phenomenon subject to analysis. This approach
effectively silences a work’s address. Analysing the work and its properties in this way
disrupts any dialogical exchange value within the work. The work is effectively treated
as a symptom or expression of cultural and political forces. This subsumption to a world
of analytic purposes fragments the artwork by treating it as an instance or example of
148 History and Theoretical Perspectives

a wider social movement. The capacity of a work to serve as a dialogical partner in the
unfolding of a spectator’s life is lost. Worst of all, the Cartesian model assumes that the
methodological subject is detached from and unaffected by the lived world of meaning
and value. Paradoxically, the very alienation concerning the elite if not remote status of
‘high art’ which the deconstructive and demythologizing methods of critique analysis
were meant to overcome is reinstated at another level. Relating the artwork to a wider
nexus of ideological determinants may place the artwork back into an identifiable world
of social practices but it nevertheless dissolves the dialogical status of the work by remov-
ing the spectator from the very hermeneutical networks of meaning and value capable
of embracing and transforming the spectator’s understanding. Gadamer’s criticisms of
the analytic approach to aesthetic experience have a further disconcerting critical twist.
The methodological attitude tears the artwork out of its existential context and converts
it into an object of consumption.
In Art and Social Theory, Austin Harrington (2004: 178–80) suggests that for Ga-
damer there are three features of art’s existential significance: (1) art enables ‘play’; it
involves spectators in acts of imagination that contribute to its inexhaustible meaning-
fulness, (2) art functions in the manner of a symbol releasing meanings that can never
be captured in their entirety, and (3) art is essentially ‘festive’ in that each perception or
performance of a work creates a community of responsive spectator members who are
drawn into communication. For philosophical hermeneutics, these moments articulate
the temporal structure in which a work is experienced. These, Gadamer suggests, are
qualities characteristic of the way ancient festivals not only occurred in time but defined
it. In their regular sequence, festivals define a community’s calendar. The Venice Bien-
nale or the Berlin Film Festival create occasions not only in which practitioners of a
discipline gather, exchange and confer but also establish the rhythm of their productiv-
ity as they prepare their submissions. It is noteworthy that for Gadamer contemporary
commercialism has a corrosive effect on the communicative time-structuring feature
of aesthetic experience. Harrington observes that commercial culture tends to isolate
members of a cultural practice from one another breaking the regularity and continuity
of socially experienced time into disconnected instants (Harrington 2004). These obser-
vations have a cautionary relevance for the cultural impact of visual studies. They pose
four questions.

1. By silencing the artwork as a dialogical object, does not visual studies ignore a
central claim of philosophical hermeneutics—that the artwork is a participa-
tory event and not an object for detached methodological analysis alone?
2. Though it endeavours to counteract the alienating effects of high art and cul-
ture, does not visual studies create another form of alienation—the artwork is
regarded not as a dialogical agent but as one of many other socially produced
objects?
3. Does treating artworks as symptoms of certain ideological groupings actually
lead to certain works or objects becoming even more fetishisized precisely as ex-
pressions of that lifestyle?
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 149

4. If so, then far from achieving a critique of subject-centred aesthetics (which

hermeneutical aesthetics succeeds in achieving), does not contemporary visual
studies reinstate that perspective by attempting to treat designed objects as art-
works, that is not as dialogical objects which bring forth a world of distinct
meanings but as objects with pleasurable aesthetic features in their own right?

Let us conclude.
When contemplated aesthetically, the designed object can equally be seen as a po-
tent bearer of a framework of meanings and values. Like any object in the visual world
it will belong to a distinct realm of defining structures and purposes. To a certain de-
gree, it will embody that world exactly in the same way as the various cutting edges of
different ploughs exhibit long-established knowledge about soil types and densities. The
designed object can equally transform the practical world whose needs inspired it: The
Douglas Dakota DC-3 designed by Donald Douglas and which entered service in 1935
transformed the world of long-distance civil flying. More recently Braun’s hand-held
calculator has a deck-layout the design of which may now be found in nearly every mo-
bile phone. The range of visual studies has been appropriately extended to include the
social dynamics of visual objects. The enormous relevance of hermeneutical structures
of thought to the understanding of both art and design is manifest and perhaps still
underestimated. The art of ‘reading’ designed objects and more conventional artworks
is much the same. Without doubt, visual studies has become hugely important within
the evolution of critical visual thinking. However, the very hermeneutic characteris-
tics that are sympathetic to the culturally inclusive ambitions of visual studies also give
pause to wonder whether all visual phenomena can be meaningfully treated as art and
if not why not. The vital ontological distinctions which concern the inseparable link
between an artwork and the world it brings forth and the asymmetry of this argument
with the designed object whose tragedy is that it must disappear into the realizations of
the purposes that brought it into being indicate that within visual studies all visual ob-
jects are not and cannot be treated as the same. Because a designed object can be read
as an artwork does not turn it into an artwork. In summary, our principal concerns are
as follows.
If visual studies is understood solely in terms of a methodological analysis and
critique of the logic and social genesis of images, it falls into a double trap. (1) In at-
tempting to overcome the subjective preferences and obscurantist elitism which often
accompany high art objects, the application of analytic rigour threatens to detach the
subject from any cultural involvement in the image. This only succeeds in displacing
one form of cultural alienation with another. (2) Tracing visual images back to the cir-
cumstances of their social production is to be guilty of the genetic fallacy. It is in the
nature of visual and verbal images that their meaning always transcends the circum-
stances of their genesis. The origin of the popular wearing of wrist watches lies for the
most part in the First World War when field officers found the pocket watch too un-
wieldy for battlefield easy use. Wearing a wrist watch, however, does not turn one into
a twentieth-century military imperialist. (3) As a dialogical interlocutor, an artwork
150 History and Theoretical Perspectives

can challenge the viewer’s presuppositions about the subject-matter being contem-
plated, subject the viewer to critique. To treat an artwork solely as an object of visual
study is to silence it and disregard it as a participatory event. Without qualification by
hermeneutic aesthetics, visual studies weakens the speculative charge of artworks, di-
minishes their transformative power and impoverishes the pedagogical and existential
significance of visual education. This might be avoided if the implications of recogniz-
ing the quite different ontogenesis of the artwork on the one hand and the designed
object on the other are recognized, understood and assimilated throughout aesthetic
education. Visual studies would be the richer and more diverse as a consequence of
that recognition.
In conclusion, hermeneneutical aesthetics is openly hostile to the subjectivist doc-
trine of taste informing Kantian aesthetics. In this, it shares common ground with those
who would dissolve the distinction between art and design within the visual arts. How-
ever, hermeneutical aesthetics both reinvents and relocates Kant’s distinction between
the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic. Abjuring the epistemological basis of Kant’s dis-
tinction between the disinterested and the interested, philosophical hermeneutics dif-
ferentiation between (a) disclosive phenomena and (b) phenomena subsumed within
utilitarian frameworks of interpretation nevertheless reestablishes Kant’s nonaesthetic/
aesthetic distinction on the basis of an ontological differentiation between those things
which come into being spontaneously (such as aesthetic Sachen) and those called into
being by an anterior world of purposes (designed objects). It is this difference of onto-
genesis which leads philosophical hermeneutics to insist on the aesthetic/nonaesthetic
(the art and design) distinction but on grounds which are far from Kantian. Further-
more, from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics it is a distinction that is worth
preserving. Collapsing the categories of design and art into one needlessly impoverishes
the experience of the visual world. Such a reduction amounts to either fear or awe of
the status accorded to high art. However, to recognize a fundamental difference of on-
togenesis concerning the artwork and the designed object is neither to rank or evaluate
the difference. Recognizing the difference amounts to what should be recognized: the
rich diversity of objects within the world of the visual. A misguided sense of political
correctness which would see art objects and designed objects as the same should not be
allowed to impoverish visual culture in the way which philosophical hermeneutics sug-
gests that it might.

Notes
1. Jürgen Habermas (1972: 176) refers to this as the knowledge constituitive interest of the
cultural sciences.
2. A dialogical conception of the artwork places critique at the centre of aesthetic experience.
Thinkers such as Habermas, Gadamer and Iser see the humanities disciplines as being consti-
tuted by on-going reflection and critique. It is a fundamental misconception of the practices
occurring within humanities disciplines that leads to the false conception of the humanities
as ‘zones of uncritical institutionalised privilege’.
Hermeneutical Aesthetics 151

3. For an account of how different lens types pick out different aspects of a terrain, see McGrath
(2007).
4. The argument here to be expanded is that the function of language is not just statemental
but revelatory.

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and History: Applied Hermeneutics. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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­University Press.
 Editorial Introduction

Robin Marriner’s chapter explores the complex relationships between visual culture
and modern art. He follows an earlier sociological precedent by approaching contempo-
rary art as a specific ‘artworld’ conceptualized as ‘the objects and network of social and
discursive institutions and practices’. He examines two claims familiar in visual culture
studies: that recent art has been borrowed from and been stimulated by popular or mass
culture, and that popular culture is a threat to contemporary or late-modern art. These
questions have become more pressing and more complex as a result of the different criti-
cal and theoretical approaches that have explored these positions in recent cultural stud-
ies. As an example, Marriner mentions two exhibitions on the subject. While The Forest
of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (1989), which took pains to be ‘informed’, was
criticized for being obscurantist and politically correct, the second High and Low: Mod-
ern Art and Popular Culture (1990), which took a more straightforward line, was widely
attacked for being uninformed by recent theory.
Marriner next discusses the well-known opposition between high and low culture,
particularly in the context of industrialized modernity, articulated theoretically, histori-
cally and politically by critics of both the Right and Left. Theodor Adorno’s view of the
spread of the ‘culture industry’ as both mass entertainment and as a vehicle for the ‘dom-
inant ideology’ underwriting late capitalism has been particularly influential. However,
Marriner argues that recent developments in both theories of visual culture and in the
artworld have forced us to change this predominantly negative view of the media and
cultural representations.
The rise of semiotics and structuralist ‘Theory’ in the 1970s, initially in relation
to film, provided a basis for criticism of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ and key tenets of for-
malist modernism. This new critical climate has been reflected and mediated in a va-
riety of ways in the practice and production of contemporary art from the 1980s to
the present; Marriner in particular mentions the work of David Salle, Sigmar Polke,
156 Art and Visuality

Gerhardt Richter, Richard Deacon and Jeff Koons. Taking Robert Longo as an example
of a pervasive ‘postmodern’ outlook in art practice, he discusses the widespread use of
self-­conscious ‘appropriations’ or reflexive borrowings from popular culture, which to
some degree call into question the difference between high and low art.
For both supporters and critics of the new postmodern sensibility, Andy Warhol is
a crucial figure, with apologists arguing that his photographic silk-screen images of ce-
lebrities and sensational newspaper images enable the viewer to explicitly confront an
image as image, and thus reflect upon the potency of images in an increasingly visually
mediated culture. Using Christian Metz’s semiotics of the photographic image, Marri-
ner analyses a work by Robert Frank, showing how the manipulation of various ‘codes’
enables its real subject matter to be the phenomenon of the ‘fan’. Frank relies upon the
interpretive work of the viewer, prompted by a foregrounding of photographic conven-
tions, to create this specific aesthetic meaning.
This question of the conditions favouring an active spectator has been widespread in
visual culture studies. While accepting the judgement that much of the popular culture
is complicit with or complementary to the social and political needs of capitalism, visual
studies has learned to be critical of the suggestion that the spectator is simply duped,
drawing attention to the range of different ‘readings’ across different groups and ‘subject
positions’. The works of Koons and Haim Steinbach are seen as dissolving any simple
distinction between objects, particularly between consumer goods and aesthetic signs.
Moreover, these artists continue to claim that what they are presenting are works of ‘art’.
Marriner interprets Roland Barthes’s influential notion of the ‘death of the author’
as a reminder to artists that they are producers rather than creators, and that they nec-
essarily drawn upon the work of other artworld members, including active, competent
viewers, to bring their work into being.
In conclusion, Marriner argues that many of the ideas and theories embraced by
visual culture studies have succeeded in unseating a Greenbergian formalist outlook
predominant through the 1950s and 1960s. For art practice, the result has not been a
new critical or philosophical consensus, but a range of responses from anxiety and un-
certainty on the one hand to energetic pluralism on the other. However, there is today
widespread scepticism about any aspiration to purity, diversity aplenty, and a new inter-
est in relationality, which finds theoretical expression in the work of Nicolas Bourriaud.
While finding these new ‘demotic’ and critical impulses to be unsettling and produc-
tive Marriner concludes by rejecting simplistic claims to ‘radicalism’ and ‘critique’ once
made by and on behalf of the avant-garde. Popular media and demotic visual culture
remain a tremendous force for contention and change in the modern world.
The concept of visuality is manifestly a fundamental idea for visual studies. Donald
Preziosi is concerned to explain not only its meaning, but also what it reveals about
the development of the study of visual culture, and in particular what he discerns as its
‘current impasse’. While being an occasion to reflect on his own intellectual odyssey, his
chapter situates the idea of visuality as a separate mode of knowing in the context of
modernism, art history and museology. More specifically, Preziosi poses the question,
Who benefits from the currency of the idea of visuality?
Editorial Introduction 157

Preziosi is preoccupied by the idea that art history, visual studies and museums must
present their objects within contexts or scenes of interpretation. Inevitably, this creates a
tension between the material and textual devices of presentation and the question of the
inherent legibility or meaning of these artefacts. This ‘fabrication’ or ‘staging’ of knowl-
edge is always ethical and political, generating questions about the wider social and his-
torical context to which it belongs. For Preziosi, the artifices of art history, visual studies
and museums ‘render their own legibilities moot and problematic’.
Lighting on the simile of the pantograph, a device for magnifying drawings or con-
veying electrical power, Preziosi suggests that the way in which artefacts are presented in
museums is meant to transport the viewer and enhance the object. He wonders how far
this goes, whether it lends the mute object an aura of agency or an empowering voice?
Does it extend to a relationship with the artist, mediated by the work, through which
both the artist and spectator live more fully in the spirit, or is this a merging with the
object, a diminishing idolatry?
Tendencies to iconophilia on the one hand and iconoclasm on the other are intrinsic
to Western philosophical and religious thought. This is the problem not so much of in-
terpretation but of the eventual self-consciousness of the artifice on which interpretation
depends. Iconophilia aims to palliate its anxiety by forgetting itself, by fusing with the
object, while iconoclasm seeks release by destroying the object and hence its conscious-
ness of artifice. Yet Preziosi insists that maintaining the difference, and so experiencing
an emotional tension, between the idea and object, the immaterial and the material,
form and content, is itself problematic, or perhaps creatively ambiguous. Refraining
from either fusion or destruction enables the viewer to prolong a condition that may,
after all, be a kind of narcissism; the viewer only finds in the work the meaning that in-
terpretation places there. This seems to be one of the insoluble problems with which art
and the modern idea of the self confront us, and which Preziosi believes the disciplines
of art history, philosophy, sociology and visual studies are systematically engineered to
evade. Disciplinarity risks eliding ‘difference and heterogeneity’ in the name of knowl-
edge and control.
Making this point in another way, Preziosi suggests that there is an ‘irresolvable am-
bivalence’ about the constitutive powers of the self, which extend to self-constitution,
and its relationship to objects, in particular its sustaining life-world. Proliferation of ir-
reconcilable theories is a sign not of a commitment to overcome the problem, but rather
of a desire for the power its aporias sustain. That is if ‘aesthetic significance’ is a ghostly
‘residue’ lingering in artefacts of a certain kind once superstitious, instrumental, com-
mercial or everyday purposes have been removed, the collection and display of such ob-
jects in museums can be represented as their liberation, an act of preservation that may
also be appropriated by powerful commercial interests and state powers.
Preziosi insists that the concept of visuality in art history, art theory and visual cul-
ture studies is dogged by similar dilemmas. For example the unending conflict between
formal and contextual properties serves the ends of political expediency by ensuring
that there is no alternative to ‘overwriting’ the object, giving it ‘voice’, making it ‘leg-
ible’. The alternative, for Preziosi, is a ‘multi-sensorial approach to cultural behavior’ or
158 Art and Visuality

‘artisinal anthropology’, which requires a difficult recognition of the multimodal prac-

tices of doing and knowing in everyday life. Museums, like disciplines, art and language
are both the means to confront artifice and ‘dangerous’ ways of evading it.
The problematic topic of the preservation and presentation of categories of ‘art
objects’ is also critical to Ian Heywood’s chapter. He is centrally concerned with the
relationship between visual art practice and the ways in which visual art has been repre-
sented by theories that have become important to influential versions of visual culture
studies, in particular those shaped by the outlook of cultural studies. Taking up the ex-
ample of Cubism and Cubist collage, he argues that Cubist collage need not be seen as a
damaging auto-critique of painting in the name of popular visual culture but might be
more usefully viewed as a risky, often ambiguous but ultimately successful reinvigora-
tion of painting practice.
Cubism’s historical connection to France’s emerging visual culture has been widely
discussed, but its formal and semantic complexities and puzzles make this relationship
difficult, if not impossible, to decipher. Yet the drive of Pablo Picasso and George Braque
to represent modern, everyday urban life in a modern way is unmistakable. No account
of Cubism can evade this social-historical-aesthetic problem.
Heywood suggests that what makes visual art important in visual culture studies is
not just its sociological or historical importance, but the kind of thinking that goes on
within it and which it makes apparent.
Cubism is often presented in terms of a response to or symptom of crisis, specifically
a crisis in French painting at the end of the nineteenth century. A view of one such cri-
sis, made popular within visual culture studies (although usually applied to the 1960s
onset of pop art or postmodernism a decade or so later), suggests a collapse of formalist
high art into a newly visual or ‘aesthetic’ popular culture. It has been accompanied by a
socio-political critique of all high art on the grounds of its supposed complicity with an
unequal distribution of ‘cultural capital’ underpinning iniquities in the distribution of
economic and political power. These and related arguments have contributed to a prob-
lematic climate of practice for visual art, aspects of which Heywood examines through
the work and opinions of the leading German artist Gerhard Richter. Richter seems to
accept an unavoidable, irremediable ‘inadequacy’ of available means and methods, and
hence a kind of debility at the core of contemporary art practices.
However, there have been recent revivals of interest in both the object and the aes-
thetic, suggesting to some the possibility of a more positive outlook on both the artwork
and art practice. As an example, Heywood reviews remarks by Keith Moxey, proposing
a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic’ turn, views that encourage a fresh look at Cubism and its relation-
ship with the emerging realms of quotidian visual culture.
Heywood identifies three practical terms necessary for an adequate discussion of
Cubism: the object characteristics of the work, the picture plane and the surface. Using
the example of Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), he tries to show how Cubist
collage engages in new ways with each of these features, as well as with puns, word play
and jokes. He examines the tendency of the quasi-linguistic interpretations of culture
to result in a judgement, that the heightened self-consciousness about the devices and
methods of art displayed in Cubist work is tantamount to irony about the possibilities
Editorial Introduction 159

of painting or visual art as such. In the work of Braque and Picasso at this time there is
certainly a rejection of many aspects of traditional art and the vigorous testing of oth-
ers, but the intense scrutiny of the particularities of everyday visual experience does
not suggest the detachment and abstraction implied by the linguistic abstractions of
poststructuralism.
While T. J. Clark judges Cubism a tragic failure, it was, nevertheless, enormously in-
fluential in understanding something important and pervasive about the cultural possibil-
ities of capitalist modernity. Its obsession with the means of devices of representation—a
structural feature of its distinctively and radically modern form of artistic reflexivity—
prevents it from achieving its ultimate end, the truthful representation of the experience
of modern life. Its very modernity frustrates its desire to represent modern life.
Heywood argues that what Clark misses in his critique is the ghostly doubling of
experience in modernity. Cubist collage needs to be understood in terms of a tension
between the drive to represent modern experience faithfully, which involved coming to
grips with its sensory presence and in particular its look, and a commitment to reveal
and explore the consequences of acute self-consciousness of the artifice involved, the ar-
tistic modernity of its way of seeing. As Poggi suggests, this is pushed to the point where
the play of devices and signs seems almost an end in itself, promoting imagination over
recognition.
This can be interpreted as a response to a wider anxiety that pervades modern experi-
ence about what to believe, how to act and who to be, an instability in modern culture
sometimes framed as the outcome of a tension between the ideal of spontaneity and ef-
fective freedom on the one hand and on the other, the remorseless objectification of life,
specifically its transformation through technical discourses and methods. That is, this
feature of Cubism reflects the ways in which modernity raises difficulties with knowing,
ethical behaviour and cultural value, due not to deficient self-consciousness about out-
looks and methods of painting practice and their typical results, but to a grasp of their
constitutive power and the consequent uncertainty about the grounds or reasons for
choosing one kind of approach over another.
A similar problem dogs ordinary life and reflection outside the rarefied cultural labo-
ratory of avant-garde art. Feelings of not living fully or authentically, problems of iden-
tity and anomie, spring not from a lack of rules, prescriptions, roles or techniques of
living and acting but from their prevalence and necessity. Adorno and Horkheimer sug-
gest that capitalist modernity exacerbates the problem by requiring the elimination of
personal history and connectivity as a condition of the individual’s market value. As has
been often observed, the emerging visual culture of modern France was the outcome
of relentless objectifying and commodifying forces, weakening the boundary between
art and life. This did not, however, of itself entail a negation of art by popular culture,
but rather enabled artists like Braque, Picasso and others to both employ and confront
urban experience in broader, more radical ways.
These factors suggest a bifurcation of experience in everyday life, two ways of expe-
riencing being a subject of modernity: on the one side what we might call spontaneous
or singular life, its vitality, locality, affectivity and receptivity, and on the other con-
structed life, consciousness of the abstraction, power and determining character of ways
160 Art and Visuality

of enacting spontaneity. Cubism’s will-to-representation and its ferociously inventive

play with the means and methods of painting do not so much ‘fail’ as detect and replay
fundamental tensions within modern experience.
Like Heywood, Simon Bainbridge is concerned to recover an even earlier moment
of modern visual experience, one that marked the very beginning of a modern ‘romantic’
conception of seeing and transformative visual experience. Bainbridge draws attention
to the intensely visual, pictorial descriptions of a natural, albeit cultivated, landscape at
the heart of English Romantic literature and in the origins of what we have subsequently
come to see as a certain, important kind of tourist experience.
In triangulating new forms of seeing, new practices with regard to the natural en-
vironment (walking, personal exploration and so on), and the emergence of romantic-
­literary language he examines the first phase of a major cultural revolution with regard to
how subjects envisage and appropriate the natural landscape, a change that still under-
writes the world of mass tourism and what John Urry has called the tourist gaze.
More specifically, he explores and advances recent research in the development of
this aspect of visual culture, concentrating on the ‘envisioning of landscape and the re-
lationship between viewing subjects and the world around them’. Here the ‘visionary’
writings of the English Romantics prove to be of seminal importance. The poet William
Wordsworth is explicit about the delight, the ‘substantial pleasure’, which comes from
elevated viewing of the mountains and valleys of the English Lakes. The pleasure of this
seeing comes from both the beauty of the scene but also from a ‘fuller and truer under-
standing’. Visual motivation, the desire to access a view or prospect, would also become
critically important in the early history of mountaineering (and, in Britain, with hiking
and fell or hill walking), one that made worthwhile the physical effort involved in ‘ac-
cessing’ monumental natural sights. This paradigm shift towards the natural landscape
and its popularization was very rapid, clearly discernable in the 1760s, but already well
established in tourist literature by the 1830s.
The visual culture of early mountaineering is bound up with two concepts of
eighteenth-century aesthetics: the sublime and the picturesque. The idea of the sub-
lime, elaborated by the so-called pseudo-Longinus, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke,
Immanuel Kant and others, links a certain type of emotional excitement, sometimes
verging on fear, to natural landscape features that exhibit ‘vastness, obscurity and
infinity’. An opportunity to view such ‘terrors’ from a position of safety converted
anxiety into stimulation and pleasure. Here the calm ‘aesthetic’ of neo-classicism was
effectively displaced by the ‘wild aesthetic’ of Romantic experience.
The picturesque, introduced into aesthetic discourse in the eighteenth century, re-
ferred explicitly to a comparison between views of landscape and paintings, particularly
those of Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. It originally aspired to differentiate a kind
of ‘rough’ or ‘rugged’ beauty, an objective correlate that perfectly fitted the landscape of
unexplored mountains and wilderness. In many senses these Romantic reformulations
of ‘the natural’ in terms of the sublime and the picturesque actively created the modern
concept of wilderness. The texts of the Romantic celebrants of wild nature in effect con-
stituted what we now understand as wilderness experience.
Editorial Introduction 161

Bainbridge discusses early guides and contemporary accounts of ascents to popular

English, Welsh and Scottish peaks, and the rapid growth of a tourist infrastructure in-
spired by this literature. Observers vividly reported disorientation, astonishment and
delight at the views disclosed by upward movement through the mountain landscape
as they ascended towards the summit. What was seen from the summit was often de-
scribed as exceptional, even incomparable, to the extent of causing physical symptoms
like vertigo and giddiness.
One way of coming to terms with—and to some extent, domesticating—this novel,
disorienting experience was by linking it to the idea of maps and mapping. Again Bain-
bridge breaks new ground in reminding his readers that the modern vogue for maps as
both orientational devices and aesthetic objects is a primary visual phenomenon. To
look down from a high peak was similar to occupying the imaginary viewing position
of the cartographer, and this suggestion links naturally to an aspiration to recognize and
even name other peaks and features, leading to a demand that such features be given
unique, identifying names should they not posses them already. The ‘re-seeing’ and ‘re-
naming’ of the environment are correlative features of these cultural practices. Interest in
topographical panoramas is widespread by the nineteenth century, and is an important
feature of visual representations of summit views even today.
Bainbridge discusses various ways in which the excitement of vertiginous views could
be heightened by approaching the edges of precipices, but also by atmospheric con-
ditions, in particular the dynamic play of sunlight and clouds, sometimes comparing
them not to the familiar example of painting but to theatrical effects and an emerging
­nineteenth-century technology of projection shows and visual ‘spectacles’.
In conclusion, Bainbridge suggests that the desire for a particular kind or intensi-
fication of visual experience was central to the early development of mountaineering,
mountain literature and tourism. John Keats’s description of an ascent of Ben Nevis
brings out the possibility of a new or at least unfamiliar way of looking, which displaces
the need for naming features and fixing positions, relishing the dissolution of the fixed
and known into fleeting, mutable impressions and unexpected changes of scale.
The discovery of wilderness, the ascent of mountain peaks and the exploration of
hitherto ‘unknown’ domains offered to the emerging visual culture of modernity not
simply new things to see, prospects that defied the capacities of prosaic description, but
new ways of seeing and being.
The theme of visual transformation as a medium of new ways of seeing and being
is continued in Martin Irvine’s chapter on contemporary street culture. Martin Irvine
succinctly describes his subject ‘street art’ as:

a paradigm of hybridity in global visual culture, a post-postmodern genre being de-

fined more by real-time practice than by any sense of unified theory, movement or
message . . . a form at once local and global, post-photographic, post-Internet and
post-medium, intentionally ephemeral but now documented almost obsessively with
digital photography for the Web, constantly appropriating and remixing imagery,
styles and techniques from all possible sources.
162 Art and Visuality

Street art is an instance of an ambivalent visual space, straddling the worlds of ev-
eryday urban life and the commercial art world. In recent years street art has become a
familiar part of the artworld, appearing in art events, exhibitions, catalogues and collec-
tions, and enjoying extensive media coverage. This phenomenon raises for visual culture
studies questions about globalized visual art, creative uses of remix and hybridization
and the function of public urban spaces in developing communities of practice and
counterpractice.
Irvine emphasizes that street artists have from the first used the city not only as a can-
vas but also as a collaborator, an active and changing source of codes, topics and creative
opportunities. It also rematerializes, rehistoricizes and resocializes an increasingly per-
vasive disembodied, transmedia visual environment, and often deliberately contests the
corporate and government monopoly on visual events within the urban environments.
The space with which it is concerned and seeks to reclaim, making a claim to ‘place’, is
urban space as lived out in the visceral movements and mobile activities of the people
who use them, forging a public aesthetic of reappearance and dematerialization.
Irvine notes the increasing sophistication and prominence of street artists since 2000,
with many moving from underground graffiti to commissioned public murals and ex-
hibitions. He notes an extension of the logic of Pop art, a move out of the studio and
gallery to convert the urban environment into a means and scene of art production,
for some continuous with Situationist techniques of ‘wandering’, repetition, dialogue
and disruptive deviation in highly controlled visual regimes of regulated, commoditized
space.
For Irvine, contemporary street art is a product of the ‘network society’ and the
‘global’ or ‘postmodern’ city. That is there is an oscillation between the material city of
places and the immaterial, fragmented city of ‘flows’, particularly the digital imagery of
the Web. While they challenge the homogenous virtual space of the postmodern city,
many street artists use the Web to distribute and achieve a more permanent visibility.
The synamic interaction between the traditional ‘immediacy’ of street graffiti and the
relative permanence of Web-mediated art and artworld installations becomes an impor-
tant site of future research and investigation.
Street art is necessarily engaged with walls and vertical surfaces generally, which are
often prominent and valuable in the modern city, particularly for advertising and com-
mercial display. For the artworld, the typically internal white wall of the gallery has
been important, even for art movements that wanted to challenge the commodity form
and the ‘white cube’. For street art, the exterior wall both narrows or eliminates the gap
between art and life and enables the conversation about the work to occur outside the
confines of the gallery.
Irvine outlines some precedents for the concerns and methods of current street artists
in the history of avant-garde visual art, but suggests a reversal of interest; not a ‘reduc-
tion’ of painting to basic or nonart gestures, street murals exhibited unrestrained mix-
tures of codes and styles already present within the city’s visual environment. However,
for many artists, some of them known for their ‘street’ work, the old distinctions be-
tween inside and outside, wall and canvas, no longer apply.
Editorial Introduction 163

Mentioning Michel de Certeau’s emphasis on the creative borrowing, reuse or rewrit-

ing characteristic of everyday life, and at odds with ideas of simple consumption, Irvine
argues that street art ‘lives at the read-write intersection of the city as geo-political terri-
tory and the global city of bits’. Street art both constitutes and exemplifies a new form of
‘remix culture’, a phenomenon that other analysts of new technologies and visual media
have called ‘re-mediated culture’.
Street art contests two ‘regimes of visibility’: that of government and legally autho-
rized display (usually commercial) on one side and of the artworld on the other. Its
‘semiocracy’ works against advertising for example by asserting the possibility of subjects
other than the consumers projected by advertisers, and ‘scrambling’ or ‘jamming’ the
messages implicit in designed and managed urban space. It is in these oppositions that
something like a postmodern politics of street aesthetics might be located.
Irvine concludes by suggesting that the term ‘street art’ may have become redundant,
simply a ‘short-hand term for multiple ways of doing art in dialogue with a city in a con-
tinuity of practice that spans street, studio, gallery, museum and the Internet’. As a po-
lemical term, however, it remains useful to indicate a group of concerns and approaches
to new forms of visual practice and experience. Street art seeks to ‘answer back’, to reas-
sert demotic presence in the controlled, dematerialized visuality of the city, to remate-
rialize and resocialize urban public spaces. It contests the orders imposed by both legal
display and artworld institutions, demonstrating that art can appear in nonart public
spaces. It also contests an impasse in postmodern art and art theory, the continual rein-
stitutionalization of cultural transgression and its ‘consensual disunity’. We might also
underline the thought that street art and self-conscious urban graffiti are the first prod-
ucts of a generation of creative individuals fully at home with the Internet and digital
technology, and as such a model for post-Internet practices of remix and hybridization.
Irvine concludes that street artists have come to terms with the idea of culture—and
especially visual culture—already being hybrid, impure and dialogical, and is working
with this insight more successfully than much gallery- and museum-based art. In this
context he notes the importance of a recent case brought against a prominent street art-
ist for copyright infringement, the significance of which is the difficulties faced by le-
gally sanctioned regimes of visibility in coming to terms with the realities of postmodern
and post-postmodern global culture.
 6

Visual Culture and

Contemporary Art:
Reframing the Picture,
Recasting the Object?
Robin Marriner

The phrase ‘visual culture’ has, at least within the context of contemporary art culture,
been understood to have a double aspect. On the one hand it has been perceived as re-
ferring to a hybrid or multi- and inter-disciplinary intellectual field that has emerged in
the last twenty years or so which has as its focus of study the objects, practices and insti-
tutions of those aspects of culture which are considered primarily visual.1 That is, a field
that takes as its object of study cultural phenomena, which would include contemporary
fine art itself, and aspires to theorize how such cultural phenomena mean.
On the other hand visual culture is taken not to designate the intellectual field but
rather that which is claimed to be the object of the field’s study. Within this meaning art
culture is itself a subclass of the phenomena that is constitutive of visual culture, along
with for example advertising, television, cinema, photography, fashion, the Internet and
so forth, but in much art world writing visual culture is used as a shorthand to reference
those visual phenomena other than art itself. Visual culture is taken as synonymous with
‘popular culture’ or ‘mass culture’ or ‘nonart culture’ and what is usually under discus-
sion is the relations between the two.
In this chapter ‘art culture’ or ‘contemporary art’ as in the art world itself is being
used not to reference all artworks being made or forms of artistic production being
presently or recently engaged but rather that fraction which, in virtue of its preoccu-
pations and values locates itself or is locatable in relation to (1) notions of the history
of Modern Art as constructed in innumerable academic texts, as locatable in relation
to (2) ‘already’ significant modern artworks (as embodied/celebrated in e.g. those art
historical texts, and the collections of museums of modern and contemporary art), in
relation to (3) the kind of work and critical debates that are presented in contemporary
and recent art journals such as for example Artforum, Artscribe International, Frieze, Art
in America, October, Parkett, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Art Monthly and in relation to
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 165

(4) works shown in the network of dealers’ galleries of international standing in New
York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, London and so forth, or in the international art fairs
that they now attend. That is by contemporary art what is being referenced are the ob-
jects and network of social and discursive institutions and practices which in conjunc-
tion are productive of present artworks and art culture, constitutive of ‘the artworld’
(see Bourdieu 1993: 78 ).
In what follows it will be suggested that for most of the twentieth century the rela-
tions between art and visual culture (i.e. as understood as mass or popular culture) have
within the art world been understood essentially in terms of two narratives: one, that
art feeds upon and is reinvigorated by popular culture, two, that popular/mass culture
and art culture are antagonistic and a threat to each other. The latter to the former by
way of critique or exposure of the former’s ideology, the former to the latter by way of
recuperation and erasure. Both of these narratives carry certain epistemological alle-
giances or assumptions and values within them, epistemological allegiances and values
that are alignable with the differing versions of the model through which during this
period culture has been widely pictured and understood, namely modernism (Jameson
1984). What complicates the task of mapping the relations between contemporary art
and visual culture now is that in the latter part of the twentieth century, in what in a
stricter sense might be thought of as the contemporary, is that the above perceptions
of the relations have been interrogated and problematized across several different areas
of theorizing and disciplines (e.g. philosophy, film and photographic theory, sociol-
ogy, cultural studies, feminist theory), disciplines which have been brought together
to form visual culture as an intellectual field. At the same time many of the allegiances
and (epistemological) assumptions of modernism that have underpinned art and critical
practice in the art world in the twentieth century have themselves come under scrutiny
and their persuasiveness challenged by drawing from the same sources: for example as
will be explored below, the idea of the autonomy of artworks, of how the production of
their meaning is to be understood, and of how they and how mass or popular culture
are consumed and so forth.
What is being suggested here is that what makes the mapping of the relations be-
tween contemporary art and visual culture particularly complicated is that though the
relations between visual culture (mass culture/popular culture) and art culture have been
contentious and debated from early within modernism, from way before the time the
term’ visual culture’ became well circulated, in the latter part of the twentieth century
the grounds of those debates have been challenged in such a way that for some people
at least their terms have been reconfigured: the ontological nature and conditions of
meaning of for example pictures, paintings, sculptures have been retheorized (as part
of debates about modernism and postmodernism), not least by those disciplines that
have come to be designated as making up the intellectual field of visual culture. It will
be argued below that the disciplines that make up this intellectual field have had real ef-
fects on the territory—both ‘nonart culture’ and ‘art culture’—that is the object of their
analysis and theorization, in the case of the art culture to the degree that our idea of pic-
tures has been reframed and of sculpture recast. Additional to the complexity this creates
166 Art and Visuality

any mapping offered is inevitably going to be viewed as contentious since the relations
under consideration here have been and are still themselves sites of contention within
contemporary art culture itself.

Reinvigoration
Despite the disclaimers to the contrary within the rigorously articulated formalism of the
1960s and 1970s (e.g. Fried 1965: 7) it is evident that art is a social phenomenon and as
was said above, has had relations to nonart culture even before the term ‘visual culture’
was coined to so designate it. From the representation in late-nineteenth-century paint-
ing of aspects of popular culture, e.g. by Seurat and Manet, and the physical inclusion
of elements of it by Picasso and Braque in their cubists ‘papiers colles’ of 1911/12 as a
means to signal ‘modernity’, through much work of the twentieth century (for example
most conspicuously but far from exclusively, Pop) there are many instances of art culture
drawing from popular culture for its subject of representation, its materials and processes
and its aesthetics. A narrative of the ‘key exchanges through which artists have expanded
the languages of art by taking up styles and forms found outside the usual precincts of
the museum’ was fairly comprehensibly, though not unproblematically, presented in the
1990 exhibition at MOMA New York entitled ‘High and Low: Modern Art and Popu-
lar Culture’. Through a series of divisions used to categorize the popular, words, graffiti,
caricature, comics, advertising, the exhibition clustered the art in terms of its perceived
beholdenness to each of the categories. But as the title of Roberta Smith’s review of the
exhibition in the New York Times suggested, ‘High and Low Culture Meet on a One-Way
Street’ (1990) the organization of the show acknowledged nothing of the purported in-
terchange between art and the popular nor other than a very traditional notion of the
way in which the popular entered into art. Not unconnectedly and more profoundly
Smith and others, e.g. Paoletti (1990) critiqued the show for its lack of any acknowledge-
ment of the theory or (art) practice of the prior decade that had interrogated and in some
cases rejected the validity of the grounds for the very hierarchy on which the exhibition
had been premised and through its omissions seemed to be sustaining. In effect what was
omitted and ignored, the theorizing of meaning offered by structuralist and poststructur-
alist philosophers, the challenge to the art world’s perception of consumption presented
by the analysis of consumption offered by cultural studies, the theorizing of representa-
tion with reference to film and photography drawing from semiotics, and the theorizing
of notions of selfhood and identity developed by feminism and so forth, all of which had
gained a degree of currency and circulation in the more general culture by the late 1980s
as well as with emerging artists, was the very material which by 1990 was being drawn
together to constitute the field of visual culture itself. Perhaps it is here worth noting, as
signalling the complexity of the terrain for which a map is being sought, that in the year
previous the exhibition ‘The Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation’ at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which drew heavily on the art and theoreti-
cal material that High and Low ignored, was itself criticized for doing just that: being too
theoretically driven and politically correct (see e.g. Gilbert-Rolfe (1989) 1996).
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 167

Threat and Antagonism

The other major and recurrent narrative within contemporary art culture in relation to
visual culture (popular or mass culture) is the one of threat and antagonism. Originating
in a range of nineteenth-century responses to the development of industrial capitalism
and concerns about the quality of life, (for example Mathew Arnold, John Ruskin, Karl
Marx) but in its contemporary formation more dependent on Marx and later Marx-
ist theoreticians’ development, for example on the early ‘marxist/trotskyist’ writings of
Greenberg ((1939) 1961, (1940) 1985), on the Frankfurt School and in particular and
recurrently Adorno and Horkheimer ((1944) 1969), Adorno ((1970) 1984) and in the
late 1970s on Althusser (1971), the art world has sustained a view of itself and its ob-
jects as transcending social determination and in opposition to the ideologically perme-
ated and socially ‘complicit’ objects of mass (commercial) popular culture. With varying
degrees of complexity and supportive argumentation Greenberg and Frankfurt School
thinkers (particularly, Adorno and Horkheimer ((1944) 1969) and Marcuse (1979))
and those who would claim them as influences (e.g. Fuller (1980), Gablik (1981, 1984),
Kuspit (1988, 1993), the writers of the journal October (Foster et al. 2004) have pro-
pounded the thesis that kitsch (all of culture excepting high culture for Greenberg) or
mass culture or commodity culture is essentially ersatz or inauthentic and within capi-
talism is used to orchestrate and choreograph our desires and pleasures in a manner that
makes them compatible with the system. Though some distance from uniform in their
conception of the nature of art and how it is oppositional to its other, Greenberg argu-
ing the need for art to pursue autonomy, disengage from the social/political in order to
avoid ‘contamination’ by its values and thus render itself more open to recuperation by
the system, Adorno ((1970) 1984) more complexly arguing that art has a double status
that is at once ‘social’ and ‘autonomous’ and it is in the contradiction of these two posi-
tions within capitalism that the development of modernism is to be understood:

the history of modernism is, at base, the history of those aesthetic strategies through
which the work of art (the commodity as fetish) has resisted its own social form (the
commodity as exchange) in order to be able to reveal, through its difference from it,
the true meaning of the social order of which it is a part, as a form of un-freedom.
(Osborne 1989: 40)

What Greenberg and Adorno do have in common that it is through art’s existence/
presence as in some sense autonomous rather than through overt political engagement
in critique that its oppositionality is provided. The presence of the real aesthetic in the
world indicts and discloses the inauthenticity of the rest of culture (albeit, if only briefly
according to Adorno). The reconsideration of Marx in the late 1960s by Althusser, par-
ticularly Althusser’s writings on ideology and the construction of ourselves as ‘subjects’
which began to circulate in the cultural debates of the 1970s (Althusser 1971), provided
at least in some circles a shift through offering a rationale/licence for a more overt concern
with the political in art making, one that enabled to a degree a reconciliation between
politics and the self-referential concern with the language of art that had been central to
168 Art and Visuality

the (late modernist) concern with autonomy by harnessing the latter to a deconstruction
of how that language was itself instrumental or productive in giving us a sense of self,
‘interpellating’ subjects in the image/text text work of Victor Burgin and Barbara Kruger
(see New Museum of Contemporary Art 1985). For the most part though the narrative
drawn upon and shared within the art world—even by those whose positions were in
many respects antithetical to each other, either from the right in wanting to characterize
and emphasize the threat that commercial culture and its values provided to high culture
(see e.g. Fuller, Gablik, Kuspit on Warhol) or from the left in trying to defend and sus-
tain the possibility of art having critical or radical potential (e.g. editorial contributors to
October)—was that provided by Adorno et al. A narrative that in effect says that popular/
mass culture is produced under capitalism to support and sustain present social arrange-
ments is (therefore) permeated by and the carrier of the dominant ideology, and has its
meanings unproblematically consumed by those to whom it is presented.
It is these very elements that are here drawn upon and used in art culture’s construc-
tion of its other and of itself and on the basis of which its narratives about its relations to
that other, whether reinvigorating or antagonistic, have been based that in more recent
history have been challenged, and depending upon one’s persuasion, seen to have been
reconfigured.

The Challenge to Autonomy

Though in circulation since the eighteenth century, as has already been mooted, one of
the concepts most central to an understanding of the nature of the art of the dominant
tendency of the twentieth century and of its perceived relations to its other is autonomy.
Not only in philosophical aesthetics, in art criticism and narratives of art history has the
notion been fundamental but as the twentieth century progressed it became so in the
thinking and practice of artists themselves. The latter reached its apogee in the 1960s
and 1970s, particularly in the USA, where notions of subject matter and quality in both
painting and sculpture came to be understood in terms of a progression towards a con-
cern with the nature or ‘essence’ of the media themselves to the exclusion of anything
else, for example in the painting of Kenneth Noland or Jules Olitski, or in the sculp-
ture of Don Judd. Despite the combatative stance taken at the time by the advocates
of ‘Modernist Painting’ and ‘Literalist Sculpture’ (in effect ‘Minimalist Sculpture’): the
distance from and disavowal of Modernism claimed by Judd ((1965) 1975), the deny-
ing of art status to Minimalist work by Fried ((1967) 1968), subsequently there has been
a substantive body of opinion (see Foster 1985; Krauss 1977) that both were working
within the same (modernist) paradigm. Fried’s notion of ‘presentness’—that the best
painting of the period is about its own nature qua painting and discloses its meaning
instantaneously at the moment of our encounter, and Judd’s notion of ‘literalness’, that
the best objects are nonillusionistic, and obdurately and literally themselves—both (de-
spite their mutual recriminations) subscribe to the idea of art’s autonomy. Both are pro-
pounding the idea of there being objects in the world which are totally nonrelational,
totally self-referential and meaningfully able to declare that.
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 169

Despite their eminence, problems could have been found internal to both Fried’s and
Judd’s writing from the outset. Fried, for example both wanting to claim that the mean-
ing of modernist works e.g. Olitski’s paintings was disclosed in their first moment of
perception and at the same time that if all one saw when encountering a painting such as
Pink Shush or Comprehensive Dream 1965,2 was the colour then ‘one had not seen them
as paintings’ (Fried 1966: fn 8) and Judd slipping from characterizing ‘specific objects’
through a series of negative relations, e.g. nonillusionistic, nonreferential, and so forth
to such objects having ‘no relations’ but being ‘obdurately and literally themselves’ (Judd
(1965) 1975), see Untitled 1967 & 1976.3 That is, in both cases it could be said that our
assent to and understanding of the claim that the meaning of the art is inherent, imma-
nent, is sought through a series of arguments which evoke and put into play notions of
relations that in their conclusions they disavow or deny. Perhaps not surprisingly then, it
is when theories that articulate meaning in terms of relations and challenge the theories
that underpin modernism start to circulate and eventually penetrate the art world that
the notion of autonomy and immanence begin to loose their credibility.
Initial circulation in English-speaking culture of what somewhat disparagingly in
some quarters became designated as ‘French Theory’ (and in so doing giving it a ho-
mogeneity that it does not have) in relation to the visual took place initially for the
most part in journals concerned with film (and to a lesser extent photography) such as
Screen and Screen Education in the 1970s. It was there that structuralist and semiotic
works were both presented (e.g. Levi-Strauss and Barthes) and drawn upon in debates
about the nature of cinematic (and later in the decade, photographic) language and of
the ­ideological/political position they had within the culture. (This began to ripple out
towards the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s into the art world through ‘small/­
independent’ magazines like Real Life and ZG.) Whilst not wishing to underplay the dif-
ferences between the work of individual (French) thinkers or between those designated
structuralist or poststructuralist of more importance here is what they share and have
taken from de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. In this text Saussure offers an ac-
count of how linguistic signs mean that has provided a model for approaching and un-
derstanding how any sign system means. A ‘sign’ for Saussure comprises two elements: a
signifier and a signified. The former is the sound or image or letter forms (word) and so
forth that is used in acts of communication, the latter the concept to which it refers, its
meaning. For example the letters form ‘d-o-g’, the sound ‘dog’ is the signifier which in
English refers to the concept of a four-legged domestic animal. In elaborating how a sign
means Saussure introduces two propositions which, despite subsequent reevaluation of
some aspects of his theory, have become and remain of fundamental and central impor-
tance to both structuralism and poststructuralism: (a) that a sign is differential, part of
a system of meaning where it gains significance in virtue of and in relation to what it is
not. (In itself the sound/letter form ‘dog’ means nothing but comes to mean in virtue of
its difference from ‘log’, ‘dig’ and other signs which it is not.) Or as Saussure says systems
of meanings have no positive terms, they do not mean as former theories of meaning
have claimed in virtue of a concept or object that they ‘label’ or name; (b) that the mean-
ing of a sign is arbitrary (unmotivated): that a particular sound/image, word signifies a
170 Art and Visuality

particular concept, e.g. ‘dog’ a ‘four-legged domestic animal etc’ is not a natural but a
cultural connection. Saussure’s account introduces a distinction between the ‘system’ of
language (langue) and individual utterances or iterations (parole) that comprise its use.
For Saussure and for the structuralists it is to the workings of the former that we have to
look to grasp how meaning works. The difference between poststructuralism and struc-
turalism can be understood in terms of the different weight given to the system and to
the individual iterations or contexts of its use in explaining meaning. As was said above
what is of central significance here despite their differences is what they share, namely
that something only takes on the status of a sign, becomes meaningful within a system,
that meaning is relational and conditional. Assenting to whichever version of the way this
has been drawn out, e.g. whether Barthes, as articulated through notions of intertextu-
ality in ‘The Death of the Author’ and ‘From Work to Text’ ((1968) 1977) or Derrida’s
challenge to our understanding of the mutual exclusivity of the concepts of interiority
and exteriority in The Truth in Painting (1978), casts claims that meaning can be inher-
ent, immanent, or present in/to the sign as untenable because they have misconstrued
the logical conditions under which meaning can transpire.
The growing circulation of theory that challenged the epistemological allegiances of
modernism enabled the critical rereading of the meaning and significance of work that
(late) modernism had marginalized (e.g. Robert Rauschenberg (Crimp 1993), Ed Kien-
holz (Whitney Museum of American Art 1996)) (which in turn themselves impacted
on art practice), at the same time new work emerged in practice that appeared either as
retrograde and vastly inadequate by modernist criteria or as itself challenging or critiqu-
ing or rejecting the values on which those criteria were grounded. Works such as the
paintings of David Salle, Sigmar Polke, Gerhardt Richter, and later Glenn Brown which
overtly acknowledge their source material and their interconnectedness (intertextuality)
both at the level of image and facture with other culture, art and nonart; works such as
the sculpture of Richard Deacon, Grenville Davey and Robert Gober which offer os-
tensibly abstract and minimalist forms that at the same time reference their relations
with the wider culture (whether anatomical/organic, functional and symbolic, coke/pill
bottle tops, or urinals or hand basins), that minimalism disavows, or the sculpture of
for example Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach which challenges the very grounding for
the modernist distinctions between sculpture and nonsculpture (see below); or work
such as that of Robert Longo which in its ‘dated’ ‘devalued’ and ‘appropriated’ conven-
tions of representations (graphite photo-illustrational drawing, reliefs, bronze figurative
memorial-type sculpture) and its hybrid form, seems wilfully (or with an incredulous
degree of ignorance) systematically to transgress every late-modernist edict on art mak-
ing, see Figure 6.1 Love Police and the Golden Children, 1982/83. Through theoreti-
cal critiques of the epistemological underpinnings of late-modernist art practice and
through the impact that reformulated ideas of meaning had on practitioners’ concepts
of the nature of objects and practice the writings of visual culture directly and indirectly
might be seen to have had marked effects on the practice of criticism and the practice
of art making itself. Effects that are not perhaps separable from the shift from the mod-
ern to postmodern.
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 171

Figure 6.1 Robert Longo, Love Police and the Golden Children, 1982-83, relief: lacquer on cast alu-
minium and cast bronze. Courtesy of the artist, © Robert Longo. Photograph: Robert Longo Studio.

Rethinking the Relations of Art and Its Other

In a lecture given at the Whitney Museum of American Art towards the end of 1981
Frederick Jameson (Foster 1985), in an attempt to characterize the postmodern, de-
clared (not without a degree of ambivalence) that the distinction between high culture
and so-called mass or popular culture had been eroded:

The second feature of this list of postmodernism is the effacement in it of some key
boundaries or separations, most noticeably the erosion of the older distinction be-
tween high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most dis-
tressing development of all from an academic standpoint. (Jameson (1981) 1985: 112)

This will be discussed below. The threat to art from mass culture as was said earlier
has been a long-running narrative in the art world, and its embodiment most corre-
spondent with Jameson’s utterance was seen to come from Pop. From its outset in some
quarters (e.g. Kozloff (1962) 1970) Pop had been perceived as bringing the ‘vulgar’ into
the realm of high culture, over time it became Warhol who was perceived as the main
offender (Fuller 1980; Gablik 1981; Kuspit 1993). In the same year as Jameson’s lecture
was published for example Gablik slammed both Warhol and his work as offering an un-
critical celebration of popular culture and an unashamed embrace of capitalistic values,
and in the subsequent book followed up with:

Does truth lie, for instance in the lonely defiance of Van Gogh, bruised by poverty and
pain, who claimed that the only lesson we have to learn from life is how to stand up
to suffering, or does someone like Warhol provide us with a model image for the artist
of our time, with his social bravura and celebrity life, playing it straight to a world in
172 Art and Visuality

which everyone can be famous for fifteen minutes? (According to Warhol fame is what
makes life liveable.) No one is likely to dispute the extent to which these conflicting
images of power and personality are totally at odds with each other. (1984: 84)

This was a criticism repeated but with even more vitriol later by Kuspit in The Cult
of the Avant-Garde Artist. There was however a different perception of Warhol’s work al-
ready in circulation, albeit limitedly and initially somewhat slowly, namely that offered
in a remark by Steinberg (1972) in his essay on Rauschenberg to the effect that though
both Rauschenberg’s and Warhol’s work could be said to give the viewer an image of
the world through their use of silk screens, more accurately it is an image of an image
of the world that we are given to look at. In presenting us with images of images, ones
from the public domain, for example of Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn Diptych 1963) or a
car crash (Orange Disaster 1963), but separated from our normal context of encounter,
e.g. a newspaper or magazine, and in their half-toned printing and colouration under-
scoring their flatness, it is the image itself that is drawn to our attention rather than or as
much as Marilyn. One might see the work as concerned with the ways in which images
contribute to and are constructive of our views of for example glamour and celebrity and
tragedy, of our views of the world and not merely copies of it. The reading of Warhol’s
work as exploring the nature of media representation and the effects of media represen-
tation on our perception and conception of the real (rather than as either a failed cri-
tique or celebration of commercial culture) gained circulation and acceptance amongst
certain artists and critics perhaps not surprisingly as theory which itself to a degree had
the same preoccupations was better disseminated (Lawson 1981). The purchase that se-
miotics enables both practitioners and theorists to get on how (initially photographic)
images mean (e.g. Barthes (1961) 1977; Metz 1973; Burgin (1977) 1983), to get be-
yond the language of form and content (see thinking entrapped and trying to break out
in Sontag (1966)), where content or meaning is (problematically) written of as some-
how identifiable in separation from its mode of presentation, and instead, through no-
tions of signifier, signified and code, show that what something means, what is it, is
inseparable from how it is what it is, undermines the concept of a photographic image
being a mirror or window on the world.
To make this more concrete, using ideas from Barthes and Metz we can approach
Robert Frank’s image Movie Premier—Hollywood 1958, (Frank 1958: 141).4 This black-
and-white photograph has centrally placed and occupying about two-thirds of the pic-
ture plane an image of a glamorous blond starlet, head and shoulders. Not just the
caption but her clothes, hair style, jewellery and so forth suggest that it is the 1950s and
America or do so if one already has certain knowledge that allows that detail of recog-
nition. Behind her at a distance, between her shoulders and the photo’s edges, at the
opposite side of the (unseen) red carpet to the photographer are a line of women, in ap-
pearance much less glamorous or expensively dressed. The initially odd thing about the
photograph given the then rules of good composition and clear subject matter is that the
centrally placed woman who occupies most of the picture, and therefore one expects to
be the subject, is (slightly) out of focus, the women beyond are sharply in. In effect this
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 173

is a photograph about fandom not about the movie starlet and that it is so is because of
the ‘how’ of its imaging. Metz writes about what he designates as ‘specific’ and ‘nonspe-
cific’ codes that combine in an image: the former being those elements that contribute
to the meaning of the image that are specific to the medium, e.g. in the case of photogra-
phy, framing, depth of field, tonal values, angle of shot, the latter codes that are at work
in and that we have learnt from more general social experience, e.g. facial expressions,
body postures, hair styles, clothes/fashion, interior design, architectural features and so
forth. The Frank photograph draws upon and puts all these codes into play but what
makes it have the particular meaning that is being claimed here, as opposed to other pos-
sible photographs that could have been taken at the same moment from the same spot
is its focus and depth of field. The same event (what Barthes calls the ‘pro-photo’ event,
the event/scene before the camera (Barthes (1961) 1977)) could have been shot using
the same depth of field but with the actress in focus and the spectators out in which case
it would have become a more orthodox image of her with blurred background, it could
also have been shot with a greater depth of field in which case both she and the spec-
tators would have been in focus. The point being that in each of these alternatives the
event before the camera would have been the same, what gives the actual photograph
its particular meaning as being a study of fandom is how it was photographed: how it is
what is it is makes it what it is. An image is always a combination of a pro-photo event
and its manner of recording, though common sense tells us otherwise (and many forms
of photography, e.g. advertising, fashion, pornography play on that), the pro-photo
event is not in itself retrievable from the image. Metz’s writing at this point is focused on
‘signifiers’ internal to the ‘text’/image, as is mooted above and will be discussed further
below, how one reads a signifier or even recognizes a signifier as such is dependent upon
knowledge that one brings to the ‘text’ and the context of one’s encounter.
What is exemplified here and of particular importance to the overall concerns of this
paper is that the work drawn off of semiotics in relation to the visual demonstrates that
engaging with images is active, involves an act of reading or decoding. This it is sug-
gested is true of all images not especially art images, that in reading certain knowledges
and competences are drawn on. What marks the difference on this account between
high and ‘low’, ‘mass’, ’popular’ culture is not that one is engaged with actively and the
other passively but the different knowledges that are drawn on in those engagements.
The binaries art/mass culture, active/passive consumption become uncoupled.
Despite a long history subscribing to the ideas that (visual) art can ‘get to the parts
of you other culture can’t’, (Tolstoy (1898) 1969: 178; Bell (1913) 1958: 28), and more
recently the idea that we can ‘directly’ perceive/experience art (Fried, Judd, Krauss),
contemporary art culture has taken within itself theorists who explore and debate the
conditions of art being experienced and what they would argue is the knowledge only
in relation to which artworks become intelligible: for example from philosophy Danto
has argued that what makes something a work of art is a body of theory, a knowledge of
art history and an art world (1981), Derrida has interrogated the ostensible mutual ex-
clusivity assumed to apply to the fundamental notions of art theorizing, for example ob-
ject and context, interior and exterior and shown their logic of mutual interdependence
174 Art and Visuality

((1978) 1987; also see Marriner 2002). And from sociology Bourdieu has examined the
ground of the distinction between high and low culture and challenged the idea of the
pure aesthetic (1993).
The serious consideration of the knowledges at work in the engagement with and
reading of mass/popular culture has been developed through both theoretical and em-
pirical work that has come to constitute the field of cultural studies. Not only has this
provided a massive body of material testifying to the active engagement and knowledge
demanded in the consumption of popular culture (e.g. Fiske 1989; Hebdige 1988; Stri-
nati 1995), but also the complex modes that engagement can take. For example Hall
(1993) categorized three positions that viewers can take in engaging with cultural im-
ages and artefacts: one where we align ourselves with the hegemonic position and read
the dominant message of an image or text in an unquestioning manner; two, where
we negotiate a meaning from the image and its ‘dominant’ meanings, i.e. struggle to
make the image meaningful through some form of ‘reconciling’ what we take the image
to bring with it with what we bring to it (our own memories, knowledge and cultural
frameworks); three, where we disagree with the values, ideological position we see to be
embodied in the image and oppose the proffered meaning through contestation, cri-
tique or rejection/ignoring it (see Baudrillard 1983).
Even if one admits part of the received art world narrative on its other, that the cul-
ture produced under capitalism is the carrier of meanings supportive of or at least con-
sistent with the maintenance and perpetuation of the system—which much cultural
studies theory would in some form or other accept—what culture studies has done
is radically to critique the other part of the narrative, that unquestioningly repeated
from the Frankfurt School, namely, that the ‘masses’ are duped. Not just within the lit-
erature on subcultures (Gelder and Thornton 1997) but in that around consumption
(Lury 1996 ) and material culture (Miller 1987) and that arising from feminism in the
1980s and 1990s (e.g. Attfield and Kirkham 1989) complex relations between cultural
products, artefacts, institutions and persons are mapped out and elaborated that show
how few viewers’ experiences comply with Hall’s first category above (historically, the
art world’s preferred option). Category one assumes a congruence between the mean-
ing of a cultural product aimed at a mass and the specific (individual) experiences and
memories and desires of a mass of people. What cultural studies research has shown is
that cultural products with a mass audience have very different meaning to the different
(interest) groups that are counted collectively to make up that mass (e.g. the audience
for a television ‘soap’).
Though far from universally acknowledged or accepted throughout contemporary
art culture (e.g. Foster et al., or Kuspit), the literature from culture studies that has been
taken into visual culture as an intellectual field has opened up and provided justification
for a ‘post-Warhol’ practice, i.e. art making that addresses and explores our lived experi-
ence of popular culture, of mass media, of an image-saturated world—most conspicu-
ously perhaps in the work of Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky and the
painters included in The Painting of Modern Life (Rugoff 2007 )—rather than condemn-
ing that experience or excluding it from art as beyond the pale.
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 175

The study of peoples’ lived relations with objects, of the meanings generated at their
moment of consumption, and the idea that meaning is relational can be seen to have
implications in other areas of contemporary art too. Here there is space to only touch
on two of these.

The Shift from Object to Sign

Perhaps with the cultural studies and anthropological examination of the lived relation
between people and objects and the questioning of autonomy it is not surprising, given
that for most of the twentieth century sculpture has been designated and demarcated
through the use of the concept ‘object’ (that it is a class of object marked off from other
objects because of its nonfunctionality) (e.g. Tucker 1974; Krauss 1977), sculpture theo-
rizing and practice becomes a territory of contestation in the 1980s. Though in many
eyes Minimalism was seen as still the dominant paradigm (Cooke 1987) aspects of ob-
jects that in minimalism and late-modernist accounts had been excluded or repressed
began to reappear. For example, as mentioned above in the works of Deacon and Davey
and Gober and Cragg where play was made of both the work as object and as a signifier
and image, and increasingly within theorizing where the idea that not just images but
objects are (never just objects but) also always signifiers gained circulation (Baudrillard
(1968) 2005). Perhaps, though, the sharpest challenge to the modernist narrative about
sculpture and the epistemology that underpinned it can be seen in the works drawing
on and using mundane or nonart objects of Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach. Koons’s
show ‘The New’ for example presented a series of sealed Plexiglas vitrines that contained
brand-new (physically unmodified) vacuum cleaners seated on shelves which were un-
derlayed with fluorescent tubes. In their presentational form (cubes, frontality, use of
Plexiglas, fluorescent tubes, etc) they can be read to reference aspects of minimalism
but in their presentation of new consumer objects par excellence in a gallery it is not
difficult to see them as asking questions about the difference (if any) between the way
in which ‘newness’ is fetishized both in the consumer world and that of modernist art.
Subsequent shows, for example ‘Equivalence’ using flotation/swimming devices in con-
junction with basket balls and reproduced images of street basket balls teams, or those
drawing on romance and pornography with la Cicciolina, ‘Made in Heaven’, seem cen-
trally to be concerned with examining the grounds for marking difference between ob-
jects. In Steinbach’s work too there is an initial reference to minimalism through his use
of the hand-constructed laminate shelf-like forms on which he displays and juxtaposes
(ready-made and often mass-produced) objects. At the same time as alluding to Judd’s
work the units also have a resemblance to particular shop display units (e.g Habitat) and
to 1980s designer domestic shelves (they are ‘Memphis’ like). Each of these different
references puts into play knowledges of different kinds of social spaces, different expec-
tations of the kind of objects we are going to encounter, and different concepts of ap-
propriate ways of ‘looking’. They draw attention to and destabilize or unfix relations we
normally take for granted. Given the context of our encounter with them, i.e. an art gal-
lery, the works in their presentation of ‘nonart’ objects in this particular presentational
176 Art and Visuality

and equivocal form can be seen as a meditation on where the meaning of objects reside.
In both cases, Koons and Steinbach in their works seem to cross the borders between
high and low culture and as such provide confirmatory instances of Jameson’s conten-
tion about the nature of the postmodern that the distinction between high and popu-
lar culture has been eroded. Though their work might be seen to challenge Modernism
in that it challenges the epistemology on which modernist ideas of art are founded, it
seems to me to present itself very much as art. Its postmodernism is not tied to the ero-
sion of difference between high and low/popular, but in where it locates that difference
to be grounded: not as inherent qualities of the objects but in their relations with the
social, institutional and discursive realms within which they circulate and are encoun-
tered. Koons and Steinbach could be said to make the sign value of objects they use the
language of their work, the works’ meaning is dependent on exactly that which mini-
malism and late-modernism banished from practice (Marriner 1990, 2002). It is only
for example in the late 1990s that sculptors who have been marginalized through that
banishment and might be seen as precedents for using sign value begin to get revalued,
e.g. Edward Kienholz with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum (Whitney Museum
of American Art 1996).

Intertexuality and Authorship

In terms of traceable direct consequences, one of the pieces of theory that has had the
most potent effects on the contemporary art world must be Barthes’s essay ‘The Death
of the Author’ ((1968) 1977). This essay and its companion piece, ‘From Work to Text’
both underscore the way in which the meaning of ‘texts’ are dependent upon the interre-
lations between rather than the ‘autonomous’ ‘isolation’ from one another, and put em-
phasis on the moment of consumption as a moment of meaning making. Though taken
somewhat literally in some circles (e.g. Belsey 1980) read calmly despite its attention­-
grabbing title Bathes seems less concerned with ridding the world of authors/artists than
in undermining a particular notion of maker as promoted by modernism, ‘the author
god’. In part there is something of Benjamin’s exhortation for the writer/‘artist’ to re-
flect on his position in the production process and for his practice to draw the reader/
spectator as collaborators into that process of production (Benjamin (1934) 1983); in
part there is something of Machery’s insistence, published a couple of years before the
Barthes’s essay in France, of the author as ‘producer’ rather than creator, of Machery’s
emphasis on the author’s/artist’s relationships to material of one kind and another from
which the work is constructed in opposition to its being brought into being from noth-
ing on the model of a creation by God (Machery (1966) 1978). Barthes’s position could
also perhaps be understood as a salutary kind of social anthropological or epistemologi-
cal reminder of just how much has to be in place, what practices, institutions, concepts,
values, knowledges, in order that an impulse, desire, thought, act can be an artistic one
either to ourselves or to another. And how none of that which has to be in place origi-
nates from within ourselves. A reminder of just what, were we to be asked say by a per-
son from outside of our culture about the significance of smearing pigment on a piece of
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 177

cloth would have to be narrated in order that the meanings to us of that could become
intelligible to that person. That we should remember with respect to what contributes
to something being significant, meaningful—as opposed to being ‘noise’—that what we
normally focus on is merely the tip of the iceberg.
For anyone who subscribes to a notion of artistic agency based on a model of the cre-
ativity of God, this claim is perhaps sufficiently deflationary (especially if one also sug-
gests that the artist/maker himself is encultured) to amount to the artist’s/author’s death.
To anyone else it could be seen to offer a humbler, less mystificatory idea of the ways in
which things come to have meaning for us and of the ‘personal’ contribution one can
make to its production.
Responses to these ideas in the art world, in both criticism and practice have been
quite extreme: from on the one hand dismissal and a reassertion of ‘subjectivity’, for ex-
ample in the writings of Kuspit (1988) where these ideas are seen cynically to promote/
exploit the demise of originality, imagination, authenticity and require an antidote of
subjectivism as exemplified in the artworks of Neo-Expressionism, to on the other hand
(initially at least) total acceptance: for example in Jameson’s account of postmodern ‘au-
thorship’ and Sherrie Levine’s rehearsal of Bathes’s argument through practice in her dis-
play of (overtly) appropriated images of ‘Master’ photographers or the (re)-painting of
Picasso’s paintings by Mike Bidlo, or the overt recycling of imagery by Salle (touched on
above). Because Barthes’s essays offer more by way of critique than by way of plausible
alternatives—having argued that the condition of meaning in a text is its interrelations
with other texts, and critiqued realism for effacing its own workings, the few examples
given of what he seems to approve of and advocate by way of acceptable are texts that
adopt established modernist and avant-garde strategies of referencing themselves and
their own (internal) textual organization—it is perhaps not surprising that for a period
art practice that takes the writing seriously gets locked into a reiteration of ‘the critique
of authorship’. The more significant legacy, at least among those who believe Barthes’s
criticism of received notions of authorship has a validity, has been not a repetition of its
utterance but an acceptance amongst practitioners not of the death of originality and
agency but of the idea that disclosing the real conditions of meaning of their work and
their part in it necessitates their acknowledging the work’s beholdenness to other work.
Across most areas of contemporary art practice it is possible to see significant work
where this is done.

Conclusion
Though in its entirety Modernist Art is far from uniform and monolithic in its philoso-
phy, in its models for artworks or in their values, that moment of it, usually designated
as Late-Modernism, that falls within the direct remit of this chapter could perhaps be
said to be an exception. ‘Modernist Criticism’ as articulated by Greenberg and his aco-
lytes between the late 1940s and late 1970s gained a sufficiently ubiquitous degree of
ascendancy in both art-making and art-exhibiting circles to constitute the ‘dominant’
paradigm for ‘serious’ art (Jameson 1984; Foster 1993). The idea that each art form has
178 Art and Visuality

qualities unique and specific to itself, and that modernism in art can be understood as
the gradual movement of each of those art forms towards its own essence—in the case
of painting for example to the acknowledgement of flatness—provided a model for art
making and criteria for both quality and (which was not unconnected) progress in art
during that time (Greenberg (1965) 1982). ‘Greenbergian Modernism’ generated the
underpinning rationale for and the frame within which works deemed significant by
‘significant’ critics (Greenberg himself, Fried, Krauss, Rose), by ‘successful’ artists and
‘major’ curators (for example at MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of New York)
were to be understood (e.g. Rubin 1970; Geldzahler 1969), and furnished a degree of
shared certainty about quality (for exceptions/dissent see e.g. Rosenberg 1972; Stein-
berg 1972). One of the consequences of the challenges described in this chapter to this
version of modernist ideas has been to unsettle that notion of certainty. Much of the
work of the 1980s as we have seen created anxieties about loss of quality (e.g. Cooke,
Kuspit), and subsequently debates about whether art culture was embroiled in its de-
mise or redefinition. Twenty or so years of the lack of a dominant paradigm and the
acknowledgement of areas of art making as involving contestation over what consti-
tutes quality are no longer seen as grounds for defensive apprehension but embraced as
distinguishing characteristics of what makes the field contemporary, for example in the
large-scale survey books Vitamin P, and Vitamin 3-D (Schwabsky 2002/2004 and Elle­
good 2009, respectively).
But of at least as fundamental importance to the nature of the contemporary and
the challenge to Greenbergian modernism of the above has been that which interro-
gated the idea that art forms (or anything else for that matter) can be defined in terms
of an essence. The rejection of essentialist theories of meaning in favour of relational
theories not only undermines the claim that each art form can be demarcated in virtue
of a specific property but also that quality of works can be assessed in relation to their
acknowledgement of and progressive movement towards that specific property. Prog-
ress, or ‘advancedness’, and quality are on the Late-Modernist view tied to a process of
purification of the medium, and importantly therefore quality can only be understood
in relation to and as belonging within specific definable art forms, e.g. painting or sculp-
ture. With the undermining of ‘essence’, the persuasiveness of the medium specificity of
quality collapses too. One of the conspicuous differences between the contemporary art
world and that of for example the 1960s and 1970s is the enormous quantity of work
that is produced and exhibited now that ruptures the boundaries of or exists between
the boundaries of what in the earlier period would have been deemed an art form, work
that on late-modernist criteria would be ‘impure’ (e.g. the subtitle of the book Vitamin
3-D above is ‘New Perspectives in Sculpture and Instillation’ not just sculpture). Such ‘im-
pure’ work can vary from the three-dimensional which sees itself as and as interrogating
the nature of painting, for example Jessica Stockholder’s, or two-dimensional work using
paint that interrogates the nature of real space e.g Katharina Grosse, through to huge
immersive, technically sophisticated and theatrical environments such as Olafur Elias-
son’s Weather Project (2003/2004) in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, or Christian Bol-
tanski’s Personnes (2010), Grand Palais, Paris, the primary visual aspect of which (not for
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 179

the first time in Boltanski’s work) are mounds of used old clothes. Given that photogra-
phy and film only entered into art galleries initially primarily through conceptual art in
the 1960s and 1970s there is now widespread and very diverse uses of photography, ana-
logue and digital, and video in art contexts: the rephotographed photographs of Richard
Prince, the ostensibly unstaged ‘documentary’ images of Nan Goldin, the huge digitally
worked immaculate prints of Andreas Gursky, and the technically unmanicured prints
of Richard Billingham all sit within the art world, as do the video works of Douglas Gor-
don and Bill Viola but are so different in kind that they collectively raise issues about
the ontology of photography and video rather than proffer a notion of photography’s
nature or video’s nature that could aid in determining their quality. Across other areas,
for example performance art or instillation art similar lists and similar diversities can be
pointed to (see e.g. Bishop 2005) which, unless such issues are to be relinquished exclu-
sively to the determination of the art market signal a need for urgent and ongoing theo-
retical investigations into ontology and value/quality within the field.
The other area where the shift in the concept of meaning from immanent to relation
and conditional outlined above can be seen to be having ongoing consequences is with
reference to the nature of debates about the political. Whilst meaning was understood
to be in the signifier it was possible to define a work as radical in virtue of certain (more
often than not formal) properties, properties that were seen to guarantee its radical-
ness e.g. Victor Burgin and Barbara Kruger’s work was argued to ‘decentre’ the viewer
through its juxtapositions of text with image and by so doing disrupt and expose the
normal viewing space into which the photographic image would recruit us (see Tickner
1985), or for example that some of Cindy Sherman’s photographs through their ‘glister
and gleam’ disorientate and subvert our location as viewers (Krauss 1993). In both these
cases the claims are made through the bringing in of extensive bodies of theory in rela-
tion to which the designated signifiers are being read, but nowhere is it acknowledged
that it is in those relations rather than in the characteristics of the work that the political
critique is being generated. During the same period it was often asked of work, particu-
larly that which engaged with consumption, for example Koons or Steinbach, Barbara
Bloom or Sylvie Fleury, was it complicit or critical? And again from a position which as-
sumed a fixedness between signifier and meaning, i.e. from an assumption that seemed
to be the very thing that was at issue in the work.
More recently, politics concerns have been given a different direction and flavour
through the curatorial and theoretical efforts of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics ((1998)
2002) with reference to artists such as Carsten Holler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Pierre
Huygne and others. Bourriaud proselytizes on behalf what he sees as a nonutopian,
more ‘humble’, more democratic and ‘interactive’ (he borrows terminology from the
vocabulary of the Internet and video games) tendency in art, one which (to varying
degrees) places the artist as facilitator or MC: the artwork, though it may make use of
objects (e.g. Holler’s slides at Tate Modern 2006/2007) is less an object than an event.
In its most abstract formulation the artwork is the creation of a social environment in
which people come together to participate in a shared activity e.g. Tiravanija setting up a
kitchen, cooking and serving curry to visitors in various art galleries in the art capitals of
180 Art and Visuality

Western culture (e.g. Paris, New York and London). What Bourriaud suggests is being
relinquished or eschewed is the ‘role of artworks . . . to form imaginary and utopian real-
ities’ in favour of offering ways of living and acting within the existing real, ‘on whatever
scale chosen by the artist’ ((1998) 2002: 13). Though at a time when ‘the grand narra-
tives’ and their respective idealisms have been said to have lost their credibility (Lyotard
(1979) 1984) and the more ‘realistic’, ‘modest’, and ‘democratic’ characterization of art
that Bourriaud is advocating seems to have a particular appropriateness, his formula-
tion has proven far from unproblematic (see particularly: Bishop 2004). Given the par-
ticularly of the event sites claims about participation and inclusiveness and democratic
begin themselves, at least with respect to the world outside of the art world, to appear
virtual. The unresolved debates in respect of video games about the nature of interactiv-
ity and levels of relative self-determination of participants as compared with the game’s
designer is something that seems equally apposite to ask of the audience and artist in this
scenario. And in respect of the claim to the mantle of politics, the nonutopian, nonide-
alistic can without much difficulty be read as an accommodation of art to the present, a
kind of resignation as much as modesty.
No less than of the ‘formal’ radicalism discussed above (and of much other
twentieth-century ‘radical’ work) does it seem appropriate to ask of Relational Art a
­series of questions: for whom is this work radical? to whom does it mean what is claimed
for it? what knowledge is needed to so read it? No more than that earlier radicalism does
its persuasiveness sustain itself before those questions despite its emergence post the
shifts in the ideas about the nature of meaning which makes such questions necessary.
Whether radicalism is still possible in art is something that has been recurrently debated
in the art world, particularly in the journal October, what in the light of changing con-
cepts of meaning has been exceedingly underdiscussed and cries out for discussion is
what ‘radicalism’ might now mean (as opposed to what it is taken to mean by October
from before that moment). If meaning is relational and conditional and not located in
the signifier (or artwork) per se, radicalism surely has to be looked for not in the work
itself but in terms of the work’s effects under certain conditions; that is, there should not
be an expectation of a singular answer to what radical work looks like. Participants in
popular culture seem to have had an awareness of this way in advance of the art world,
signs of dissidence or oppositionality have recurrently undergone abandonment, and
change, and renewal in relation to their fading effectivity (witness, for example, the ca-
reer of subcultural styles). This is perhaps another territory in which art culture might
learn from and be ‘reinvigorated’ by its other.

FURTHER READING
Costello, Diarmuid & Vickery, Jonathan J. 2007. Art: Key contemporary thinkers. Oxford: Berg.
Graw, Isabelle, 2009. High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin: Sternberg
Press.
Sandler, Irving. 1996. Art of the Postmodern Era. New York: Harper Collins.
Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 181

Notes
1. The first university sector course in the UK with the designation Visual Culture was vali-
dated in 1990 at Bath College of Higher Education (now, Bath Spa University): MA Visual
Culture.
2. Jules Olitski, Comprehensive Dream, acrylic on canvas, 1965. http://www.abstract-art.com/
abstraction/12_Grnfthrs_fldr/g115_olitski_compr.html, accessed 5 November 2010.
3. Don Judd, Untitled, plywood cube, 1967 & 1976. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35918/
art-dealer-david-zwirner-lands-donald-judd-foundation/, accessed 25 September 2010.
4. Robert Frank, Movie Premier—Hollywood 1955. http://www.nga.gov/podcasts/fullscreen/
020309lect01.shtm, accessed 24 September 2010.

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 7

Beyond Museology:
Reframing the Sensorium
Donald Preziosi

[I]deology, roughly speaking, is about what we think we see when we aren’t really
looking.
—Homi Bhabha

Magnificat anima mea Dominum.

—Luke 1:46

It has not gone unremarked that a fair amount of contemporary visual culture studies
seems to have proceeded in curious detachment not only from the social, political and
ethical circumstances of their actual practices but from engagements with the actual
histories and historiographies of premodern and extra – Euro-American artistries. One
of the reasons for this has been its academic institutionalization on the western side of
the Atlantic as a specific reaction to certain parochial debates within New York City art
criticism by a small group of modernist art historians—a situation rather different on
the eastern side of the Atlantic.1 The resultant interrelations between visual studies and
art history were reduced either to the former being staged as astronomy to a discarded
and dismissable astrology, or as a cure (perhaps, more exactly, a pharmakon)2 to the lat-
ter’s parochial ethnocentrism. What follows examines the problem of visuality in its (still
mostly occluded) relationship to museology—the commonly overlooked third term in
contemporary discourse on visuality—art history, visual culture studies and museology.

Reframing Visuality
The following follows upon and reframes for this volume a circuitous and not easily
diagrammed personal/professional trajectory of my engagements with the critical and
Beyond Museology 185

theoretical grounds of contemporary disciplinary practice, in particular those that take

as their domain of study ‘visuality’ or the ‘visual culture’ of peoples, times and places.
It takes a critical stance regarding its aims and claims, engaging with a long-standing
disquiet within that field that in fact is coterminous with its quarter-century history.
I will try to make clear what has bothered me (and not a few others) about the aca-
demic marketing endeavour of visual culture studies, and about not a few disciplinary
turns or re-turns over the past academic generation (towards culture, history, politics,
visuality, theory, (new) media, religion, the object, etc). Scepticism about these and
similar ‘turns’ may be an inevitable artefact of having seen so many turns, re-turns,
evasions, diversions and about-faces in the academic fields amongst which I’ve been
working, and about many of which I’ve had a few things to say historiographically,
and methodologically, as well as about various ethical and political problems raised
by various disciplinary turnings. This chapter, then, will attempt to outline the rea-
sons for my position(s) on these and related issues, and along the way will suggest
approaches to resolving the current impasse in visual culture studies and related aca-
demic endeavours.
The invitation to contribute to this volume comes at a time when my attention is
divided between two partly overlapping research projects, the first dealing with the pe-
rennial conundrum of the antitheses between what are conventionally distinguished as
art and religion, the second with the problem of writing a polemical manifesto on ‘the
idea of art’ today.3 Both of these projects, as well as the writing of the present chapter,
also come after a long and circuitous history of my own engagements with a number of
disciplinary and cross-disciplinary developments.
What follows here is a marking of several standpoints that by hindsight may be linked
together to suggest an intellectual and philosophical trajectory to my account of current
disciplinary impasses. Starting with an old student fascination with the problem of in-
terpreting the labyrinthine ruins of ancient Minoan/Cretan architecture and settlement
planning, interests morphed thereafter into a fascination with the artifice of knowledge
production itself and the interrelations between diverse sensory modes of understanding
and signification. All of that evolved against the backdrop of long trying to negotiate or
reconcile the artistic passions of a visual artist father with those of a (dead just before
my birth) poet/journalist grandfather, both of whom in their work were intensely mes-
merized (visually, verbally) by the modernist romance of antiquity and various mani-
festations of otherness. The latter (for them) apparently inherited from memories of an
earlier ancestor who made his livelihood as a mid-nineteenth-century European orien-
talist painter living and working in Istanbul, partly employed for a time by the Otto-
man court cataloguing the many ethnic customs and costumes of peoples of the Empire
in Turkey, Palestine, the Balkans and Egypt. My own professional oscillations (‘turns’)
between investigating visual and verbal modes of knowledge production (through dis-
ciplinary formations such as classical philology, art history, visual semiology and an-
thropology, linguistics, archaeology, architectural history) are equally explained by this
background and simultaneously not at all explicable.
At any rate, the following begins where that past continues; futurity, as Benjamin ar-
gued, being most lucidly recognizable in the past:4 a future anterior of what we shall have
186 Art and Visuality

been in what we were in the process of becoming. But most recently, this paper comes
soon after several months spent on a residential research fellowship in Australia investi-
gating the fabrication and global marketing of ‘aboriginal art’ as a (visual) abstraction out
of (and thereby the commodification of ) the intensely multimodal, multidimensional
and multifunctional cultural practices of indigenous communities in that country, and
in particular those of the central western desert. In the latter research, partly undertaken
in connection with the aforementioned joint volume on ‘the idea of art’ commissioned
by the Blackwell ‘Manifestoes’ series of books, the disciplinary singling out and isolating
for analysis of ‘the visual’ in fields such as visual culture studies and art history became
more palpably problematic than ever.
This in turn deeply challenged the task of co-producing a book on ‘the idea of ’ (in-
deed, any aspect of ) cultural practice,5 given the epistemological, philosophical and
semiological conundrums surrounding the Western opposition between an idea and
its purported manifestation; between ‘meaning’ and ‘form’; oppositions cogently ar-
gued long ago as serving to perpetuate a metaphysical ideology of signification (Derrida
1981b), rooted in monotheist religiosities.
This chapter addresses that conundrum as specifically articulated in the Western
modernist tradition of separating visuality from other modes of understanding and
knowledge-production, as with visual culture studies and related academic disciplines
such as art history and museology, as if it had a life of its own. My concern in what fol-
lows also addresses the ethical implications and political effects of this and related reduc-
tionisms: aside from the globalized market in commodities, who and what is benefitted
by the ‘turn’ towards the visual?6

Mary in the Museum

A clear awareness of the reality of our own finitude being a source of some anxiety, we
may at times be tempted to actually believe in our own immortality. Aesthetic, his-
torical, biographical and museographical possibilities for after-lives may seduce us into
imagining the constraints of the real being eliminated if we keep a tense yet measured
distance—a coy similitude or even a pantographic relationship—towards our (self )
image. As epistemological technologies of virtual/heterotopic space, museums and
collections keep the real at a manageable distance in the face of anxieties. The ego’s
habitation in museological space opened up by its mirror image, however, is yet more
complicated and tense. On the one hand, the duplication of the self and the distance
it presupposes is a necessary condition for reflection and autonomy. Yet on the other
hand, the ego, driven by the will to converge with its image, might be tempted (like the
ancient patron saint/avatar of the museumgoer, Narcissus) to annihilate that distance.
Hence the efficacy of aesthetic institutions such as museums or religions (or of arte-
facts such as visuality) depends precisely on the maintenance of that tension; the main-
tenance, that is of a consciousness of the artifice of our realities as artifice. Even as we
masquerade its denial in our theologies, and even, indeed, in most of our visual studies,
art histories and museologies.
Beyond Museology 187

In what follows, I would like to consider the inextricability of the aims and claims
of ‘visual culture’ in modernity and those of museums and museology: the obscure ro-
mance of the twin siblings of the Enlightenment, visuality and museology (mediated by
their mid-wife aesthetics). This is a subject that in my experience has been too little at-
tended to in contemporary visual studies, in particular the problem of the uncanny re-
lationship; the ambivalent juxtapositions between the individual and the museologized
object. On a fundamental level, this interrelationship is the core conundrum haunting
these and related modernist discursive practices since their early-modern elaborations.
I won’t attempt to give an overview of the many ways in which that question has been
or could be viewed historically or thematically, including a direct problematizing of the
rhetorical/onto-theological distinction itself between ‘subjects and objects’—although
what follows does in fact bear very much indeed upon that issue.7
The hagiographic uses and effects of art museums have long overshadowed their
essentially ethical functions as instruments for modeling, mimicking and modifying
individual and collective behaviour. As modes of interpretation and social discipline,
museums stage parallactic relations between diverse domains of the sensible (such as
objects and their framings in whatever medium, including verbal glossing) whilst si-
multaneously fixing in place those embeddings and juxtapositions as if they were tamely
and mutely stereoscopic. Beyond their modern social status as architectonic phenomena,
museums are more fundamentally a staging of occasions for relating sets of appropriated
or invented phenomena, using diverse materials and methods. However, this invariably
confers an ambivalent legibility to the visible entities ostensibly foregrounded by their
framing—a situation paradoxically rendering any museological legibility itself moot,
which of course drives fundamentalist believers in the literalness of representation up
(and indeed over) the wall, as we saw in the sectarian lunacy spawned a few years ago by
the ‘Mohammed cartoon’ controversies, which continues unabated.
As an epistemological technology, a method of fabricating knowledge, interpretation
is essentially ethical and political in that its manifestations, palpably impinging upon the
perceptions of individuals, invariably have potentially unpredictable consequences for
individual and social behaviour. Moreover, the very palpability of the artifice of its own
stagecraft renders museological effects potentially construable otherwise than as (pre-
sumably) intended. In this respect, museological practice shares the core conundrum of
all artistry or artifice as such. In rendering the visible legible, art history and visual stud-
ies, for example render their own legibilities moot and problematic, bringing to light the
(often covert) agency of those who would claim a given interpretation as true or faithful
to its alleged intentions. This is a key issue widely occluded in the earliest stagings of
and claims for visual culture studies a quarter-century ago, although within the then-
current critiques of art historicism such issues were indeed quite prominent.8 In effect,
interpretation’s own artistry renders its productions moot: a situation with fundamental
political, philosophical and theological consequences, few of which continue to engage
contemporary visual studies except on its disciplinary margins.
While some commentators—recently, for example Rancière—have claimed that the
supposedly mute palpability of artworks renders them not only ‘democratically available’
188 Art and Visuality

to audiences but also available as models (simulacra) of empowerment, not only is its
supposed opposite in fact equally probable, but the antithesis as such is palpably prob-
lematic. As indeed is the customary distinction between a staged artefact and its written
or verbal inflections.
I want to contextualize recent critical museological practices by drawing attention to
the nature and functions of interpretation (‘reading’) as a practice always ambivalently
sanctioned and proscribed, linking it to long-standing political and cultural conflicts and
impasses regarding the proper social roles of artistic (re)presentation—a dilemma as old
at Plato’s (not unconflicted) attempt to banish the mimetic arts from his ideal city, and
as recent as violent religious conflicts over the proper uses and interpretations of artistry,
where the paradoxical ambiguity of signification has quite rightly unhinged true believ-
ers in literalism.
I would like to reckon with these fraught interconnections using a no doubt rather
odd and seemingly counterintuitive image, that of the pantograph, a term which is famil-
iar in two principal ways. It commonly refers to (a) an instrument for copying a drawing
or plan at a different and usually larger scale by a system of linked and jointed rods, and
(b) a jointed metal framework for conveying a current to a train, tram or other electrical
vehicle from overhead wires. An image made with a pantograph enlarges or magnifies
the original. And a pantograph is a conveyer of power to mobile machinery.
I am reminded here of how, on the occasion of visiting her cousin Elizabeth, the
pregnant Mary described her feelings pantographically, as follows:

My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my saviour.
For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me and holy is his Name.9

This is an extraordinary declaration, for (as with our encounter with museum images
and objects) what is portrayed was no simple one-way encounter between the immortal
and the mortal, but rather in fact a claim of mutual magnification. The text literally says
that Mary’s soul (psyche; anima) enlarges (megalunei; magnificat) a divine spirit that in turn
magnifies her. She becomes a vessel for the divine spirit (her ‘saviour’) so that, in conveying
that spirit, channeling it, it in turn enlarges her own soul or spirit. By becoming a divine
conveyance, she is no longer a mere ‘handmaiden’ of that spirit, for she will give birth to
its announced embodiment, a mortal or corporeal manifestation of that spirit. From being
herself the issue of mere mortals, her own issue is to be an embodied divinity.
What is encountered with an object, image or artefact in the museum is similarly of
course no simple or direct confrontation, but the mooting of a possible conveyance in
which encountering subjects are enriched and transformed, and, following the analogy,
in that encounter the ‘spirit’ of the object is itself magnified.
Does this make idolatrous the individual’s relationship to museological (or other
artefactual) material? In acceding to the power (spirit, soul . . .) of the object, is the
­viewing/using subject in fact attributing agency to it, or attributing a simulacrum of
Beyond Museology 189

agency; mooting an agency?10 Also, in doing one or the other, magnifying its assumed
spirit, are we (is it) magnifying (or mooting the magnification of ) our own spirit(s)? Did
T. S. Eliot’s words in The Wasteland, ‘In the room the women come and go, speaking of
Michelangelo’ give a hint that magnification has just taken place; that the speaking con-
stitutes a magnifying and extension of the spirit of the artist?
Interpretation or verbal articulation, then, might appear to be a recasting of the an-
cient ars longa, vita brevis as ars longa, ergo vita longa (or even longissima)? Interpretation
or critique as ceremonial incantation revivifying a palpably mute artefact? Following the
analogy may raise some not-so-easily articulated mootings of relations between artistic
and theological agency, if staged (museological) encountering positions the encounterer
as an echo chamber amplifying the spirit of the artificer.
It begins to sound like an echo of the architectonic stagecraft of the ancient Greek
theatre, where you may recall were strategically sited amongst several ascending semicir-
cular rows of stone seats, a series of (harmonically calculated) hollow urns which acous-
tically amplified and passed on the voices of the actors down below on the small circular
speaking, singing and dancing stage (khoros), so that those on the uppermost tiers of the
theatre could hear the performers as if they were physically closer to the drama’s action.
In the quotation from Luke, Mary’s soul (psyche; anima) magnified the Lord, yet her
spirit (pneuma; spiritus)—an analogous but not exactly the same entity—(her breath) re-
joiced in her saviour-impregnator. Magnifying and rejoicing from the same individual.
Magnifying as rejoicing perhaps. There is a window here into confronting the perennial
problem of the fetish, or the aesthetic/theological conundrum of idolatry (that rabbit-
hole into which all true believers may fall), and by extension the nature of museological
staging and encountering.
Shall I then be a vessel for the soul/spirit of (say) Picasso in my encounter with Guer-
nica, and is my bodily encounter with it a vicarious involvement in what is re-presented?
Are we not here confronted with the (essentially problematic) nature of museological
aims and functions in relation to the expectations and desires for resolution and fixity of
sense on the part of the visitor? The establishment of a field of expectations; of the antici-
pation of interpretation; of a palpable sense of fixing in place a measured/measureable
relationship between subjects and objects. A tense space-time of mutual confrontation,
solicitation and seduction. As one of the most widely distributed Anglophone museum
bookstore guides to viewing art so aptly put it, ‘Do your best at all times to let the work
of art speak directly to you with a minimum of interference or distraction’ (Finn 1985).
We are entreated, are we not, to believe in the efficacy of this encountering, in anticipa-
tion of (spiritual) magnification?
I walked into this gallery a (mere) citizen, perhaps a mere anonymous handmaiden of
a great immaterial Spirit dwelling in a sidereal realm presumably ‘outside’ the museum
(if sidereal realms can be situated by GPS-location concretely relative to other realms).
But right there, confronted with the Guernica, I become an echoing urn for Picasso’s
spirit—Pablo not only living on as echoed in and by me, but being truly aggrandized by
my encounter with what breathed ‘life’ into the effects of his artistry. My soul (psyche)
doth magnify Picasso, and, what’s more, my spirit’s breath or voice (pneuma) rejoices in
190 Art and Visuality

him. I am indeed bettered by the encounter, by becoming (wilfully or circumstantially)

an instrument of the transmission and dissemination and magnification of Pablo’s sprit.
Of the artistry or artifice of that spirit.
Was Mary bettered by her gossip with her cousin, re-announcing her own annun-
ciation by articulating her recent experience? Was Elizabeth herself (like second-hand
smoke) duly affected (magnified) as a result? Was Mary’s transformed state the origin
or product of her conversation with Elizabeth? Or ambivalently both: sometimes, after
all, conversations may indeed be quite literally productive of what is being pronounced.
What exactly was John Soane doing in writing a ‘history of my house’ in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields in 1812, prior to its full habitation and transformation into a museum, and see-
ing it in ruins as if discovered by antiquarians of the future trying to make sense of what
this artefact might have been? (arguably the first ‘science fiction’ autobiographic novella,
as I argued in my Slade Lectures at Oxford a few years ago).11

Narcissus in the Gallery

Is my ingestion of Pablo’s spirit an instance of techno-lust, or even a case of tech­
nophagism?12 The story of Narcissus reminds us that merging with one’s (or any) im­
age is not so much an ultimate autobiographic act, perhaps, but anti-autobiographic.
Self-ingestion would seem to defeat the purpose of ingestion, namely to maintain or
magnify (grow) oneself by assimilating raw material. Narcissus’s aims were evidently no
more nor less gastronomic than those of other lovers. I devour you with my eyes: what
of lovers of imagery? Consumers of museological materials? We are (decorously) en-
treated to keep such materials at arm’s length; but what of biographical matter? Is that
a different matter after all? Does being confronted with (auto) biographical material
change the nature of the relationship?
We are perhaps inevitably returned to Hegel’s definition of art (indebted in all re-
spects to Plato, lest we forget) as the sensible presentation of Idea—a definition, as
Jean-Luc Nancy (1996) nicely put it a decade and a half ago, yet not without a certain
(perhaps unappreciated) irony, that haunts philosophy—not to speak of all those disci-
plinary discourses swirling in its wake (museology, art history, aesthetics, archaeology,
visual culture studies) which have been instituted in modern times to make the invisible
(Idea) visible, and henceforth legible. Legibility, that is as translation; as embodiment.
A thoroughly theological problem, of course—or more specifically the key problem of
(monotheist) theologies in the wake of Plato (not to speak of Moses confronted by those
(no doubt famished) wasteland worshippers of that gilded bovine, that exquisitely apt
idol of wish-fulfillment; Moses didn’t quite get it, or maybe he really did realize the real,
terrifying danger of (the hunger for) art)—all permanently confounded by the perenni-
ally irresolvable war between iconophilia and iconoclasm, from (well before) Byzantium
up to or down to the present.13
The West’s problem with ‘art’ (its own invention, after all) as a key problem in
­philosophy/theology: perhaps the central problem. Plato’s own ambivalence about this
even in the wake of a need to banish (mimetic) art from the city; to insulate and close
Beyond Museology 191

the eyes of the ordinary citizen from the semiotic indeterminacy (framed as promiscuity)
and interpretative ambiguities of artifice.14 The (Christian, Muslim, Jewish) monothe-
ist’s worst nightmare.
Let us perhaps understand Mary’s issue, then, as a party to, perhaps even an uncanny
mooting of a resolution of that unresolvable conversation; a mooting as mediating the
rhetorical/extra-rhetorical distinction between matter and spirit; between the material
and immaterial; the visible and invisible; form and content; signifier and signified? The
Magnificat if you will as the philosopher’s stone of artistry where the Platonic/onto-
­theological juxtaposition between invisible and visible, between Idea and artifice, en-
dures as the necessary condition for reflection on the singularity of the autonomous ego.
The Christ as an embodiment of the philosophical conundrum of visual artifice itself:
the field of forces that is precisely mooted in museological space-time. The museum not
as a what but as a fielding of relations: an articulation of stage directions putting actor-
agents in place relative to what, precisely by their relative positioning, evokes and con-
jures up a stage which perforce becomes the backdrop or screen to action.
As epistemological technologies of virtual space-time, museums, collections, exhibi-
tions and expositions do indeed expose this relationship as a distance tensely maintained
between the ego of the viewing subject and the viewed object, image or artefact. A dis-
tance that needs no external electronic sensing device for alarms to ring if contracted too
much: the pantographic maintenance of the socialized ego is sufficient for the distance
to be maintained so that the magnifying process may proceed. Yet the effect of this ‘ac-
cession to the Symbolic’15 is to keep in place the rhetorical syntax of content, significa-
tion, meaning: the very artifice of the opposed poles of ‘subjects-and-objects’.
It was Samuel Weber who observed, in his 1996 book Mass Mediauras, a study com-
missioned by the Australian Commission on the Reform of Higher Education in a
‘multicultural’ or ‘postcolonial’ environment (a veritable Antipodean Lyotardian ‘post-
modernism’ moment (Lyotard 1979)), that

If the institutionalization of the subject/object relation—the matrix of representa-

tional thinking [I should add here, a supremely parochial, Eurocentrist division of
labour]—is the result of the emplacement that goes on in and as modern technology,
then those same goings-on undermine the objectivity upon which the matrix depends.
By determining reality as standing stock, representational thinking treats objects as
calculable ‘data,’ as ‘information’ to be taken into account or accounted for. Thus,
whether in economic practice or in modern art, objects are de-objectified by becom-
ing increasingly subject to the calculations of a subjective will struggling to realize its
representations and thereby to place itself in security.

He then went on to say:

But . . . there are no secure places. Emplacement itself remains tributary to that move-
ment of unsecuring that it ostensibly seeks to escape or to ignore. (Weber 1996: 73, my
emphasis)
192 Art and Visuality

I’d like to juxtapose this with Derrida’s assertion, some twenty years ago, that ‘a di-
vine teleology secures the political economy of the Fine-Arts’ (Derrida 1981a). You may
well ask of Derrida what exactly, then, was that ‘political economy’? or for that matter
that ‘divine teleology’—isn’t art history after all, and from when it was but a gleam in
the eyes of its Enlightenment progenitors, if not for some of its Renaissance human-
ist precursors, a divine teleology, with visual culture, as art history’s latter-day wake, its
­after-math, even its after-mathesis. I’d also like us to think these two things together with
Emmanuel Levinas’s equally implacable insistence, repeated one might say all during the
rises and wanes of the modernist history of art history and postmodernist visual culture
(and indeed alluded to in Derrida’s own tribute to Levinas that he read at the latter’s
burial), that there is a form of truth that is totally alien to us, that we do not discover
within ourselves, but that calls on us from beyond us, requiring of us the need to leave
the realms of the known and the same; the recognition of otherness—of otherness as
such, which is what, he insisted, in fact actually constitutes us as ethical beings? You don’t
need to boil down the epistemological broth of aesthetics to find ethics at the bottom of
the pot, all you have to do is smell and taste the broth itself.
On which, of course, hinges the fate of visual studies.
The situation might seem to be too complex to successfully articulate, but in reality it’s
quite stunningly simple: Narcissus is held in check by the (unquenchable) desire to prolong
and maintain his own narcissism, which is precisely what would be drowned if not drawn
out and perpetuated in a semi-idolatrous state of suspension. Maintaining the tension, sus-
pending dis-belief, keeping the real at a manageable distance in the face of anxiety about
the fragility of the ego’s mirror imagery—a fragility (like that of the Catholic eucha-
rist) that nonetheless makes possible imagining (imaging) its non-fragility and apparent
permanence (its avatar) in virtual museological (and ecclesiastical) space-time. (Auto)
biographical museological matter (perhaps there’s no other completely distinct kind, re-
ally) is a mooting or reckoning with the question of embodiment, of magnification, of
transmission and dissemination, of interpretation. Of the artifice of interpretation. The
dream of science and the dream of meaning: the dream of the science of meaning, as
someone (Derrida no doubt) once put it in another but not unrelated context.

Making the Legible Visible

Let me backtrack one more time and lay a fresh deck of cards on the table. I began a
series of lectures I gave a few years ago in Oxford with the following words, which I’ll
repeat here, since it has been haunting me ever since and remains a kind of conundrum,
or even a Borromean knot (to speak through Lacan for a moment) which I’ve been try-
ing to untie, and if not actually disentangle (to disentangle a Borromean knot you have
to cut one of the four strands, leaving you with three unattached strands (art history,
visual culture, museology, perhaps?)), and which continues to call out to me to rotate it
and peer at it from many directions. This is what I said:

At the heart of that two-century-old practice of the modern self we call art, the ‘science’
of which we might once have liked to have called art history (or perhaps museology,
Beyond Museology 193

art history’s chief allomorph, or even ‘visual culture’, that other highly commodified
method of avoiding the impossibilities of representation), and the ‘theory’ of which
we may still wish to call aesthetics, or sociology, or even philosophy, [at the heart of
all this] lie a series of knots and conundrums, the denial of which constitutes the very
relationship between ‘subjects and objects’ naturalized in circular fashion and kept in
perpetual play by the ‘disciplinary’ machinery; the epistemological technology, of art
history.
It is precisely this denial that has grounded, legitimized, and institutionalized that
shadow discourse of aesthetic philosophy or ‘theory’ which the art historical imagina-
tion, in varying ways over these two centuries, has continued to project as a ‘transcen-
dence’ of its own (simultaneously co-constructed) disciplinary abjection. We need not
be surprised that a discipline can be grounded in denial, since disciplinarity as such (as
I said at the beginning above) is founded upon the occlusion of difference and hetero-
geneity; on explicit fragmentings and channelings of vision. (Preziosi 2003: 1)

The academic discipline(s) of art history and visual culture studies, from one per-
spective the most rigorous and encyclopedic ‘institutionalization(s) of the subject/object
relation’ as such, to borrow Weber’s words, has evolved historically by living on the hori-
zon of a virtual future, in a curious space-time of the future perfect tense—as if (as pro-
fessions) they shall have been the ‘practice’ of a philosophy (or a concept or theory which
some may continue to call aesthetics), and in so doing, in approaching (whilst never
quite reaching) its (their) asymptotic point or horizon of completion, it/they perpetu-
ally reconstitute(s) and reiterate(s) the problematic of its/their irresolvable foundational
dilemma. This is part of what may be meant by the idea that the only compelling vision
of the future being the failure of the present: one of the conundrums wrestled with by
Benjamin and alluded to at the beginning of this chapter.
The dilemma I’m referring to is, precisely, an irresolvable ambivalence about the consti-
tution of the self in its relation to and seemingly inextricable entailment with objects; with its
object-world; its Lebenswelt. This repetition-compulsion is played out as attempts to keep
in play contrary theories of that relationship, as I’ve noted earlier, much like the endless
and irresolvable oscillations of an optical illusion (the form of your stuff—the stuff you
either produce or consume or both—either is the ‘figure’ (emblem, symbol, character,
etc) of your truth; and/or it is not).
Keeping that ambivalence in play is, of course, a strategy of power. I am reminded
of the controversies surrounding the fielding of the essentially and deliberately am-
biguous notion of ‘terrorism’, which one cannot either rationally interrogate (as what
in the mind of some would constitute ‘appeasement’ of an ill-defined enemy) or ever
finally defeat (which would lead to admitting that we and the ‘terrorist’ live in the
same moral universe). That this political display of power is itself grounded in a re-
ligionist discourse is quite clear: moral equivalences are abhorrent also because they
question the ‘exceptionalism’ of America (or Europe, or the West) in relation to (‘ter-
rorist’) Islam.16
It is consequently no mean task—as the past two centuries of art history and of the
‘philosophy of art’ and as the past quarter-century of ‘visual culture’ have dramatically
194 Art and Visuality

demonstrated—to conceive of articulating a critically adroit historiography of a dis-

course built around such doubly compounded phantasms, let alone project for it (them)
a better institutional future. It has certainly been not a little problematic to articulate
the evolutionary development of an academic field as if it were some singular evolu-
tion of concepts or ‘theories’ of ‘art’. That is the simulacrum of the idea that ‘art’ itself
was historically the evolution of a certain residue in all things—once you subtract the
instrumental and utilitarian (and for some the sectarian and social-historical) ‘mean-
ings’ of things, as so clearly and explicitly articulated in connection with the founding
of (but not only) the Louvre Museum. That is ‘residues’ linked together (as a visual or
aesthetic ‘history’ one might say) to serve ethical and political functions in the present
in the practice of critical and museological apologists and ideologues of the new modern
nation-state.
In the latter case it should be recalled that Napoleon justified his plundering of
the treasures of Europe on behalf of Parisian institutions such as the Louvre as not
a capture but rather a liberation of the aesthetic qualities of works once held captive
(by private individuals, institutions, monasteries, churches, etc) on behalf of citi-
zens of the Republic.17 A freeing up of aesthetic properties formerly held ‘captive’ by
being embedded in the multifunctional contexts of their original production and use
(Deotte 2004). Like a visuality abstracted out of its (multimodal, multidimensional
and multifunctional) cultural praxis (visual culture studies as a Napoleonic practice?).
Is it any wonder that the critical/historical extraction of a residue from the object-
world—whether you call that the aesthetic dimension of a thing; the visual culture
of a people; the mentality of a person or people; or indeed anything from the ‘spirit
of a Folk’ to the ‘gayness of an artist’ purportedly ‘legible’ in an object—is always al-
ready foreclosed?
This is deeply problematic; which is why I would suggest that our disciplines have
been virtually indistinguishable, historically, from that prefabricated secular theolo-
gism, that desire for a magisterial voice and Archimedean leveraged position, in which
mastery is conceived of as the control over material seen as its domain; its ‘data’ (yet
another allomorph of the program of imperialism (and not only Eurocentric))—in
contrast to whatever our craft might be modeled upon (queerness?). It would behoove
us to step back and try and reconstruct the conditions that led to the invention and
naturalization of this remarkable practice of the modern subject; of the modern ‘citizen’,
we call ‘art’.
The pantograph of the vanities (indeed, the afterlife of vanity itself ) is the crux
of the issue of the poetic artifice of the museum, of the endeavour to make the vis-
ible legible; to make an object ‘speak’, as David Finn (1985) once notoriously argued.
At the end of the day—better yet, let us rather say at the end of the night (the night
of the soul, indeed)—museums permit us to see fiction as fiction, to see the fictiveness or
contingency of our world. In that respect, and not so coincidentally, museums render
distinctions between the sacred and the secular deeply and intensely problematic. Vi-
sual studies if it has a viable and responsible future will need to begin attending to
such complexities.
Beyond Museology 195

The Exit to the Museum Is Just Another

Picture on the Wall?
To recapitulate: Every mode of disciplinarity is by definition blind or deaf to what in its
purview has been obscured so as to render more effectively lucid or tellingly powerful
what it desires to socially, politically and culturally privilege. This is no less the case not
only with visual culture studies or with the history, theory and criticism of art, but also—
and more fundamentally—with visuality itself as conventionally understood not only in
Western modernity and its allomorphs and aftermaths, but also in its antecedents or an-
ticipations in Europe and elsewhere, as commonly projected by disciplinary hindsight.
In the current disquiet over the parochial nature of visual culture studies themselves,
I would like to open up here at the end of my chapter the question of what an ethically
responsible practice of cultural studies might be today which begins with a notion of syn-
aesthesia rather than with a framing of (multimodal) social and cultural behaviour as an
addition of already-reified sensory modes of knowledge-production and behaviour. And,
to ask a not-entirely-unrelated question, Can (or should) the still academically isolated
epistemological technologies of art history or visual culture studies be effectively (re)in-
tegrated into a multisensorial approach to cultural behaviour? Can the academic glass
walls still separating art history, visual studies, anthropology, ethnography, aesthetics
(etc) be shattered in the service of a genuine ethics of practice? Could the ruins of those
practices form the ground for changes that are more than mere reupholstery?
Reductionism in any guise renders up only impoverished accounts of how individu-
als come to know and do what they appear to know and do. Such impoverishments are
not without danger, and not only abstractly. In the discursive formation of art history,
for example the academically enshrined opposition between formal and contextual ‘read-
ings’ of artefacts and imagery is inherently irresolvable, and has effectively fixed in place
a tension that consequently serves to maintain political and ethical positions vis-à-vis
the object’s signification or, in the words of one art historian, evidently unaware of con-
temporary cross-cultural debates regarding the agency of (natural and humanly made)
objects, its ‘intelligence’ (Crow 1999). The oscillation of temporarily cogent modes of
modeling knowledge about artefacts may be likened to the oscillation of alternative elec-
trical charges (‘turns’, anyone?) generating electricity as a palpable phenomenon.
Knowledge is formed in everyday activities and knowing is coterminous with our
movement through the world.18 It is not ‘built up’ from data acquired at static positions
or from selected vantage points, but grows and changes with human subjects and the
world through which they move. But the challenges to fabricating such a holistic ana-
lytic practice are very great, as current debates in a number of academic fields have clearly
shown: an ‘artisanal anthropology’ of multimodal cultural behaviour—from which our
own practices would learn a very great deal—remains in its own infancy.19 And, frankly,
at present, art historians and students of visual culture have not been formally trained
to even recognize the problems that need to be faced, let alone reckon effectively with
what needs to be done to address them. What is needed is to literally make what is still
invisible palpably legible, and, indeed, unavoidable.
196 Art and Visuality

For those committed to the critical study of culture and its histories, current states
and possible futures, thinking in and about museums may be one way to appreciate,
even perhaps to actually envision artifice as artifice, with all that may entail ethically and
politically, including the possibility to change what we think we see or thought we saw.
This is no simple or innocent task. But we have always known, have we not, that muse-
ums, like all forms of human artifice, including sciences, histories and religions, are very
dangerous things indeed, not to be taken lightly in any age, least of all our own.

Further Reading
Marchand, Trevor H. J. 2010. Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relations
between Minds, Bodies, and Environment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
16/1. http:www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/1233338948.
Preziosi, Donald. 2003. Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Preziosi, Donald. 2009. The Art of Art History, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farago. 2004. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. London:
Ashgate.
Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farago. 2011. The Idea of Art. Oxford: Blackwell.

Notes
The first chapter epigraph is from Homi Bhabha, ‘Dance This Diss Around’, in Maurice
Berger, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998), 48.
1. A perusal of one of the foundational Anglophone texts of postmodern visual studies, Fos-
ter (1983), as well as publications such as the New York City art journal October (1979 – )
(founded by disaffected Art Forum magazine critics such as Foster), and especially the lat-
ter’s notorious ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’ (October, Summer 1996), makes this
quite clear. The latter contributed to remarkably agonistic ‘pro- and anti-visuality’ tracts
in the emerging field of visual culture studies and the latter’s relationship to art histori-
cal theory and criticism, in particular that field’s commitment to aesthetic formalism. It
seemed very apparent at the time (a feeling undiminished by hindsight) that many of
the disputes of the period were generationally grounded, occluding instrumentalist pro-
and anti-Greenbergian approaches to art criticism, in particular the enduring problem of
how to rescue professional art criticism from the devastating implications of the European
(and especially Francophone) ‘theory’, which ironically some of the October magazine con-
tributors had a role in translating for audiences west of the Atlantic. The notable lack (or
marginalization) of social-historical and gender-attentive discourse in these and many sub-
sequent texts was not unremarked at the time: for a typical reaction to the Anti-Aesthetic
volume see Aronowitz (1983). Not a few of the anthologies of visual studies that appeared
in the USA in the wake of these events perpetuated the instrumentalisms and parochial dis-
ciplinary interests of that period, a trend still evident in some recent American anthologies,
notoriously the recent Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Diko-
vitskaya 2005), whose editor explicitly takes up a ‘pro-visual’ (in that case more precisely a
pro-formalist art historical) slant.
Beyond Museology 197

2. On which see Derrida ((1972) 1981), on the pharmakon as cure and poison. Visual stud-
ies as art history’s pharmakon. The point to consider and reckon with here is whether as a
‘cure’ of art history’s Eurocentrism, in reifying visuality as an abstraction out of the multi-
modality and multifunctionality of actual sociocultural praxis, visual culture studies may
in fact have ‘poisoned’ the latter precisely by its abstract reductionisms. The issue is taken
up further below.
3. The first book, tentatively titled Enchanted Credulities: Art, Religion, and Amnesia, was con-
tracted with Routledge, and builds upon a long-standing interest in the connections between
artistry and religiosity, most recently enlivened by controversies surrounding the infamous
‘Mohammed cartoon’ controversy in Europe and ancient, enduring and seemingly irresolv-
able disputes on the aims and functions of representation in various monotheist traditions.
The second book project is a jointly authored volume (with Claire Farago) commissioned by
Blackwell for its ‘Manifestoes’ series of books in various fields, the first in that series being
Terry Eagleton’s 2000 manifesto The Idea of Culture. Our book, on ‘The Idea of Art’, inter-
rogates the premises of the idea of the series itself.
4. Among many discussions of this Benjaminian perspective see Krapp (2004), especially chap-
ter 2, ‘Future Interior: Walter Benjamin’s Envelope’, 31 – 52.
5. The volume, co-authored with Claire Farago, is currently in production (Oxford: Black-
well, 2011). The first volume in that series was Terry Eagleton’s The Idea of Culture (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000). Our volume opens with a critique of the idea of the series itself, and con-
siders what it might mean ethically and politically today to write a ‘manifesto’ on art.
6. As remarked about throughout the present volume, the literature on visuality and visual cul-
ture is quite immense, and even more so as it bleeds into, extends and follows on its own paths
in the wake of the evolution of the academic discipline of art history. This chapter will not deal
with that tradition except at certain critical points. A useful introduction to what has been at
stake, and an important landmark in attending to these issues, and especially as a questioning
of tacit assumptions about the universality of visuality, is Brennan and Jay (1996).
7. A subject taken up at length in my forthcoming Routledge volume Enchanted Credulities:
Art, Religion and Amnesia, synopsized in an article of the same name (Preziosi 2009b).
8. Among these, see the following, which also include extensive references to these debates:
­Preziosi (1989, 2003, 2004, 2009a).
9. English Book of Common Prayer, Luke 1:46 – 9. In the original Greek, megalunei he psyche
mou ton Kurion, kai hegalliasen to pneuma mou epi to Theo to soteri mou . . . oti epoiesen moi
megala ho dunatos, kai hagion to onoma autou.
10. The situation here hinges on distinguishing between equation and adequation or approxima-
tion (aequatio vs. adaequatio), echoing the sixteenth-century dispute over the interpretation
of the reality of the eucharist. When the priest intones the words hoc est corpus meum (this
is my body), at and for that very moment is this piece of bread literally (Catholic) Christ’s
body, or is it symbolically and metaphorically, ‘representation’ (Protestant) of that body?
11. Described in detail passim in Preziosi (2003), especially chapter four, ‘The Astrolabe of the
Enlightenment’.
12. I’ll make this a technical term for art (tekhne)-consumption, beyond the mere eating of the
menu.
13. See above, n. 4. The cited work continues a discussion on the issue of iconophobia and
art as inciting contemporary sectarian violence, especially in the wake of the infamous
‘Mohammed cartoon’ controversy in Denmark and Europe, which was taken up in my
198 Art and Visuality

keynote address to the international conference on the critique of religion (Gudløs! Reli-
gionskritk i dag) at the University of Copenhagen, 29 – 30 January 2007. The conference
papers were published in 2008 (Preziosi 2008); my talk appeared (in Danish) as ‘Fortryllet
lettroenhed—kunst, religion og hukommelestab’ (Art, Religion, and Amnesia).
14. As made quite clear by Agamben (1999), 4; see also Preziosi (2009b). Simon Critchley
(2005) makes similar points in his book Things Merely Are, through an extended meditation
on the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
15. The Lacanian reference is important here; see the recent study by Nusselder (2009), espe-
cially chapter 4, ‘The Body in Space’, 83 – 97, and in particular part 4.2.3, ‘Affective Avatars’,
p. 93, where the author notes ‘The (spatial) differentiation between the body as organism
and the body as image constitutes the ego as a necessary alienation from the direct sensory
sensations . . . The imaginary ego retains strong elements of illusion and lure, but it has pow-
erful effects. It “virtualizes” our direct sensations by making our awareness of them an effect
of the imaginary.’
16. A useful discussion of this may be found in Kandutsch (2010).
17. One thinks of course of Lord Elgin’s marbles: Elgin, perhaps, being once thought of as lib-
erating the Parthenon sculptures from their Ottoman owners on behalf of (some) future
Greek Republic, subsequently held ‘in trust’ (captive) by the British Museum, which of
course continues to refuse to give them back to Athens because of its own wider obligation
to humankind (Cuno 2004; Kimmelman 2010).
18. On which see Ingold (2001).
19. See the excellent review of current literature by Marchand (2010).

References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert. Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press; original ed. l’uomo senza contenuto. Milan: Quodlibet, 1994.
Aronowitz, Stanley. 1983. So What’s New? The Postmodern Paradox’, Voice Literary Supplement
(October): 14 – 15.
Brennan, Teresa and Martin Jay, eds. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Per-
spectives on Sight. New York and London: Routledge.
Critchley, Simon. 2005. Things Merely Are. London: Routledge.
Crow, Thomas. 1999. The Intelligence of Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Cuno, James, ed. 2004. Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard
University Press.
Deotte, Jean-Louis. 2004. ‘Rome, The Archetypical Museum, and the Louvre: The Negation of
Division’, in Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the
Museum. London: Ashgate.
Derrida, Jacques. (1972) 1981. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Dissemination. Paris: Minuit; Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 61 – 172.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981a. ‘Economimesis’, Diacritics, 11/2: 3 – 25.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981b. ‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in
Jacques Derrida, Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 15 – 36.
Dikovitskaya, Margaret, ed. 2005. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Finn, David. 1985. How to Visit a Museum. New York: Abrams, 10.
Beyond Museology 199

Foster, Hal, ed. 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2001. ‘From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention’,
in H. Whitehouse (ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography.
Oxford: Berg.
Kandutsch, Carl. 2010. ‘Mechanisms of Power in the Age of Terrorism’, CTheory. Resetting
Theory. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=646.
Kimmelman, Michael. 2010. ‘Who Draws the Borders of Culture?’, New York Times, 9 May, Arts
and Leisure, 1 – 18.
Krapp, Peter. 2004. Déjà vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory. Minneapolis and London: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1979. La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit.
Marchand, Trevor H. J. 2010. Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation be-
tween Minds, Bodies, and Environment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16/1.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123338948.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1996. The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
88 f.; original ed. Les Muses, Galilee, 1994.
Nusselder, Andre. 2009. Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Preziosi, Donald. 1989. Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven, CT
and London: Yale University Press.
Preziosi, Donald. 2003. Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity.
The 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford. Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press.
Preziosi, Donald. 2004. In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics. With a Commentary by
Johanne Lamoureux. London: Routledge.
Preziosi, Donald. 2008. ‘Fortryllet lettroenhed—kunst, religion og hukommelestab’ (Art, Reli-
gion, and Amnesia), in Malene Busk and Ida Crone (eds), Gudløs! Religionskritk i dag. Co-
penhagen: Tiderne Skrifter, 203 – 18.
Preziosi, Donald. 2009a. The Art of Art History, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Preziosi, Donald. 2009b. ‘Enchanted Credulities: Art, Religion and Amnesia’, X-Tra. Contempo-
rary Art Quarterly, 11/1: 18 – 25.
Weber, Samuel. 1996. Mass Mediauras. Form. Technics. Media. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
 8

Cubism and the Iconic Turn:

A Climate of Practice, the
Object and Representation
Ian Heywood

Why does Cubism matter to the contemporary study of visual culture? It’s hardly new,
dating back to the early years of the twentieth century, it has been much written about,
and many Cubist works have settled seamlessly into international collections of modern
art and the history they document. Having long ago ceased to provoke shock and anger,
hasn’t it also been pretty well understood as just another episode in the development of
modernism, significant only to the history of visual art?
Cubism, and in particular Cubist collage (sometimes called ‘synthetic cubism’),
marks an early and decisive contact between modernist high art and everyday visual cul-
ture.1 This chapter will maintain that it continues to raise many important issues for art
practice and history, and visual culture studies. For example it would be easy to think
of Cubist collage as a critically destructive attack on traditional painting, a denial of its
integrity and distinctiveness, the knowledge and skills it requires and its purported elite
cultural status. In the case of collage, the supposedly disruptive materials were derived
largely from the popular visual culture of the day. Was it, then, an attack on the preten-
sions of painting and high art somehow motivated or authorized by the artefacts and
spirit of popular visual culture? Was it the ironical, ambiguous display of the material
and practical mechanisms of painterly likeness, or perhaps an early discovery of the ut-
terly arbitrary character of the painterly sign? Or was it a reflexive critique of certain lim-
itations, contingent rigidities or, to put it bluntly, decadence in the tradition of painting
conducted by a progressive avant-garde, a critique which, despite being in some ways
located within high art, undermined art’s capacity to produce signs of cultural distinc-
tion, to generate the cultural underpinning for supposed qualitative differences between
social and political strata? In this chapter we examine the view that Cubist collage was
an attack on painting using weapons forged by fine de siècle visual culture. For some, the
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 201

result of this assault was a renewed, invigorated approach to painting, while for others it
demonstrated that the era of painting was over.
Yet it is possible to question this narrative, reversing a pattern of negative judgement.
I shall argue that Cubism is a supreme demonstration of the resilience of painting, its ca-
pacity to take into itself alien materials and processes, some derived from popular visual
culture, using them in ways that change what its very success demonstrates to be merely
contingent codes and conventions. This radical act, revolutionary but not solely destruc-
tive, gives rise to collage and construction, new forms of art that revitalize and expand
the deeper structures of methods and values embedded in painting.
Cubist collage also has something to say at the level of content through its novel em-
brace of fragments of an emerging mass market in visual commodities. These bits and
pieces allude strongly to scenes of public amusement—cafes, food and drink, conversa-
tion, flirtation, music, news and gossip—and to the enjoyment of private life, in par-
ticular the comforts and visual pleasures of everyday domestic life then being developed
and more widely distributed by innovations in home decorations and furnishing. The
look of everyday life was changing rapidly, as new products, new visual technologies and
visual events appeared in urban settings. The visual environment of everyday life, which
included many images and signs referring to, exploiting and undercutting the history
of painting, drawing and other craft occupations, was being mobilized as never before.2
Yet it does not follow from any of this that Cubist collage was designed either to subvert
painting and high art through an alignment with the purportedly antagonistic or level-
ling instincts of popular culture, or conversely to reject out of hand the new, commod-
itized forms of leisure in the name of elite culture.
Crow (1996) argues that at the core of modern culture is the tension in capitalism
between destruction and creation, a phenomenon sharply visible in modernist art, and
in particular in the repeated taming and accommodating of avant-garde transgressions
by the dynamic, integrating force of capitalist mass culture. The approach adopted here
maintains, however, that visual art is important to the study of visual culture in all its
forms, providing a uniquely concentrated, rigorous practical enquiry into vision itself,
and what it is like to see the modern world in a modern way.
The influence of postmodernism, semiology, poststructuralism and what will be dis-
cussed below as ‘visual cultural studies’ is waning, with new theories and outlooks jos-
tling for position.3 This interregnum is a propitious moment for treating visual culture
studies as a forum for different interests and approaches to social and cultural phenom-
ena possessing a significant visual dimension to meet and exchange insights and ideas. It
is a moment not only for thinking about the visual, but also attempting to understand
the thinking embedded in visual things, particular kinds of reflection that resist capture
in words, numbers, concepts and categories. The visual arts, particularly painting and
drawing, have a long tradition not only of looking carefully at and recording the visible
world, but also scrutinizing vision. Paul Cézanne’s influence on modern painters was
profound precisely because of his practical reflexivity, particularly his worry about being
able to ‘fix’ perception in an authentic way, his dogged struggle to reconcile the act of
202 Art and Visuality

recording with the event of seeing (Merleau-Ponty 1993: 59 – 75). If nothing else, the
longevity and intensity of the scrutiny embedded in painting and drawing make them
critical to any visual culture studies to which reflexivity about seeing is important.

Art’s Crises, Cultural Theory and

Hypochondriacal Reflection
Had painting in France, in the early years of the twentieth century, entered a crisis, either
by its own logic or because of innovations by leading practitioners? This is a common way
of seeing not only Cubism, but also other important moments in the history of modern
art. While the tropes of an unfolding inner logic on the one hand and crisis on the other,
with in some versions the former directly leading to the latter, haunt the history of modern
art, their nature, extent and gravity often seem elusive. For example do we mean by crisis
the onset of a profound but temporary turbulence, with modernism representing a return
to a kind of aesthetic normality, albeit one marked fundamentally by the preceding trauma?
Or is art’s history during this period a series of related but different crises, which contribute
to the transgressive and increasingly divergent paths of different media and practices? Or
again, is there one, chronic underlying crisis, from which art has yet to recover?
These questions highlight the idea of crisis itself, incorporating at its root a medical
meaning, that of a turning point in the course of an illness leading to either recovery
or death. While this image may seem exaggerated or far-fetched, from Hegel onwards
writers have pointed out the ways in which visual art has been troubled by anxiety about
its health, even the suspicion that it is undergoing its own death (Hegel 1975 (Lectures
on Aesthetics 1820s), Kermode 1963, Heidegger 1971, Adorno 1984, Lang 1984, Bois
1990, Danto 1987, Pippin 2005b, Geulen 2006).4
This is not the place for a full discussion of these often-complex lines of thought.
However, a popular approach to visual culture studies, let’s call it visual cultural studies,
has provided the theoretical framework behind an influential interpretation of the crisis
of art, one that links art to culture and society in a specific way.5 On this view we should
see in Cubist collage early signs of dedifferentiation, a flattening of cultural topography
caused by the disappearance of visual high art into popular visual culture, a transforma-
tion often represented as involving two motions: the collapse of supposedly elite culture
meeting the upwards thrust of popular culture. Turning to popular, consumer forms
first, the advent and growth of a form of capitalism geared to the symbolic dimension
of products meant that ordinary, useful artefacts were designed to operate as signs. Ar-
tefacts had practical functions to perform but also possessed an increasingly important
‘aesthetic’ dimension.6 Their purchase and consumption were best seen as the expres-
sive assertion, in a minority of cases contestation, of existing or new life-style identities,
which were beginning to replace the older social classes rooted in production. Lending
theoretical weight and a particular interpretation to art’s alleged crisis, visual cultural
studies sees works of art as essentially no different. Hence the only significant contrast
between art and popular culture is the ‘honesty’ of accessible, commercial mass culture
as opposed to the deceitfulness of inaccessible, elite culture.7
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 203

In visual cultural studies, then, art is often represented as having lost its aura of
taste and elevated value on the one hand and confidence in its cultural and political
potential on the other, where the latter can range all the way from cultural formations
underpinning nation states to ‘progressive’ forms of cultural intervention. Demystifica-
tion, driven by auto-critique, advanced theoretical criticism or technological or histori-
cal obsolescence, reveals modern visual art of every kind to be a niche product whose
signs of distinction are consumed by an elite expressing and reinforcing its cultural, and
hence ultimately political, power (Bourdieu 1986). The influence of semiotics from the
1970s onwards encouraged the reconceptualization of works of art as coded, ultimately
linguistic messages that naturalize or justify contingent social facts operating in the in-
terests of the powerful and wealthy. Even supposedly ‘oppositional’ art must fall under
the same suspicion. The knowledge claims of cultural studies rest on the contention that
it provides theories and methods enabling images and artefacts to be ‘read’ or decoded
for ideological content and political effect.8 This climate has encouraged many to treat
works of art as texts, which when decoded testify monotonously to their role in the re-
sidual political reality of deceptive cultural processes.
It is important not to exaggerate the direct influence on art practice of the crisis
story told by visual cultural studies and other theorists and critics. Yet by the close of the
1970s the view had been widely accepted that modernity and modernism—its supposed
official culture—had reached an impasse. Eventually a good deal of academic and popu-
lar criticism, influenced by postmodernism, poststructuralism, the new art history and
the linguistic, class and gender theories of cultural studies, and in particular by the syn-
cretic assembly of critical assumptions, concepts and themes devised by visual cultural
studies, both reflected and contributed to concrete, practical manifestations of what we
might call hypochondriacal reflection.9
For example in the 1970s the German artist Gerhard Richter, for many a key post-
modern artist, decided to paint large, religious oil paintings (based on an Annunciation
by Titian; see Figure 8.1), but what he discovered was the impossibility not only of this
kind of religious imagery but also of great painting with profound spiritual or philo-
sophical aspirations. He reports just wanting a copy of a ‘beautiful painting’. Eventually
he realized that ‘it just can’t be done any more, not even by way of a copy’ (Richter 1995:
226). Giving Richter the benefit of any doubt, let’s say he tries to summon up the condi-
tions, both internal to himself as an artist and external in the sense of referring to what
seems valid or honest once expressed (criteria evidently important to Richter), necessary
to engage authentically with this primary form of painting. In the final analysis the spe-
cifically Christian content is neither here nor there. What is important is the possibility
of visualizing and presenting a scene in which something of extraordinary importance
and beauty occurs, where this is inextricably connected to the importance and beauty of
the image and the act of seeing which reveals its significance. If we are to believe Richter,
or see his case as paradigmatic, art practice now seems doomed to disappointment with
respect to traditional and modern aspirations for its wider cultural significance, at least
aspirations that might connect its historical achievements with the goals of contempo-
rary practice.10
204 Art and Visuality

Figure 8.1 Gerhard Richter, Annunciation after Titian/Verkündigung nach Tizian, 1973, oil on can-
vas. Courtesy of the artist, © Gerhard Richter 2010. Photograph: Atelier Richter.

Yet, paradoxically, Richter insists on his ‘daily practice of painting’, on carrying on

with art as if it were still a going concern. He is well known for engaging seriously and
rigorously with a variety of styles—heroic modernist abstraction, Romantic depiction,
political engagement and so forth—but in light of some his self-reflections what results
seems critically indistinguishable from a series of exemplary failures. An exchange with
critic Jonas Storsve in 1991 makes the point clearly. Storsve formulates what Richter is
doing in terms of a contradiction between something that can ‘really be kept alive’ and
‘an empty pose’, a contradiction that cannot be evaded and so must be continually re-
peated. Richter rejects ‘contradiction’, forcing Storsve to redefine it as ‘knowing full well
that the means you are using won’t achieve what you aim for, and at the same time not
being prepared to change those means’. Richter’s reply, again denying contradiction, is
that what Storsve is talking about is ‘a perfectly normal state of affairs . . . the normal
mess if you like’. Nothing would be achieved by ‘different means and methods’, not be-
cause all are of the same value but because all are ‘similarly inadequate’ (Richter 1995:
158). Richter’s case is exemplary for Storsve and others precisely because he recognizes
this inescapable inadequacy and yet continues his dogged, daily practice.11
Sophisticated artists like Richter may have reached the conclusion that the ‘nor-
mal’ state of affairs for practice is the ‘inadequacy’ of available means and methods
either via theory or the experience of practice itself.12 Most likely, the two are con-
nected, with views on the health of practice being shaped by the rising influence of
theory from the 1970s onwards, not only in the education of artists but also setting
the ideological climate for curators and critics. Recently, however, key tenets of the
theory conducive to the hypochondriacal assessment of contemporary practice have
been questioned, in particular its evaluation of the significance of the sensory, material
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 205

singularity of works of art. I cite as evidence an essay by the prominent US art histo-
rian and theorist Keith Moxey.
Most people would associate Moxey with a critical theory and method, which, hav-
ing learned from semiotics and poststructuralism, saw itself as finally being able to free
art history from privilege and elitism, positivism and idealism. Moxey has never been, as
far as I am aware, opposed in principle to traditional art practices like painting, nor has
he advocated abandoning art history in favour of cultural studies. Rather he stands here
as a representative figure in what seemed to many a theoretical and critical consensus
about art and culture, influenced on the one hand by semiotics and poststructuralism
and on the other by cultural studies. His essay is very useful in setting out some aspects
of a shift in outlook. Two quotations give the flavour of what he proposes:

Bored with the ‘linguistic turn’ and the idea that experience is filtered through the me-
dium of language, many scholars are now convinced that we have unmediated access
to the world around us, that the subject/object distinction, so long a hallmark of the
epistemological enterprise, is no longer valid. In the rush to make sense of the circum-
stances in which we find ourselves, our tendency in the past was to ignore and forget
‘presence’ in favour of ‘meaning’. Interpretations were hurled at objects in order to
tame them, to bring them under control. (Moxey 2008: 131)

However, a new generation of scholars believes that

the physical properties of images are as important as their social function. In art his-
tory and visual studies, the terms ‘pictorial’ and ‘iconic turn’ currently refer to an ap-
proach to visual artefacts that recognises their ontological demands. Paying heed to
that which cannot be read, to that which exceeds the possibilities of a semiotic inter-
pretation, to that which defies understanding on the basis of convention, and to that
which we can never define, offers a striking contrast to the dominant disciplinary para-
digms of the recent past: social history in the case of art history, and identity politics
and cultural studies on the case of visual studies. (132)

According to Moxey, then, the ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic’ turn is a shift from representa-
tion to presentation, from reading the function of images as moments in a process of
ideological reproduction to the more complex recognition of what we might call the
rights and agency of the object, the wholeness of its material, sensory, ideational being
in its singularity, and the ways in which these characteristics influence its meaning, aes-
thetic presence and history.13
It is not possible to evaluate the strength of Moxey’s argument here, or speculate on
the consequences for visual culture studies should the ‘iconic turn’ prove influential.
Of direct concern is the connection between the prevalence of crisis talk in contempo-
rary art practice and criticism, leading to the kind of hypochondriacal reflection out-
lined in our discussion of Richter, and an image of a modernist cultural crisis circulated
by visual cultural studies. On this view, with the onset of modernism and the rise to
prominence and power of visual culture the arts are on a journey that leads inexorably
206 Art and Visuality

to postmodernism, a condition of practice premised upon the failure of modern art’s

means, methods and most profound aspirations.
Emboldened by the iconic turn we shall examine this view by considering a key epi-
sode in the development of modern art in terms of both its artistic significance and its
relationship with everyday life and culture. We want to look more closely at Cubism
and Cubist collage, and the ways in which it has been recently interpreted, in light of its
relationship with vernacular visual culture. These are of course the old questions: what
is the nature and significance of the work of art (or other cultural artefact) ‘in itself ’ or
at least in terms of the specific kind of practice to which it belongs, and how does this
practice, together with its artefacts, relate to its society? They reappear not only when
we are confronted by a new work successfully estranging itself from public expectations,
but also when we return to older art, like Cubism, that remains, for some of us at least,
enigmatic, elusive and, despite its embrace of popular cultural forms, sometimes defi-
antly obscure, but also intriguing and oddly beautiful.
No one thinks that the history of modern art is one of serene, unbroken continuity
with tradition. Far more common is the view that Cubist collage is an early moment
in modern art’s unfolding turbulence, perhaps partially inflicted by art upon itself, but
also precipitated by developments in the wider culture. But how adequate is our grasp
of Cubism and the theories of visual culture that frame its contact with selected bits and
pieces of the fin de siècle urban environment? There is a lot at stake here, not just the
relative importance of a local event in the history of modern art, but modern art itself
and its relationship to modern visual culture. Assuming that we take modern art to be an
important element of modern visual culture, then it is worth recalling T. J. Clark’s ob-
servation: the idiom that resulted from Cubism’s intense preoccupation with its devices
and goals became ‘the idiom of visual art in the twentieth century . . . Therefore all those
who wish to secure an account of modernism as a line of art, or tradition, or canon, have
had to confront Cubism pre-eminently—to spell out its purposes, and show why and
how it gave rise to such rich variations’ (Clark 1999: 175).14 The story of modern visual
culture cannot be told without something being said about Cubism.
The studies by Poggi (1992) and Clark (1999) discussed below have important, en-
lightening things to say about Cubism or Cubist collage. While both writers are art
historians, they draw on and refer to ideas and themes that outcrop widely in visual cul-
tural studies. They will assist our discussion of significant aspects of Cubist painting and
collage—without ‘writing off ’ the object in the ways we have seen Moxey criticize—and
help us to assess and review a range of different interpretations of the meaning of Cub-
ist painting and collage, and different views on the relationship between Cubism and
modern vernacular visual culture.

Objet /Table, Image/ Tableau

In order to take the object seriously we should establish some terms in which a dis-
cussion of Cubist paintings and collages can be carried out. In particular, we need
to identify three pictorial elements as they were taken up and modified by Cubism,
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 207

initially in the context of painting and drawing: the object characteristics of the work,
the opaque ground to which painted, pigmented marks are traditionally applied and
the usually shallow-box construction of the framed canvas; the picture plane, the illusory
‘front’ or transparent face of the painting perpendicular to a horizontal projection from
the principal motif or topic of interest, the boundary between pictorial illusion and the
surrounding world; and the surface, a key distinguishing phenomenon of painting, the
outcome of the relationship devised and presented by the artist and his or her materials
and processes, between ground and picture plane. It should be noted that the surface is
simultaneously sensuously visible and tangible, but also imaginary or virtual.
Cubism is a good example of modernist works in which the artist establishes as a
surface a particularly overt, dynamic relationship between ground, which in collage in-
cludes the work’s enhanced object characteristics, and the illusory order of representa-
tion, in the case of still life tables, bottles, glasses and so forth in a familiar horizontal,
intimate, quotidian spatial arrangement.15 To think of this as a simple preference in
modernist painting for shallow space misses much of the complexity. Rather, it should
be understood as the relationship between the possibility of illusory or pictorial space,
the flatness of the ground, and the real depth of the painting-as-object, the material,
physical space it occupies. This creates the possibility of an active relationship between
a surface, an image and an object dynamically charged by tensions between different
degrees of illusory depth. The viewer is assertively confronted by the tangible flatness of
the support, the material, spatial and optical presence of the artwork as an object, the
mundane physical things depicted in still life, and in Cubist collage, by the unadorned,
almost brutal appearance of the profane artefactual world of everyday life in the form of
fragments torn out of their ordinary context, and so deprived of their original use and
meaning. Collage can thus be seen to enhance a kind of uncompromising materialism
already present in Braque’s innovative emphasis on painting materials and process, for
example mixing in sand and the use of combs as spreaders. Braque and Picasso set these
dimensions to work, but do not allow any of them to dominate the logic of the image
as a whole. Picasso is peculiarly insistent on keeping all these balls in the air at the same
time16.
Cubist works of this period operate vigorously upon the difference between the pic-
ture place—the facing, vertical plane of illusory pictorial space, which can be thought
of as a transparent surface through which one sees everything the painting depicts in a
receding spatial order17—and two horizontal worlds of objects, the illusory space of the
still life that structures the picture and, in a new twist, the space of real objects applied
to the work, thus foregrounding the object characteristics of the painting itself. In this
kind of still life ordinary, everyday things arranged on a table or against a wall dominate
the horizontal world of observed objects. Moreover, through the scenes and settings they
represent and evoke, these works play with ideas of leisure, escape, the pleasures of ev-
eryday intercourse in the midst of the products of a capitalism gearing up to market and
exploit consumption, leisure and what we have subsequently come to know as life-style,
vigorously energizing visual and tactile pleasures in the process. The inert, stubborn ma-
teriality of things is emphasized, along with their capacity to mobilize desire.
208 Art and Visuality

Given these and other complexities, Cubism has provoked many explanatory and
aesthetic theories, two of which are important here.18 In the first, it is said to achieve
a higher conceptual realism by abandoning a single, fixed viewing position of largely
opaque objects in order to see through or show all round the object, thus offering a
fuller view and more complete knowledge.19 In the second, Cubism exemplifies a typical
modernist preoccupation with the self-contained, nonreferential object: the significance
of the modern work is said to lie in its material, optical presence, not its literary message
or what or how it depicts. For some who take this view, Cubism is a significant step to-
wards full-blown abstraction.20 Yet if Cubism aspires to present the art object shorn of
reference and meaning, how are we to understand Braque and Picasso’s tenacity about
representation, not only the display of its elementary constitutive forms, but also of ev-
eryday objects, scenes, settings and themes? But then again, if clarity and realism are the
goal, how are we to understand Cubism’s delight in ambiguities and paradoxes?21
Poggi discusses some of these puzzles in terms of a relationship between table and
tableau. The table is a ‘sign for the modernist aspiration for the literal object’, whereas
the tableau is ‘a sign of traditional illusion’ (1992: 86). She reports documentary evi-
dence that the Cubist circle discussed the Symbolist insistence on the independent ex-
istence or autonomy of the work of art in terms of the tableau-objet. Moreover, Picasso’s
group was well known for its love of puns and paradoxes, for which tableau proved a

Figure 8.2 Pablo Picasso, Still Life With Chair Caning, Spring 1912, oil and oilcloth on can-
vas, Museé Picasso, Paris. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2010. Photograph: Bridgeman Art
Library.
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 209

rich source. The word derives from the Latin tabula for wooden board or plank, but was
eventually extended to apply to a table or any smooth, flat surface suitable for writing or
drawing on. In France tableau eventually came to refer to a painting on a wooden panel,
and finally portable easel paintings. Thus tabula encompasses both tables and traditional
paintings (tableau).
Inspection of the chair caning in Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning, supposedly
the ‘first collage’, reveals it not to be hand-painted but a mass-produced, printed image
on oilcloth, crudely cut and stuck onto the canvas surface, shifting the work vigor-
ously towards the table or object (see Figure 8.2). Is this, then, the disruptive placing
of a piece of mundane reality—an ordinary thing—into the illusory, sacred space of an
otherwise conventional still life oil painting? The paradox is immediately apparent: this
particular fragment of the object world is designed to create an illusion, while the paint-
ing into which it is inserted cannot in any way be described as conventionally illusion-
istic. Is it possible that it was somehow meant to function as trompe l’oeil, even if only
locally within a section of the image? Yet Picasso seems to go out of his way to prevent
this, crudely painting a grey bar across the oilcloth, and making no attempt to hide the
cut edges. In other words, he ensures that we simultaneously have the illusion and see it
shattered. But again, even this interpretation needs qualification. Its colour and sharp-
ness of detail makes the chair caning jut forward, a vertical plane in front of what might
be a second, more distant picture plane located close to the painted objects, becoming
almost a repoussoir, a painted framing device like a curtain, which pushes back the il-
lusion. But Picasso offsets this effect, making the chair caning recede by means of the
overlaid grey bar, what may be diagonal shadows and the base of a glass.22
Poggi has many illuminating things to say about Cubism and Cubist collage derived
from both her historical research and direct observation, but her interpretation is also
strongly influenced by linguistic and poststructuralist theories prominent in some ap-
proaches to visual culture, notably visual cultural studies.23 It is their effect on her analy-
sis that interests us here. Visual cultural studies has often had a tendency to write off
the art object by textualizing it, making its whole significance something to be read-off
from its optical and material features. For the eclectic and reflexive visual culture studies
proposed here, however, visual works of art constitute a test case. Simply put, we need to
acknowledge and understand their optical and material features, as well as their histori-
cal character, how they belong or do not belong to their times. Neither task is easy, nor
is the question of their relationship.
In a section tellingly called ‘The Play of Identity and Difference’ Poggi begins by dis-
missing all claims for ‘realism’. Such is the profound ambiguity or impossibility of the
ways in which these objects and scenes are represented that there can be no question of
conventional cognitive or conceptual advance as their aim. At one level this seems rea-
sonable enough; it is tricky indeed to say just how Cubism helps us to see better or know
more. However, is it adequate to conclude that the unwavering insistence on representa-
tion, or at least its simulation, and the refusal to step fully into abstraction, paradoxically
signal Braque and Picasso’s negative attitude to the whole of painting up to that point
and even painting as such? Cubism does cleave to representation, and it is far from obvi-
ous that Braque and Picasso depart fundamentally from a tradition of practice premised
210 Art and Visuality

on the belief that painting as an art could refer to, and make something of value from,
a common human experience of life, via some kind of metaphoric transformation of
ordinary visual appearances. The difficulty is coming to terms with how this works out
in practice.
Poggi accurately describes these works as composed of contrasts, a ‘play of differen-
tiated signifiers: the straight edged versus the curved, the modelled versus the flat, the
transparent versus the opaque, the handcrafted versus the machine-made, the literal ver-
sus the figurative’ (1992: 78). She claims that Braque and Picasso are practically propos-
ing ‘the artificiality of art and the arbitrary, diacritical nature of its signs’ (78). The basic
argument is as follows: the whole tradition of painting as an art is about illusion; Cub-
ism is sophisticated, self-aware art that rigorously rejects mimesis (while toying with the
devices upon which it depends); hence Cubism negates, or is ironical about, painting
as an art. Put in poststructuralist terms, Cubism rejects the task of imitating the look of
the ‘organic object’, the solid, opaque, self-identical object available for imitation, in fa-
vour of a collection of discrete formal units, a bit like letters or words. These units may
be combined to create the effect of reference or meaning, but in this case at least, do
not tell us anything substantial or new, even by way of metaphor, through the look of
the objects they allude to. Indeed, by employing these elements in paradoxical and con-
tradictory ways Braque and Picasso do not give the viewer more information about the
visible world but seek to ‘undermine the traditional conventions of illusion by isolating
them and setting them in opposition’ (Poggi 1992: 46).
Do Braque and Picasso espouse some kind of literary-theoretical irony about the
very possibility of reference by resemblance, a view that calls into question the possi-
bility of their work being ‘about’ anything other than a grammatical play of signifiers?
The plausibility of this view is contradicted by the ferocity of Braque and Picasso’s con-
cern for ­particulars—not only the structure and details of the works, but also the visual
presence of the subject matter, a glass, lemon-squeezer, half a lemon, a little pot with
drinking straws and the rest—evident throughout their work.24 Also, a conscious grasp
of the power of visual contrasts, explicitly modernized by Signac and Leger, is as old as
art itself. As radicalized by Picasso in particular, the exploitation of contrast, and reflex-
ive awareness of devices and procedures found in the history of painting, do not entail
the kind of scepticism about art’s capacity to represent aspects of embodied experience
that Poggi sees as Cubism’s animating spirit. Braque and Picasso are simply not quasi-
poststructuralists avant la lettre.
In sum, Poggi finds in the table-tableau theme a ‘critique’ of the modernist idea of
the tableau-objet and traditional, illusionistic easel painting. It is undeniable that Cubism
uses elements of both approaches, allowing neither to dominate, but of itself this does
not amount to either an active negation of painting or an ironical demonstration of its
contemporary impossibility. It is certainly true that Picasso and Braque reject the author-
ity of historical convention, the received regime of pictorial resemblance and illusion,
and that they place before their audience images that result from a vigorous play with the
elements of both pictorial illusion and the modernist tableau-objet, almost, but not quite,
to the point of destruction. It is also possible to argue, on the basis of the quality of the
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 211

work produced between 1908 and 1916, that in sailing so close to the wind, in taking
such risks, Cubism forged an image-making practice of exceptional vitality.

Representation, Metaphor and Apparitions

T. J. Clark has argued that Braque and Picasso were determined that Cubism should
represent the visible world, not just in some vague, general way but with the high degree
of particularity traditionally achieved by the best painting and drawing. His conclusion,
however, is that ultimately it fails, managing only schematic allusion. Cubism is thus
‘pretence’.25 It professes to offer fresh knowledge about a new, modern world, knowledge
that has been gained by looking hard into the visible face of everyday life, then organiz-
ing, articulating and making visible this unfamiliar way of seeing through meeting the
demands intrinsic to making a successful painting. However, for Clark, Cubism falls
short of this goal because of its very radicalism, its insistence on presenting the means
of representation as such.
As a preliminary to considering this claim we should summarize, as plausibly as pos-
sible, Cubist intentions: first, to foreground not only the formal or technical machinery,
but also the brute materials of painterly representation more starkly than ever before;
second, to make an image rich and complex in different ways, encompassing both a vi-
sual or aesthetic dimension that is fresh, bold, arresting, challenging and inventive, and
also what we might call a ‘discursive’ aspect using puns, jokes and word play; third, to
forge, through the act of seeing, an image that represented truthfully how the world
is. The difficulties with which we have been preoccupied belong largely to this third
ambition.
For Braque and Picasso, the painterly image was rooted in the representation and
recognition of particularities, the conviction that what we see, represented in drawing,
painting or collage, has to have the standing and authority of a recognizable, particular
visible thing, in both what it represents and what it is. If the image is incapable of con-
vincing the viewer that he or she is looking at the likeness of a particular, as opposed to
something that brings to mind a generalized look or idea, then a metaphorical trans-
formation of one particular into another cannot take place. That is, in order to achieve
metaphorical transformation, a shape recognizable as the likeness of a visible thing must
be modified, lending it new significance and intensity. Without the likeness there is
nothing for metaphor to work on.26
Clark judges that Cubism fails in this basic task. The machinery of representation,
and the adventitious details and motifs (all those moustaches, buttons, pipes and so
on), almost pushed into the face of the viewer, announce the arrival of something that
should be recognizable and particular, able to disclose something important in its sin-
gularity. However, in refusing unambiguous representation, the appearance of a sub-
stantial particular anchored in everyday appearances and experience, the ground floor
of metaphorical transformation, and by insisting instead on the priority of the play of
representational devices, Cubism offers the viewer only schematic allusion, something
equivalent to a sketch or diagram.
212 Art and Visuality

Clark’s underlying idea seems to be as follows. In the early years of the twentieth cen-
tury a new social order, a new reality for human being-in-the-world, is emerging. For
some modernists, grasping the new reality required seeing it for what it was—because
seeing is a primary way of knowing—and that meant seeing it through modern eyes.
However, the radical reflexivity inherent in modernity entails recognition that ways of
seeing are both historically relative and constructive; as constructive interpretations they
are a constituent, formative part of the orders to which they belong. Modernity has revo-
lutionary consequences not only for what Marxists like Clark refer to as the means and
relations of production, but also for modes of sensory apprehension. It would follow,
therefore, that the new way of seeing, which would reveal the reality of modernity, is
embedded in emerging ways of life, and unless it is disembedded, dug out and grasped
as such, we will fail to release the full promise of the new world.
If we are unable to see the life around us properly it is because we cling to old ways
of seeing. The modern way of seeing does not present itself as something novel to look
at, like a locomotive, a shopping arcade or the Eiffel Tower. Rather, it has to be worked
out, brought fully into the world, and Braque and Picasso believed visual art capable of
achieving this. You begin by looking hard, not only at ordinary visible things, but also at
how one looks and represents what there is to be seen. The way of seeing embedded in
older life and art, its formal structure or grammar, must be isolated, appraised, rejected
or augmented as necessary, and set to work. The problem for Clark is simply that isolat-
ing the visual means of production from their product leaves the Cubist image adrift,
arbitrary, and the inevitable alternatives, relentlessly and often anxiously explored by Pi-
casso, are a slide into what Clark sees as the elegant vacuity of grids or, now bereft of any
defence against fantasy and idiosyncrasy, a kind of manic inventiveness.27 Put in some-
what different terms, the modern tendency to objectify the senses and mechanize mean-
ing leads to confusion between seeing and making. In this case, the intense reflexivity of
Cubist seeing leads to the techniques and devices or praxis of image making monopoliz-
ing the field of vision and the occluding of the visible world.
Clark misses something here: the ghostly reappearance of visible things. Certainly
the best Cubist pieces are inseparable from the questions and paradoxes they pose. These
marks, lines and surfaces could perhaps be that jug, bottle and glass arranged in that
way, something we might have seen in an artists’ café on an April evening in Paris, but
does the image convince sufficiently for metaphor to take hold? The talent, skill and in-
ventiveness of Braque and Picasso persuade the spectator that Cubism has the capacity
to achieve whatever kind of representation is wanted. Hence, if there are indeed real dif-
ficulties with Cubist mimesis this might suggest either that it has in some way repudi-
ated representation or that the viewer is at fault for not cottoning on. As we have seen,
popular alternative interpretations try to resolve this difficulty through their proposals
of higher conceptualism realism, progress towards complete abstraction, or a kind of
reflexive self-disenchantment, irony and the open play of signifiers. If none of these sat-
isfy, we are left to question the image by looking hard and long at its facets, edges, shad-
ows, impasto, collaged fragments and so forth, searching for a solid presence that will
not leave our imagination roaming and unsettled. Put more positively, the Cubist image
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 213

seems to demand from the viewer that imagination precedes recognition.27 Braque and
Picasso’s fierce engagement with quotidian things, the will to representation evident in
their relentless exploration of the means and materials of art, leads to the everyday, vis-
ible world’s spectral reappearance. These ghostly entities are not of the past, but belong
to the present or the future. While they seem to be what they appear to be, they also lack
something: substance, full corporeal life, the capacity to participate.
Yet ghosts often have a message or secret to impart, revealed to their intended recipi-
ent only through anxious interrogation. The various theories prompted by Cubism seem
to be just this. However, Braque and Picasso did not intend Cubism to ‘pose questions’.
On the contrary, they were after answers. Nor is it being suggested that this ghostly re-
appearance of everyday experience, of life at the point where it is at its most substantial,
material and embodied, but also at its most ephemeral and subjective, has an immedi-
ate, neat application to other aspects of visual culture. It is a disclosure specific to art of
this kind.
The spectral visibility Cubism lends to everyday life suggests a theme that outcrops
elsewhere in twentieth-century art, literature and philosophy, a suspicion that moderns
are not fully what they seem to be, that there is a widespread falseness and debility be-
cause modern societies fail to provide sufficiently convincing guidance about what to
believe, how to go on, what to do.29 This is not due to a failure to regulate life; there are
instructions, scripts, rules and norms aplenty, behind which lie the division of labour,
highly rationalized institutional roles, the replacement of ascribed by achieved identity
and sophisticated procedural reasoning, or more recently under the ‘new capitalism’ the
direct application of power unfiltered by bureaucratic structures. Formulae, prescrip-
tions, procedures and directives on the one hand, and on the other guidance for self-
help, DIY identity, cognitive therapy, techniques of ‘positive thinking’, and scripts and
choreographies for successful living are not enough, however, failing to vanquish the
danger of meaninglessness and leaving unsatisfied longings for freedom, autonomy and
morally based communities (Giddens 1991: 70 – 108, 181 – 208).
In addition to the refinement of institutional and organizational frameworks for ac-
tion designed to ensure transparency, intelligibility and efficiency, whether enshrined
in bureaucratic structures or actively pushed out to the institutional periphery—for ex-
ample by the kind of de-layered, ‘flexible organisations’ discussed by Sennett (2006)—
there is also the progressive impact of technical and theoretical discourses, in particular
the interpretive constructions of psychology, sociology and cultural theory on the ways
in which human beings understand their ordinary, everyday lives and practices. The im-
pact of technical discourses of various kinds on the self-interpretation of everyday life
merits a longer discussion than is possible here.30 However, it is perhaps useful to think
about the significance of Cubism from the point of view of how attempts to theorize
everyday life and experience, or make it amenable to technical control, contribute not
to its disappearance but its bifurcation. On the one hand there is the continued substan-
tiality, vitality and urgency of everyday experience—accompanied of course by its fleet-
ing, highly local character—but also, as late-modernity takes hold, its ghostly, denatured
reappearance, the effect of its objectification, either as subject to techniques of living or
214 Art and Visuality

more philosophically, the formal apparatus of constitutive interpretation, ultimately the

‘grammar’ of discourse.31

Conclusion
In a historical period characterized by an intentionally activated visual and sensory envi-
ronment, amplified and diversified by new communicative technologies, the encounter
between visual art and visual culture may seem of marginal importance. The promi-
nence of visual artefacts in the modern period, in particular the obvious reach, power
and glamour of popular, commoditized, mass cultural forms, has led some theorists to
claim that this kind of visuality has become the dominant cultural form, with visual art
sidelined as a minority, elite preoccupation. The interpretation provided by visual cul-
tural studies suggests that at the root of cultural artefacts and processes is a covert dis-
tribution and legitimating of quasi-political power, and that underlying and disguised
by visual and sensory appearances is language, in the shape of arbitrary, coded signs
which make meaning, and therefore author the world. Understood properly, language
rivals number as a human technology, the power of both derived from their capacity for
abstraction. The result, as Barbara Stafford has observed, is a postdisciplinary academy
‘haunted by the paradoxical ubiquity and degradation of images; everywhere transmit-
ted, universally viewed, but as a category generally despised’ (Stafford 1992: 11).
Against this, however, should be set the need not only fully to understand the con-
sequences of changes in the traditional cultural hierarchies, including the significance
of visual art, brought about by modernity, but also the fact that within two- and three-
dimensional art visual sensibility and visual thinking have undergone exploration and
refinement of unrivalled depth. Both aspects are of critical significance to visual culture
studies.
Those who have never been totally satisfied with visual cultural studies should be
heartened to receive Moxey’s news of the ‘iconic turn’, which seems to offer if nothing
else a chance to take the object, embodied experience and work of art as art more seri-
ously. In order to discuss Cubism and Cubist collage properly it has been necessary to
have available terms that identify key formal features of this kind of artefact, and this
requires examining and evaluating the usefulness of various descriptive and critical ideas
by looking carefully at works. The notions of object-features, picture plane and surface,
as well as Poggi’s objet/table and image/tableau, touch on recurrent themes in Cub-
ist criticism, specifically the tension between the modernist material object on the one
hand and the representation of quotidian modern life on the other. In the case of Cub-
ism, the modernist object attains its peculiar autonomous presence by being on the one
hand deprived of its embeddedness in familiar contexts of use and meaning, triggering
imagination by forcibly propelling the senses into an interpretive role, but also by being
perceptibly organized as if for the kind of representation characteristic of visual art. The
ferocity of Braque and Picasso’s will to representation, together with their radical ex-
periments with the constitutive conventions of visual mimesis, simultaneously ironical
and in deadly earnest, lead to the ghostly reappearance of familiar everyday scenes and
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 215

things. Although probably not intentional, there is here an envisaging how modern life
can appear both real and substantial and yet also reflectively spectral, that is insubstan-
tial when reframed by technical discourses and procedures. In the field of cultural the-
ory this reframing has often been particularly pronounced, with interpretive practices
transformed into highly technical procedures and discourses. The prestige and rhetorical
power of such discourses is derived largely from their capacity for reflexive and abstract
self-formulation, that is so to speak, the will to disembodiment of those who use them.

Notes
1. For an influential account of links between avant-garde art and modern mass culture see
Crow (1996).
2. A growing class of entrepreneurs realized the economic potential of leisure. New forms of
commoditized recreation included music and dance halls, organized sports, cinemas, cafes
and restaurants, newspapers and magazines and gambling, while the spread of paid holidays
from work encouraged the growth of tourism and holiday resorts. Paris also gained noto-
riety for its hundreds of brothels, as well as revues and risqué cabarets, such as the Moulin
Rouge. Its metro system opened in 1990. For an outline of social history of leisure see
Rojek (1985).
3. See for example the rise of iconology or picture theory outlined below; also of note is Nor-
man Bryson’s recent conversion to neuroaesthetics, see his introduction to Neidich (2003).
4. In the famous Epilogue to his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Martin Heidegger
quotes three passages from Hegel’s Aesthetics (1828/29). Heidegger remarks that while the
ultimate truth of the judgement that ‘art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest
vocation, something past’ has yet to be decided, but until then ‘the judgement remains in
force’ (Heidegger 1971: 80).
Frederick Beiser reminds us that Hegel does not use the phrase ‘the death of art’, the attri-
bution probably coming from a paraphrase in Croce’s Aesthetica. He also remarks that an
early translation of the Aesthetics rendered Kunst sich selbst aufhebt as ‘art commits an act of
suicide’ (Beiser 2005: 340).
5. Dikovitskaya (2005: 64 – 84). See also her distinction between cultural studies and visual
culture studies.
6. For Fredric Jameson ‘aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity
production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more
novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now as-
signs an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and
experimentation’. However, lest we blithely welcome the democratizing, or at least com-
moditizing, of the aesthetic, Jameson sternly reminds us that ‘this whole global, yet Ameri-
can, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave
of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as
throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror’ (Jame-
son 1992: 56).
7. An art historical-critical version of this cycle is often said to begin with Marcel Duchamp
and reach its culmination in Andy Warhol, who then opens the way to a fully postmodern
art (Danto 1986, 1987, 1992; see also Shusterman in Rollins 1993). It’s worth recalling that
Duchamp went through a Cubist phase, and the introduction of what he calls ‘readymades’,
216 Art and Visuality

that is the direct use of manufactured artefacts in works of art (usually dated to the signed
bottle rack of 1914), had already been pioneered by Braque and Picasso. See Pierre Caban
(1971: 26).
8. The influence of poststructuralism on visual culture studies is another story, but the em-
phasis on language, albeit denied the possibility of reference and hence of ideology critique,
both radicalizes the constructive character of theory and connects it inextricably to written
texts.
9. The point is not that difficulties, problems and challenges confront practice, but that reflec-
tion is hypochondriacal when an unbalanced judgement of possible symptoms has become
habitual or compulsive. For the related omnivorous appetite of cultural studies and the con-
nection with a regime of ‘excellence’ characterizing the late-modern university see Readings
(1996).
10. See also Heywood: ‘An Art of Scholars’ in Jenks (1995) and ‘Richter’s Reflexivity’ in White-
ley (2001).
11. This view, or something like it, would be shared in my opinion by influential curator-critics
like Benjamin Buchloh and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
12. It is tempting to compare this apparently bleak outlook with what Nietzsche calls the ‘as-
cetic ideal’ (Nietzsche (1887) 1969: 159 – 61), an ‘unconditional honest atheism’, the origins
of which lie in the Christian conscience ‘sublimated’ into scientific conscience, becoming
eventually an ethic of ‘intellectual cleanliness at any price’. Oddly, the conviction behind
Richter’s ‘honesty’ may rest in a certain self-inflicted cruelty, in essence the working out of a
moral stance towards the practice of art.
13. Moxey summarizes the areas and major figures contributing to the iconic or pictorial turn:

Philosophy: Deleuze and Guattari, Alain Badiou

Art History: Georges Didi-Huberman
Visual Studies: W.J.T. (Tom) Mitchell, James Elkins
New Science Studies/Actor Network Theory: Bruno Latour
German Bildwissenschaft/Bildanthropologie: Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, Horst
Bredekamp

14. For John Golding, Cubism represents ‘the most important and certainly the most complete
and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance . . . [Nothing] has so altered the prin-
ciples, so shaken the foundations of Western painting as did Cubism’ (Golding 1988: 15).
Of collage, Clement Greenberg writes: ‘Collage was a major turning point in the evolution
of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in
this century’ (Greenberg 1961: 70).
15. Although the relationship between ground and picture plane enacted by surface becomes a
common preoccupation in the modern period, it is a characteristic of what Wollheim calls
‘painting as an art’ (Wollheim 1987). One of the effects of modernism is to give the premod-
ern history of this defining feature greater prominence.
16. See Clark (1999: 204).
17. It should be noted that the picture plane can seem to coincide with the actual material sur-
face (ground) of the painting, to recede behind it, or even to be in front of the ground. We
should also note the use of repoussoir or painted framing devices like curtains, which push
back the illusion, but then sometimes raise questions about their spatial position. See also
Poggi (1992: 62).
Cubism and the Iconic Turn 217

18. There are important contemporary accounts of Cubism by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metz-
inger, Fernand Leger, Juan Gris, Guillaume Apollinaire, Andrè Salmon and Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler. The best source of information on this literature in English is Antliff and
Leighten (2008). See also more recent work by T. J. Clark (1999), Rosalind Krauss (1985)
and Yves-Alain Bois (1990).
19. Kahnweiler, not only a businessman but also an able critic, was one of the first to interpret
Cubism along these lines. He claimed that Picasso, after years of research, had ‘pierced the
closed form’. His defence of Cubism combines claims about the ways in which it overcomes
‘distortions’ of colour and form present in all previous painting, and its advanced method of
distinguishing between Locke’s primary and secondary qualities, presenting and organizing
the former and only ‘suggesting’ the latter. He also remarks that Cubism gives to painting
‘unprecedented freedom’. See Kahnweiler in McCully (1996: 69 – 73).
20. See Clement Greenberg’s important essay ‘Collage’ (Greenberg 1961: 70 – 83). He writes:
‘There is no question but that Braque and Picasso were concerned, in their Cubism, with
holding on to painting as an art of representation and illusion.’ Elaborating the point, he
says that ‘Painting had to spell out, rather than pretend to deny, the physical fact that it was
flat, even though at the same time it had to overcome this proclaimed flatness as an aesthetic
fact and continue to report nature’ (70 – 1).
21. See also Clark’s brisk dismissal of the idea that Cubism offers more knowledge of the object
by releasing the eye to ‘wander’ (Clark 1999: 204).
22. In Violin Hanging on a Wall (1912) wood grain wallpaper suggests both a vertical surface
(although not close to the picture plane) and the horizontal space of a table supporting the
display of objects. We also see this play of vertical and horizontal planes in Construction with
Guitar (1913).
23. In this she follows what are perhaps the best-known semiotic interpretations of Cubism of-
fered by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois.
24. See Clark (1999: 183).
25. A loaded word, seeming to imply that Braque and Picasso knew that they had failed, but
pretended—in what they said and perhaps in loading up their works with adventitious
­details—that they hadn’t. This is a peculiar accusation, not only because conscience is dif-
ficult to get at, but also because it seems at odds with what Clark rightly wants us to see as
the utter seriousness and integrity of Cubist practice.
26. See also Clark’s helpful comparison with a painting of olive trees by Van Gogh (Clark 1999:
216).
27. The pictures organized as ‘elegant grids’ belong to the summer of 1910 spent at Cadaqués,
for example Female Nude in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and The Guitarist
in the Musée National d’Art Modern, Paris. For paintings that for Clark show manic activ-
ity and a ‘failure to conclude’ see (Wo)man with a Mandolin, 1912, Musée de Picasso, Paris
(Clark 1999: 188 – 91).
28. For interesting remarks about how viewers must combine in their minds an undistorted
‘scheme of forms’ with secondary qualities like ‘colour and tactile quality’ if they are to ap-
preciate the full pictorial effect of Cubism see Kahnweiler in McCully (1981: 71).
29. These ideas can be found in works by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Heidegger, Jean Paul
Sartre, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, David Riesman, Erving Goffman and
Richard Sennett among many others. See also Geoffrey H. Hartman’s (1997) connection of
culture to ‘abstract life’. He provides many literary examples of the ‘feeling of being an out-
sider to life’.
218 Art and Visuality

30. For two illuminating philosophical discussions see Cavell (1988) and Rosen (2002).
31. Semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism pursue this idea, but have different views on
its significance.

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 9

Reframing Nature:
The Visual Experience of
Early Mountaineering
Simon Bainbridge

In the opening of his popular Guide to the Lakes ((1810) 1975), the poet William
Wordsworth introduces his readers to the Lake District landscape by asking them to
imagine themselves in a particular viewing position:

To begin, then, with the main outlines of the country;—I know not how to give the
reader a distinct image of these more readily, than by requesting him to place him-
self with me, in imagination, upon some given point; let it be the top of either of the
mountains, Great Gavel, or Skiddaw; or, rather, let us suppose our station to be a
cloud hanging midway between those two mountains, at not more than half a mile’s
distance from the summit of each, and not many yards above their highest elevation;
we shall then see stretched at our feet a number of valleys, not fewer than eight, diverg-
ing from the point, on which we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a
wheel. (Wordsworth (1810) 1975: 41 – 2)

For Wordsworth’s readers, this cloud-based viewing position was one that could only
be realized in the imagination, though as an idea it might have been influenced by the age’s
experiments in balloon travel (see Holmes 2008: 125 –62). As the paragraph makes clear,
however, this impossible position was actually only an imaginative extension of what was
a relatively new but rapidly developing way of viewing landscape, seeing it from the sum-
mit of a mountain. By ascending to a summit, the poet suggests, the reader will be able to
gain a fuller and truer understanding of the world around him. Drawing an analogy for
his Guide with a scale-model of the Alps, Wordsworth writes that an elevated perspective
over a miniaturized landscape supplies a ‘substantial pleasure: for the sublime and beauti-
ful region, with all its hidden treasures, and their bearings and relations to each other, is
thereby comprehended and understood at once’ (Wordsworth (1810) 1975: 41).
Reframing Nature 221

Wordsworth, an experienced mountaineer who had climbed Snowdon and the

major Lake District peaks and had walked through the Swiss Alps, published his
Guide in the middle of a period which saw the initial development in Great Britain
of what now would be termed ‘hill-walking’, ‘fell-walking’ or ‘mountaineering’; the
latter word was first coined in 1802 by Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge to describe his own exploits in the Lake District (Coleridge 1956:
452). While many early mountain ascents were undertaken for scientific, ­military or
other practical purposes, from the 1760s onwards people increasingly began to climb
mountains for a specifically visual experience. Though ascending fells is a highly phys-
ical activity and appeals to the senses of touch, smell and hearing, in the period of its
early development it was very much understood as visually motivated; as Jonathan
Otley commented in his A Concise Description of the English Lakes, ‘an extensive pros-
pect [is] the principal motive for ascending a mountain’ (Otley (1823) 1825: 43).
Indeed, while many hill-walkers would now see exercise as a major reason for un-
dertaking the activity, in its early history the physical effort required to reach a high
point was very much regarded as the cost which it was hoped would bring the reward
of a summit view. For example after describing the ‘laborious ascent’ required to
reach the top of Skiddaw in 1773, William Hutchinson remarked that ‘the ­prospect
which we gained from this eminence very well rewarded our fatigue’ (Hutchinson
1774: 156).
The early history of mountaineering, then, represents an important development
in visual culture, particularly in terms of the envisioning of landscape and the rela-
tionship between viewing subjects and the world around them. In this chapter, I want
to trace the origins of this new way of seeing and experiencing the world and examine
what it was about the visual experience of climbing mountains that led to the remark-
able development of the activity in the period from the 1760s to the 1830s, by which
decade the desire to reach summits had been fully incorporated into the general lit-
erature of tourism. Though there is now much debate about what precisely constitutes
mountaineering as opposed to fell and hill-walking, during this period there were
no such distinctions and I use the different terms interchangeably to describe the ac-
tivities of those tourists who deliberately set out to climb or ascend what they called
‘mountains’ (a term they often used to refer to peaks much lower than the height of
3,000 feet which has since become one of the most common definitions of a moun-
tain in Great Britain). The broader context for this study is provided by two excellent
book-length accounts of the shifting cultural response to mountains: Marjorie Hope
Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959) and Robert Macfarlane’s
Mountains of the Mind (2004). Nicolson provides a wonderfully informative account
of the aesthetic revaluing of mountains in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
though her study is much more focused on looking at peaks than looking from them.
Macfarlane gives a terrifically wide-ranging and stimulating analysis of the culture of
mountains and mountaineering (including a chapter on ‘Altitude: The Summit and
the View’), though the very scope of his study make it impossible for him to look in
any detail at the rapidly expanding field of travel writing from the late-eighteenth and
222 Art and Visuality

early-nineteenth centuries in which we can trace the development of this new visual
experience.

The Sublime, the Picturesque and the Development

of Mountaineering in Britain
The visual culture of early mountaineering represents a development of two of the major
concepts of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the sublime and the picturesque. The concept
of the sublime can be traced back to the Greek writer Longinus whose first-century essay
‘On the Sublime’ was concerned with the uplifting effect of elevated language. Though
this meaning was still current in the eighteenth century, the sublime came increasingly
to be used to describe certain kinds of landscapes and natural features which produced
powerful emotional reactions from those who saw them. Early examples of such reac-
tions to sublime landscapes include the dramatist John Dennis’s description of his feel-
ings of ‘a delightful horror [and] a terrible Joy’ when ascending a perilous Alpine pass
in 1688, and Joseph Addison’s account of how mountain landscapes and ‘unbounded
views’ produced ‘a pleasing Astonishment’ in his ‘Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagina-
tion’ of 1712 (Addison 1712: 540; Dennis in Thorpe 1935: 465). It was Edmund Burke
in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
of 1757 who most influentially associated this sense of excitement bordering on fear
with the sublime, writing that ‘whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain,
and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is,
it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’ (Burke
(1757) 1998: 13). However, Burke argues that for this powerful emotion to be pleasur-
able it needs to be experienced from a position of safety: ‘When danger or pain press too
nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain
distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful’ (Burke
(1757) 1998: 13 – 14). Mountainous landscapes offered a key source of the sublime and
an important way of understanding the relationship between visual experience and psy-
chological reaction. It was in terms of the sublime that Wordsworth’s friend Thomas
Wilkinson justified a lifetime of mountain climbing, opening his memoir Tours to the
British Mountains of 1824 by stating ‘From early life I have been an admirer of the sub-
lime in Nature. Mountains and their accompaniments are amongst the finest specimens
of the sublime. Hence, when circumstances allowed, I availed myself of the opportunity
of exploring their recesses and ascending their summits’ (Wilkinson 1824: v).
Burke clarified previous theories of the sublime by defining it against beauty. For him
the beautiful was characterized by smallness, smoothness, roundness and delicacy, and
produced feelings of love. The sublime was defined by vastness, obscurity and infinity,
and produced feelings of astonishment and, as we have seen, terror. As the eighteenth
century progressed, a third term was introduced that overlapped with, and mediated be-
tween, these opposing conceptions of landscape—the ‘picturesque’. The clergyman Wil-
liam Gilpin, one of the earliest and most important theorists of the picturesque, defined
Reframing Nature 223

it as ‘that particular kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’ (Gilpin 1768: 2),
finding in the works of painters such as Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa the models
for an appreciation of landscape. For Gilpin, the distinguishing quality of such paint-
ings and landscapes was their ‘roughness’, which defined them against the regularity and
smoothness of nonpicturesque beauty. ‘Roughness’ and ‘ruggedness’ produced variety,
richness and contrast—desirable qualities in art and landscape for Gilpin. Though the
nature of the picturesque was much debated in the closing decades of the eighteenth
century, it provided a valuable aesthetic for appreciating the British landscape, and par-
ticularly the increasingly popular tourist destinations of the mountainous regions of
the Lake District in north-western England, Snowdonia in Wales and the Highlands of
Scotland which, while certainly rough and rugged, were sometimes seen to lack the scale
and magnificence of the Alps.
Though the cult of the picturesque and the picturesque tour have often been char-
acterized as only interested in low-level views, the possibility of ascending to summits
was inherent within them from their origins. In his Guide to the Lakes of 1778, a found-
ing text of the picturesque tour, Thomas West advocated the Lake District over the Alps
as a travel destination because, though ‘the tops of the highest Alps are inaccessible,
being covered with everlasting snow’, the Lake District mountains ‘are all accessible to
the summit’ and ‘furnish prospects no less surprising [and] with more variety than the
Alps themselves’ (West 1778: 6). West offers no advice on how to ascend to these sum-
mits, but the famous ‘stations’ which he identified as the ideal locations from which to
view the landscape were sometimes surprisingly elevated. For example his fourth station
on Derwentwater is Castle Crag, a very steep peak in the so-called Jaws of Borrowdale,
which is just under 1,000 feet high and requires quite a demanding climb to gain what
West describes as ‘a most astonishing view’ (West 1778: 97).
West’s Guide was only one early literary encouragement to climb mountains, and the
search for the sublime or picturesque experience produced a large number of summit
narratives as well as a developing infrastructure of guides and accommodation that sup-
ported the increasing demand to ascend for the sake of a view. In the Lake District, Skid-
daw near Penrith in the northern part of the district became the most popular site for
ascents to a mountain summit, due to its accessibility, its relative separation from other
peaks and the fact that it was possible to get close to the top on horseback. Ascents of
‘lofty Skiddaw’ were described in a number of the most popular travel accounts, includ-
ing those made by William Hutchinson in 1774, Adam Walker in 1791, Joseph Bud-
worth in 1792 and Ann Radcliffe in 1794. As early as 1798 this nascent summit fever
had become a target for satire. In the comic parody of picturesque tourism The Lakers,
the heroine Veronica’s plans to climb Skiddaw are frustrated by bad weather, but she
comments ‘I must go up whether it is fine or not. My tour would be absolutely incom-
plete without an account of a ride up Skiddaw’ (Plumptre 1798: 27). Semi-organized
mountain trips of the sort a real-life Veronica would have taken were often rather so-
ciable events. Led by a local guide, often a farmer, shepherd, innkeeper or one of their
family, many people climbed as part of a group or small party. These trips often began
very early in the morning and seem to have involved drinking fairly copious amounts
224 Art and Visuality

of brandy, rum and whisky, supplied by the guide (an issue frequently discussed in the
accounts). Exploring summits beyond the most popular ones of Skiddaw, Helvellyn
and Coniston Old Man remained rare in the eighteenth century, and the desire to do
so could disconcert even the local guides. Joseph Budworth, who made pioneering as-
cents for pleasure of Helm Crag in 1792 and the Langdale Pikes in 1797, recounts how
having scrambled over the rocks to reach the summit of Pike O’ Stickle in Langdale,
his guide Paul Postlethwaite turned to him and said, in a broad Cumbrian accent, ‘Ith
neome oh fackins, wot a broughtin you here?’ To which Budworth replied: ‘Curiosity,
Paul’. Postlethwaite responded: ‘I think you mun be curious enuff: I neor cum here but
after runaway sheop, an I’me then so vext at um, I cud throa um deawn th’ Poike’ (Bud-
worth 1810: 269). The canon of climbable Lake District mountains expanded rapidly
in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In his A Companion to the Lakes, first
published in 1829, Edward Baines offered ‘a particular account of the ascents of Skid-
daw, Helvellyn, Scawfell Pikes, Great Gavel, Bowfell, Langdale Pikes, High Bell, High
Street, and several other mountains’ (Baines 1834: v).
There was a comparable expansion in the number of visitors who sought to reach the
summits of the Scottish Highlands and Snowdonia in Wales, though the greater scale
and difficulty of the Highland mountains meant that activity focused initially on Ben
Lomond, the most southerly of the Scottish peaks over 3,000 feet, where guides were ‘at
hand to conduct you, by the best and readiest track, to the summit’ (Denholm 1804: 39).
Though Ben Nevis was recognized as the highest mountain in Britain, as late as 1824
one guidebook could still describe it as ‘not often visited’ due to the ‘considerable . . .
distance to the top’ and the ‘laborious’ accent (MacCulloch 1824: 323). Even the adven-
turous Samuel Taylor Coleridge was rather overawed by the wildness of the Highlands,
compared to the Lakes. In Wales, Thomas Pennant ascended Cadair Idris and Snowdon
(the highest mountain in Wales) as early as 1773. He failed to gain a view on the former,
and his hope that ‘another traveller’ would be able to ‘make a more satisfactory relation
of this mountain, than I have been able to do’ indicates how pioneering this venture was
(Pennant 1778: 89). However, following Pennant’s ascents, Cadair Idris and Snowdon
became established as the two most popular Welsh summits, with an infrastructure of
guides, ponies, new roads and accommodation growing up around them. By the time
of the Reverend William Bingley’s A Tour Round North Wales, 1798, seven main routes
had been established up Snowdon, ‘the most celebrated mountain in Great Britain’, all
of which Bingley explored and described in detail (Bingley climbed several other Welsh
mountains including Tryfan, though his account of the dangers of this peak served to
discourage others from attempting it) (Bingley 1800: I.239). By 1803, William Hutton,
who commented that it is ‘unfashionable not to visit the Lakes of Llanberis, but chiefly
Snowdon’, was assessing the economic benefit of the developments in mountaineering
to Wales, reporting that ‘there is already . . . more than thirty thousand [pounds] a year
spent by the English mountain-hunters’ (Hutton 1803: 54). Towards the end of the
period covered by this essay, Snowdon (like Scafell and Ben Nevis) started to become
a target for those motivated by a desire to climb the highest peak in the region. M. R.
of Liverpool wrote to The Kaleidoscope in 1828 that ‘From the time I landed in North
Reframing Nature 225

Wales I had looked upon the ascent of Snowdon as a kind of achievement I should like
to perform. It would be, I thought, a feat without which all my other excursions would
be incomplete’ (M. R. 1828: 102). However, for the vast majority of visitors the reason
for reaching a summit was the view it facilitated, and many writers saw their expeditions
as failures if they were unable to obtain a view despite having reached the summit (see,
for example Fisher 1818: 36).

The View from the Top

The power of the extraordinary and unprecedented visual experience of a summit view
in this early age of mountaineering is illustrated by the frequent invocation of the idea
of ‘astonishment’, a term central to Addison’s and Burke’s accounts of the sublime (and
that we have already seen in West’s description of the prospect from Castle Crag). For
Edward Baines the view from the summit of Skiddaw was an ‘astonishing prospect’
while Richard Warner described how the ‘vast unbounded prospect’ seen from Cadair
Idris impressed ‘the astonished and delighted eye’ (Baines (1829) 1834: 146; Warner
1798: 97). It was this idea of being stunned, bewildered or even terrified as a result of
climbing up and looking down that Dr John Brown invoked in his A Description of the
Lake at Keswick, an account first published in 1766 and one of the earliest appreciative
descriptions of the Lake District’s mountain scenery. In what appears to have initially
been a private letter of the 1750s, Brown wrote to his friend Lord Lyttleton:

I will now carry you to the top of a cliff, where if you dare approach the ridge, a new
scene of astonishment presents itself, where the valley, lake and islands, seem laying at
your feet; where this expanse of water appears diminished to a little pool amidst the
vast immeasurable objects that surround it; for here the summits of more distant hills
appear before those you had already seen; and rising behind each other in successive
ranges and azure groups of craggy and broken steeps, form an immense and awful pic-
ture, which can only be expressed by the image of a tempestuous sea of mountains.
(Brown 1771: 8)

Brown skilfully captures the sense of visual defamiliarization that ascent produces
through a combination of distance, changes of perspective and the shifting relations
of objects within the landscape: valleys, lakes and islands shrink while mountains arise
as if from nowhere, dwarfing all around them. As his description illustrates, mountain
climbing creates a compelling visual fusion of the familiar and the strange, enabling the
viewer to see new objects, or to identify known places but to see them in novel ways.
Brown’s account would become well known and it was frequently invoked by other
writers when seeking to describe the visual experience resulting from a position of emi-
nence. Writer after writer would repeat Brown’s observations that ascent appeared to
cause the world to diminish, to become a miniature version of itself, while simultane-
ously revealing a series of mountainous prospects that could only be observed from such
an elevated position. Unlike the picturesque tour, with its emphasis on fixed stations,
226 Art and Visuality

mountaineering involves movement through landscape, and though some writers de-
scribe a summit as if it were a station par excellence, others emphasize the sense of a con-
stantly changing visual experience as the viewer ascends, descends or traverses. Jonathan
Otley, for example particularly recommended climbing Skiddaw because, though other
mountains rivalled it for the grandeur of its summit view, ‘in no other ascent, are the
prospects equalled, which unfold themselves in the ascent’ (Otley (1823) 1825: 47).
Similarly, the novelist Ann Radcliffe took pleasure in her descent of the same mountain
as a result of the series of visual effects it produced: ‘it was interesting to observe each
mountain below gradually re-assuming its dignity, the two lakes expanding into spa-
cious surfaces, the many little vallies that sloped upwards from their margins, recovering
their variegated tints of cultivation, the cattle again appearing in the meadows, and the
wooded promontories changing from smooth patches of shades into richly tufted sum-
mits’ (Radcliffe 1795: 460).
Brown’s account of his elevated experience helped establish some of the tropes of
mountaineering writing. Hutchinson, for example referred to ‘the image of a tempestu-
ous sea of mountains’ in his An Excursion to the Lakes (Hutchinson 1774: 156). But also
repeated throughout the period is the sense that the visual experience resulting from
standing on a summit was unprecedented and exceeded anything with which it might
be compared. Edward Baines, for example describes how a ‘young friend’ who had not
climbed a peak before had thought the ascent of ‘Bell’ in Kentmere ‘the most weari-
some thing in the world, but the view from the summit repaid all, being beyond com-
parison the most novel, interesting, and wonderful prospect he had ever beheld’ (Baines
(1829) 1834: 277). Indeed, so new was the visual experience of mountaineering that it
could disconcert those who undertook it for the first time, and not only when there was
real danger of falling. The German tourist Charles P. Moritz recounts in his Travels . . .
through Several Parts of England, in 1782 how he set out to ‘climb an high hill’, clam-
bering up a ‘pretty steep . . . green mountain’. Reaching halfway without having once
looked back, Moritz found himself nearly paralyzed when he did turn to take in the
prospect:

when I looked round, I found my eye had not been trained to view, unmoved, so pro-
digious an height; Castleton, with the surrounding country, lay below me, like a map;
the roofs of the houses seemed almost close to the ground, and the mountain, with
the ruins itself, seemed to be lying at my feet. I grew giddy at the prospect, and it re-
quired all my reason to convince me that I was in no danger, and that, at all events,
I could only scramble down the green turf, in the same manner as I had got up. At
length I seemed to grow accustomed to this view, till it really gave me pleasure; and I
now climbed quite to the summit. (Moritz 1795: 233 – 4)

Moritz’s reaction reminds us just how extraordinary and novel an elevated view
would have been for these early climbers, unfamiliar with air-travel, aerial photography
or even the high-rise buildings that have made the sensations of altitude more familiar in
the centuries since. But it also illustrates the process of an individual teaching himself to
Reframing Nature 227

appreciate this novel visual experience, educating himself in the aesthetics of a new way
of seeing until vertiginous viewing starts to become pleasurable rather than petrifying.

Becoming Master of the Prospect

Moritz’s initial reaction to his elevated position also illustrates one of the key ways in
which early climbers responded to the visual experience such a location afforded them,
comprehending the defamiliarized landscape through analogy with a map. Summiting
a mountain came close to replicating the omniscient viewpoint created by cartogra-
phy, the viewer seeming to hang above the landscape and look down with a ‘bird’s eye
view’ (an idea invoked by Budworth and Green, and that developed into Wordsworth’s
cloud-based viewing station with which this chapter began). As Joseph Hucks observed
in A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales of 1795, from the top of the Welsh Mountain
Cadair Idris the view is ‘grand and magnificient. Ireland, the Isle of Man, North and
South Wales, lie extended before the eye like a level map’ (Hucks 1795: 114). Think-
ing of summit views as maps provided ways of engaging with what was being seen. In
A Companion to the Lakes, Edward Baines describes how, on the summit of Helvellyn,
‘we found it most interesting to behold again Skiddaw and Saddleback, Scawfell, and
Langdale Pikes, and to trace with the eye, as on a map, all the journeys we had been
making since we entered Westmoreland’ (Baines (1829) 1834: 220). An Account of the
Principal Pleasure Tours in Scotland went beyond this analogous relationship of summit
view and map, commenting of the view from the top of Ben Nevis as follows:

To enumerate all the objects in this view is impossible; if the tourist take the Map of
Scotland in the Pleasure Tours, and spread it in a horizontal position, he can then take
the range of one hundred miles around, and the objects to be seen will be distinctly
laid before him. For instance, let him take an object on the east, west, south, or north;
then turn leisurely round, and he will have it pointed out to him by name on the map
as he comes to it. This appears to us better than inserting a mere catalogue of names,
without pointing out their positions. (Anon. 1821: 74)

The Pleasure Tour’s practical advice indicates how written guidebooks were gradually
taking the place on summits of actual mountain guides, whose roles normally included
identifying key features in the prospect for their clients. Common expectations about
the guides’ role are indicated by Hutton’s disappointed comments about his own guide
on Snowdon, whom he thought ‘inadequate to his office. He made no observations, nor
spoke but when spoken to, and then I could barely understand his English. He ought to
have been master of the prospect, and, like a showman, pointed out the various objects’
(Hutton 1803: 152). Printed guides increasingly sought to take on this position of mas-
tery of the prospect, enabling their readers to locate themselves within a comprehensible
location and to identify surrounding features. Travel writing from the early part of this
period often resorted to the simple counting of natural features observable from a sum-
mit, as when Thomas Pennant writes that from the top of Snowdon ‘I counted this time
228 Art and Visuality

between twenty and thirty lakes’ (Pennant 1778: 164). And a sense of exploration was
sometimes accompanied by a willingness to confess ignorance, Joseph Budworth com-
menting that he had journeyed over many ‘noble mountains’ between Buttermere and
Patterdale in the Lake District but admitting that ‘for want of a guide I cannot distin-
guish their names’ (Budworth 1792: 213). However, as accounts of climbing mountains
became increasingly part of the growing genre of travel guides, they sought to express
a stronger sense of knowledge about summit views and to provide their readers with
different aids to understanding and appreciating what they were seeing (such as the
Pleasure Tour’s map). In his A Companion to the Lakes, Edward Baines names forty-six
individual mountains and several more mountain ranges ‘visible in the grand panoramic
view from the summit of Skiddaw’, detailing their positions so that the viewer can note
them by rotating in a clockwise direction (Baines (1829) 1834: 147 – 8). Even more spe-
cific in the aids he offers for identification of objects visible from a summit is Jonathan
Otley, who in his A Concise Description of the English Lakes provides distances and com-
pass bearings for the sights that can be seen from his four mountain ‘Stations’ (Scafell
Pike, Skiddaw, Helvellyn and the Old Man of Coniston). In works such as these, we can
see an anticipation of the most popular of all guides to the Lake District Mountains,
Alfred Wainwright’s ((1955 – 1966) 2003) seven-volume A Pictorial Guide to the Lake-
land Fells published between 1955 and 1966, which uses a range of methods to illustrate
the views from the summits of the fells. Like Wainwright, these early mountain guides
enable those on a summit to gratify the desire to identify and name the prominent ele-
ments of the surrounding view.
One way in which summit views were often assessed in the period was in terms of
how distant were the objects that could be identified. In 1792, Adam Walker describes
how, from the top of Skiddaw, ‘with a Refracting Telescope we saw the sheep on Mount
Creffel on the coast of Galloway, and some of our company believed they saw the moun-
tains of Mourn in Ireland’ (Walker 1792: 98), some 124 miles distant. However, other
writers were scornful of what they dismissed as a rather naive approach to the apprecia-
tion of mountain prospects. While Jonathan Otley discussed in detail when to ascend a
mountain to gain ‘an extensive prospect’, carefully considering issues of time of day and
weather conditions, he was forceful about the reasons for doing so:

The value of a prospect of this kind, consists not in straining the eye to see what (ac-
cording to the strength of the imagination) may be either mountains of Ireland, or a
fog bank—a distant gleam of sunshine, or the reflections from the German Ocean—a
speck of condensed vapour, or a ship on the glittering sea: it consists rather in be-
holding a country richly variegated, with fields of corn fit for the sickle—meadows,
green as an emerald—hills, clad with purple heath—lakes, with winding shores, and
beautiful islands—rivers, shining like silver, as they shape their serpentine courses
towards the sea;—and in tracing the effects of light and shade upon mountains, ris-
ing behind mountains, in every imaginable diversity of form: in short, it consists in
viewing such objects as can be distinctly known, and properly appreciated. (Otley
(1823) 1825: 46)
Reframing Nature 229

First published in 1818, Otley’s Guide illustrates the growing sophistication and in-
deed familiarity with which summit views started to be assessed. His aesthetic strictures
reject the sense of astonishment characteristic of those seeing a mountain prospect for
the first time and he pokes fun at the desire of others to identify distant objects. In-
stead Otley considers the view as if he were appreciating a landscape painting, indicat-
ing the extent to which some climbers had indeed mastered the mountain prospect in
the period.

Mountain Spectacle
While an ‘extensive prospect’ was the primary motivation that drove the development of
mountain climbing in this period, it was not the only new or engaging visual sensation
offered by this nascent activity. The summits of the higher mountains in Britain were
themselves unexplored spaces which looked to early climbers like nowhere they had ever
been before. In 1778, Thomas Pennant gave a frequently quoted description of the sum-
mit of Glyder Bach in Wales:

The area was covered with groupes of columnar stones, of vast size, from ten to
thirty feet long, lying in all directions: most of them were in columnar form, often
piled on one another: in other places, half erect, sloping down, and supported by
others, which lie without any order at their bases. The tops are frequently crowned
in the strangest manner with other stones, lying on them horizontally. (Pennant
1778: 151)

Pennant described this extraordinary scene as ‘a sort of wreck of nature, formed and
flung up by some mighty internal convulsion’ (Pennant 1778: 152), and for other writ-
ers the sense of ruination they felt on a summit often led to thoughts of the earth’s cre-
ation and its eventual destruction. John MacCulloch described the summit of Ben Nevis
as ‘utterly bare’ and presenting ‘a most extraordinary and unexpected sight’, adding ‘if
any one is desirous to see how the world looked on the first day of creation, let him
come hither’ (MacCulloch 1824: 325). Yet MacCulloch also saw the summit’s ‘black
and dreary ruins’ as testimony to the destructive power of Nature, exciting ‘surprise at
the agencies that could thus, unaided by the usual force of gravity, have ploughed up
and broken into atoms, so wide and so level a surface of the toughest and most tena-
cious of rocks’ (MacCulloch 1824: 326). The sense of discovery on the top of mountains
was not limited to these grand and terrifying scenes, however, but was also produced
by the exquisitely beautiful. At the culmination of a description of Scafell Pike’s sum-
mit, published in her brother’s Guide to the Lakes, Dorothy Wordsworth identifies a vi-
sual sensation available to only the very few who reach that remote spot, writing that
‘flowers, the most brilliant feathers, and even gems, scarcely surpass in colouring some
of these masses of stone, which no human eye beholds, except the shepherd or travel-
ler be led thither by curiosity: and how seldom must this happen!’ (Wordsworth (1810)
1975: 110).
230 Art and Visuality

Climbing mountains gave individuals plenty of opportunities to indulge and de-

velop their taste for the pleasurable terrors of the sublime. Summits provided an excel-
lent grandstand for looking at other peaks and experiencing what one novice climber
described as a ‘compound of wonder, grandeur, and terror’ (Hutton 1803: 154). But
these feelings could be made all the more intense by adding an element of what in mod-
ern mountaineering parlance is called ‘exposure’—the sense of personal vulnerability to
great height. We can see such an intensification of sublime emotion in James Denholm’s
description of his experience on the summit of Ben Lomond in 1804. Initially, Denholm
gives an account of the view from a position of personal safety, writing that ‘The pros-
pect to the north is . . . the most awfully grand: Immense mountains, piled, as it were,
above each other [and forming] a prospect, which may in some degree be conceived, but
cannot be properly described’ (Denholm 1804: 41 – 2). However, as Denholm explores
the summit itself, he becomes aware of a different kind of visual experience available:

Ben Lomond . . . appears as an immense cone, detached or insulated from the sur-
rounding mountains. Towards the north, however, this figure is broken by an immense
precipice of 2000 feet in height, conjectured by some to be the remains of an imper-
fect crater, with one side forcibly torn off. To look down this fearful steep requires a
considerable resolution: you approach it with cautious step and a trembling nerve,
clinging firm to the surface of the mountain, which even appears insecure; the view is
terrific and grandly sublime. (Denholm 1804: 42)

For some writers, peering down precipices took them to the limits of vision and ex-
perience. Joseph Hucks, standing on the edge of a precipice on Cadair Idris and looking
into the ‘frightful abyss’, was put ‘in mind of the chaos, or void space of darkness, so
finely described in Milton, when the fallen archangel stood at the gates of hell, ponder-
ing the scene before him, and viewing, with horror, the profound expanse of silence and
eternal night’ (Hucks 1795: 113 – 4). Others, however, adopted a more light-hearted if
no less intrepid approach to the dangers of mountain landscapes. After quoting a fellow
writer’s account of the ‘numerous narrow openings’ on the route to Skiddaw—‘Chasms
of enormous depth in the bowels of the mountain forming steeps of slaty shiver yawn
upwards with frightful grin’—William Green comments that ‘it is an amusing sort of
exercise to tramp along the edges of these grinning fissures’ (Green 1819: 2.340). As well
as staring down and walking alongside precipices, the period also saw individuals such
as William Bingley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge beginning to scramble up and down
them, signalling the birth of rock climbing as a pursuit in Britain, an activity closely re-
lated to mountain climbing but one with a very different visual aesthetic.
Weather and atmospheric conditions had a considerable impact on the visual experi-
ence of mountaineering. While cloud, mist or rain could ruin the hoped-for prospect,
they could also contribute to what William Hutchinson terms the ‘grand spectacle of
nature’, a phrase he uses to describe a temperature inversion when he and his party find
themselves above the clouds on the summit of Skiddaw, looking ‘down upon an angry
and impetuous sea, heaving its billows, as if boiling from the bottom’ (Hutchinson
Reframing Nature 231

1774: 159). Jonathan Otley gives a fuller account of this phenomenon, again adopting
something of the role of a connoisseur of visual effects whose sophisticated response is
defined against that of the novice mountaineer:

Sometimes when clouds have formed below the summit, the country as viewed from
above, resembles a sea of mist; a few of the highest peaks having the appearance of
islands, on which the sun seems to shine with unusual splendour. To such as are ac-
quainted with it under other circumstances, this may be considered a magnificent
spectacle; but a stranger will naturally wish to behold the features of the country in a
more distinct kind of view. (Otley (1823) 1825: 44)

Hutchinson and Otley both describe a striking but relatively static phenomenon.
However, changes in weather and atmospheric conditions can make the visual experi-
ence of mountaineering compellingly dramatic and dynamic, rapidly transforming not
only what can be seen but also the conditions of vision themselves. Early mountaineer-
ing literature is full of detailed descriptions of the various visual effects caused by dif-
ferent combinations of light and vapour. More surprisingly, when writers were looking
for an art form with which to compare the visual experience of mountaineering, they
often turned not to landscape painting as we might expect but to the theatre or to one
of the many forms of visual ‘spectacle’ that developed in the nineteenth century. Otley
illustrates this sense of observing Nature’s performance when he comments that those
who are fortunate enough to be upon a summit ‘at the very time of the cloud’s depar-
ture, will experience a gratification of no common kind—when, like the rising of the
curtain in a theatre, the country in a moment burst upon the eye’ (Otley (1823) 1825:
43 – 4). William Green, who remarks that ‘floating vapours are frequently the sources of
supreme amusement’, presents the changing conditions on mountains as creating a se-
ries of rather tantalizing revealed and veiled tableaux:

In their playful humours these immense curtains in openings of every shape and fea-
ture, when contrasted with the azure of a beautiful distance appear as brown frames,
through which, like scenes of enchantment, momentary glimpses are caught of the far
removed country, which lost, the anxious spectator may be as suddenly saluted from
another quarter, perhaps displaying a scene more grateful than the former, and with
which the capacious elements may either feast him, or as suddenly as the former veil
it from his view. Thus by an ever shifting exhibition, the eye is kept in a perpetual
play and the sense alternately delighted, vexed, or agitated into extacy. (Green 1819:
2.341)

The perceived link between the natural spectacle gained through mountaineering
and the technological spectacle that was developing in this period is illustrated by Ed-
ward Baines’s comparison of the ‘continual shifting of light and shadow’ seen from
Harrison Stickle in Langdale to the popular projection show called ‘a phantasmagoria’
(Baines (1829) 1834: 309). As this comparison would suggest, though the visual culture
232 Art and Visuality

of mountaineering developed out of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of the

sublime and picturesque, as it developed it also had much in common with the emerg-
ing technologies of spectacle that have been seen as embodying the start of the modern
visual age.

Conclusion
This chapter has sought to examine the visual culture of early mountaineering, arguing
that what has become a highly popular activity was initially motivated by the desire for
a specifically visual experience—the ‘extensive prospect’. Ascending to the summits of
mountains frequently did more than gratify this desire, however, granting many indi-
viduals what they claimed to be the most powerful and memorable visual experiences
of their lives. It enabled the curious and the adventurous to see new things, previously
unimagined, and it enabled them to see in new ways. By way of brief conclusion, I want
to trace the short mountaineering career of the poet John Keats which succinctly encap-
sulates this set of visual experiences.
As a young man living in London, Keats dreamed of climbing mountains:

I will clamber through the Clouds and exist. I will get such an accumulation of stu-
pendous recollections that as I walk through the suburbs of London I may not see
them—I will stand upon Mount Blanc and remember this coming Summer when I
intend to straddle ben Lomond—with my Soul! (Keats 1970: 83)

While Keats never made it to Mont Blanc, his pedestrian tour through Northern En-
gland and Scotland in 1818 took him to the Lake District, where he climbed Skiddaw,
having earlier been frustrated by mist in an attempt to climb Hellvellyn. Describing his
Skiddaw experience, Keats captures the sense of the economy of physical expenditure
and visual reward dominant in the period: ‘we had fagged & tugged nearly to the top,
when at half past six there came a mist upon us & shut out the view; we did not how-
ever lose anything by it, we were high enough without mist, to see the coast of Scotland;
the Irish sea; the hills beyond Lancaster; & nearly all the large ones of Cumberland and
Westmoreland, particularly Helvellyn & Scawfell’ (Keats 1970: 108). Keats here ex-
presses no interest in summiting Skiddaw or disappointment at having failed to do so;
the achievement of the view provides the culmination of his efforts. Travelling north to
Scotland, the high price of a guide deterred Keats from tackling Ben Lomond, but he
did climb Ben Nevis. For Keats, the visual experience of climbing the mountain was
unprecedented and unrivalled—he described the chasms on Ben Nevis as ‘the most tre-
mendous places I have ever seen’—and his comment in a letter to his brother Tom that ‘I
do not know whether I can give you an Idea of the prospect from a large Mountain top’
reminds us that this was an entirely new visual experience and one that was difficult to
capture in language (Keats 1970: 146 – 7). Yet it was not the hoped-for prospect that had
most impact on Keats; indeed, it seemed at first that he would be unlucky with weather
conditions, as the clouds formed ‘as it appeard large dome curtains which kept sailing
Reframing Nature 233

about, opening and shutting at intervals here and there and everywhere’ (Keats 1970:
146). But the poet was not disappointed by these conditions, finding in them an alter-
native way of seeing. He continues: ‘so that although we did not see one vast wide extent
of prospect all round we saw something perhaps finer—these cloud-veils opening with
a dissolving motion and showing us the mountainous region beneath as through a loop
hole—these Mouldy [probably for cloudy] loop holes ever varrying and discovering fresh
prospect east, west north and South’ (Keats 1970: 146 – 7). Keats takes pleasure in the
way his vision is shaped by atmospheric conditions, feeling no need to assert the power
of his own eye or self over nature. As he says later in the same letter, on a mountain ‘the
most new thing of all is the sudden leap of the eye from the extremity of what appears
a plain into so vast a distance’ (Keats 1970: 147). Of the many novel visual sensations
inspired by reaching the summit of a mountain, for Keats the most striking is that it cre-
ates a new way of seeing. Such a revelation provides a fitting final example of the impor-
tance of the development of mountaineering to the history of visual studies.

Further Reading
Andrews, Malcolm. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in
Britain, 1760 – 1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2004. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London: Granta
Books.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Nicholson, Norman. (1955) 1995. The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists. Milnthorpe,
Cumbria: Cicerone Press.

References
Addison, Joseph. 1712. ‘Essay on the Pleasure of the Imagination’, The Spectator, 412: 540.
Anon. 1821. An Account of the Principal Pleasure Tours in Scotland. Edinburgh: John Thomson.
Baines, Edward. (1829) 1834. A Companion to the Lakes, 3rd ed. London: Simpkin and
Marshall.
Bingley, William. 1800. A Tour Round North Wales, 1798, 2 vols. London: E. Williams.
Brown, John. 1771. A Description of the Lake at Keswick. Kendal: W. Pennington.
Budworth, Joseph. 1792. A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes. London: Hookham and Carpenter.
Budworth, Joseph. 1810. A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes, 3rd edn. London: Joseph Palmer.
Burke, Edmund. (1757) 1998. A Philosophical Investigation into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. A. Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956. Collected Letters, vol. 2, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Claren-
don Press.
Denholm, James. 1804. A Tour to the Principal Scotch and English Lakes. Glasgow: A. MacGoun.
Fisher, Paul Hawkins. 1818. A Three Weeks Tour into Wales, in the Year 1817. Stroud: F. Vigurs.
Gilpin, William. 1768. An Essay upon Prints. London: J. Robson.
Green, William. 1819. The Tourist’s New Guide, Containing a Description of the Lakes, 2 vols.
Kendal: R Lough.
234 Art and Visuality

Holmes, Richard. 2008. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty
and Terror of Science. London: Harper Press.
Hucks, Joseph. 1795. A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales. London: J. Debrett.
Hutchinson, William. 1774. An Excursion to the Lakes, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, in
August 1773. London: J. Wilkie.
Hutton, William. 1803. Remarks upon North Wales. Birmingham: Knott and Lloyd.
Keats, John. 1970. Letters: A New Selection, ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
MacCulloch, John. 1824. The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. London: Longman.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2004. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London: Granta
Books.
Moritz, Charles P. 1795. Travels, Chiefly on Foot, through Several Parts of England, in 1782.
London: G. G. and J. Robinson.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Otley, Jonathan. (1823) 1825. A Concise Description of the English Lakes, and Adjacent Mountains,
2nd edn. Keswick: Jonathan Otley.
Pennant, Thomas. 1778. A Tour in Wales, 1773. London: Henry Hughes.
Plumptre, James. 1798. The Lakers: A Comic Opera, in Three Acts. London: W. Clarke.
R., M. 1828. ‘Four Days’ Ramble in the Neighbourhood of Bangor, North Wales’, The Kaleido-
scope, 9/431: 102 – 3.
Radcliffe, Ann. 1795. A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794. Dublin: William Porter.
Thorpe, Clarence DeWitt. 1935. ‘Two Augustans Crossing the Alps’, Studies in Philology, 32:
463 – 82.
Wainwright, Alfred. (1955 – 1966) 2003. Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: 50th Anniversary
Edition. London: Taylor & Frances.
Walker, Adam. 1792. Remarks Made in a Tour . . . to the Lakes in 1791. London: G. Nicol.
Warner, Richard. 1798. A Walk through Wales in August 1797. London: C. Dilly.
West, Thomas. 1778. A Guide to the Lakes. London: Richardson and Urquhart.
Wilkinson, Thomas. 1824. Tours to the British Mountains. London: Taylor and Hessey.
Wordsworth, William. (1810) 1975. Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt with a preface
by Stephen Gill. London: Frances Lincoln.
 10

The Work on the Street:

Street Art and Visual
Culture
Martin Irvine

The Significance of Street Art in Contemporary

Visual Culture
Street art, c. 2010, is a paradigm of hybrid art in global visual culture, a post-postmodern­
genre being defined more by real-time practice than by any sense of unified theory,
movement or message. Many artists associated with the ‘urban art movement’ do not
consider themselves ‘street’ or ‘graffiti’ artists, but as artists who consider the city their
necessary working environment. It’s a form at once local and global, post-photographic,
post-Internet and post-medium, intentionally ephemeral but now documented almost
obsessively with digital photography for the Web, constantly appropriating and remix-
ing imagery, styles and techniques from all possible sources. It’s a community of practice
with its own learned codes, rules, hierarchies of prestige and means of communication.
Street art began as an underground, anarchic, in-your-face appropriation of public vi-
sual surfaces, and has now become a major part of visual space in many cities and a rec-
ognized art movement crossing over into the museum and gallery system.1 This chapter
outlines a synthetic view of this hybrid art category that comes from my own mix of
experiences and roles—as an art and media theorist in the university, as an owner of a
contemporary gallery that has featured many street artists and as a colleague of many of
the artists, curators, art dealers and art collectors who have contributed to defining street
art in the past two decades.2
The street artists who have been defining the practice since the 1990s are now a major
part of the larger story of contemporary art and visual culture. Street art synthesizes and
circulates a visual vocabulary and set of stylistic registers that have become instantly rec-
ognizable throughout mass culture. Museum and gallery exhibitions and international
media coverage have taken Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Swoon and many others to levels
236 Art and Visuality

of recognition unknown in the institutionally authorized art world. Street art has also
achieved a substantial bibliography, securing it as a well-documented genre and institu-
tionalized object of study.3 This globalized art form represents a cultural turning point as
significant, permanent and irreversible as the reception of Pop art in the early 1960s.
For contemporary visual culture, street art is a major connecting node for multiple
disciplinary and institutional domains that seldom intersect with this heightened state
of visibility. The clash of intersecting forces that surround street art exposes often sup-
pressed questions about regimes of visibility and public space, the constitutive locations
and spaces of art, the role of communities of practice and cultural institutions, compet-
ing arguments about the nature of art and its relation to a public, and the generative
logic of appropriation and remix culture (just to name a few).
Street art subcultures embody amazingly inventive and improvisational counter-
practices, exemplifying Michel de Certeau’s description of urban navigators in The
Practice­of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984) and Henri Lefebvre’s analyses of appropria-
tions of public visual space in cities (Lefebvre 1991, 2003, 1996). Street artists exemplify
the contest for visibility described by Jacques Rancière in his analysis of the ‘distribution
of the perceptible’, the social-political regimes of visibility: the regulation of visibility in
public spaces and the regime of art, which policies the boundaries of art and artists’ legit-
imacy (Rancière 2004a, 2006a,b, 2009a,b). However the reception of street art contin-
ues to play out, many artists and their supporters have successfully negotiated positions
in the two major visibility regimes—the nonart urban public space regime and the
highly encoded spaces of art world institutions. Street art continues to develop with a
resistance to reductionist categories: the most notable works represent surprising hybrid
forms produced with the generative logic of remix and hybridization, allowing street
­artists to be several steps ahead of the cultural police hailing from any jurisdiction.
By the early 1990s, street art was the ghost in the urban machine becoming self-
aware and projecting its repressed dreams and fantasies onto walls and vertical architec-
ture, as if the visible city were the skin or exoskeleton of something experienced like a life
form in need of aesthetic CPR. A visually aware street art cohort in New York, Los An-
geles, San Francisco, Paris and London began to see the city as the real teacher, provid-
ing a daily instruction manual for the visual codes and semiotic systems in which we live
and move and have our being. A call went out to hack the visually predatory codes of
advertising, the rules of the attention economy and the control of visibility itself. A new
generation of art school–educated artists heard the call and joined the ranks of those al-
ready on the ground; they combined punk and hip-hop attitude with learned skills and
knowledge of recent art movements. By 2000, street artists had formed a global urban
network of knowledge and practice disseminated by proliferating Web sites, publica-
tions and collective nomadic projects.
Whether the street works seem utopian or anarchic, aggressive or sympathetic, stun-
ningly well-executed or juvenile, original or derivative, most street artists seriously work-
ing in the genre begin with a deep identification and empathy with the city: they are
compelled to state something in and with the city, whether as forms of protest, critique,
irony, humor, beauty, subversion, clever prank or all of the above. The pieces can be
The Work on the Street 237

ephemeral, gratuitous acts of beauty or forms of counter-iconography, inhabiting spaces

of abandonment and decay, or signal jams in a zone of hyper-commercial messaging. A
well-placed street piece will reveal the meaning of its material context, making the invisi-
ble visible again, a city re-imaged and re-imagined. A street work can be an intervention,
a collaboration, a commentary, a dialogic critique, an individual or collective manifesto,
an assertion of existence, aesthetic therapy for the dysaesthetics of urban controlled, com-
mercialized visibility and a Whitmanian hymn with the raw energy of pent-up demo-
cratic desires for expression and self-assertion. Whatever the medium and motives of
the work, the city is the assumed interlocutor, framework and essential precondition
for making the artwork work. (See especially the examples in Figures 10.1–10.7, 10.9,
10.14–10.22, and 10.27, 10.28.)
In the context of art theory in the institutional art world, street art and artists seem
made-to-order for a time when there is no acknowledged ‘period’ identity for contem-
porary art and no consensus on a possible role for an avant-garde.4 Yet the reception of
street art in the institutional art world remains problematic and caught in a generational
shift: the street art movement embodies many of the anti-institutional arguments elabo-
rated in the art world over the past fifty years, but it hasn’t been adopted as a category
for advancing art-institutional replication, the prime objective of the art professions.
Art world institutions prefer their avant-garde arguments and institutional critiques to
be conducted intramurally within established disciplinary practices. Even though no
art student today experiences art and visual culture without a knowledge of street art,
most art school programs continue an academic platform invested in playing out some
remaining possibilities in a postmodern remix of Performance Art, Conceptual Art, Ap-
propriation Art, Institutional Critique and conceptual directions in photography, film
and digital media. Critics, curators and academic theorists now routinely discuss art
forms that are ‘post-medium’, ‘post-studio’ and ‘post-institutional’, precisely the starting
point of street art.
Street art is also a valuable case for the ongoing debate about the material and his-
torical conditions of visual culture, and whether the concept of ‘visual culture’, as
constructed in recent visual culture studies, dematerializes visual experience into an
ahistorical, trans-media abstraction.5 The pan-digital media platforms that we experi-
ence daily on computer and TV screens and on every conceivable device create the il-
lusion of a disembodied, abstract, transmedia and dematerialized visual environment,
where images, video, graphics and text converge and coexist in the field of the flat-panel
frame. Street artists are making statements about visual culture and the effects of con-
trolled visibility in the lived environment of the city, where walls and screens are increas-
ingly intermingled. Shepard Fairey frequently remarks that one of his main motivations
was inserting images in urban space that challenged the corporate-government monop-
oly of visible expression, creating a disturbance where ‘there can be other images coex-
isting with advertising’ (Fairey 2009: 94). Street art inserts itself in the material city as
an argument about visuality, the social and political structure of being visible. Street art
works by being confrontationally material and location-specific while also participating
in the global, networked, Web-distributable cultural encyclopedia.
238 Art and Visuality

The social meaning of street art is a function of material locations with all their al-
ready structured symbolic values. The city location is an inseparable substrate for the
work, and street art is explicitly an engagement with a city, often a specific neighbor-
hood. Street artists are adept masters of the semiotics of space, and engage with the
city itself as a collage or assemblage of visual environments and source material (Ellin
1999: 280–8; Rowe and Koetter 1979; see Figures 10.7, 10.8, 10.19, 10.21, 10.22, and
10.27). A specific site, street, wall or building in London, New York, Paris or Washing-
ton, DC, is already encoded as a symbolic place, the dialogic context for the placement
of the piece by the artist. The practice is grounded in urban ‘operational space’, the
‘practiced place’ as described by de Certeau (de Certeau 1984)—not the abstract space
of geometry, urban planning or the virtual space of the screen, but the space created by
lived experience, defined by people mapping their own movements and daily relation-
ships to perceived centres of power through the streets, neighborhoods and transit net-
works of the city. Street art provides an intuitive break from the accelerated ‘aesthetics
of disappearance’, in Paul Virilio’s terms, a signal-hack in a mass-mediated environment
where what we see in the regime of screen visibility is always the absence of material ob-
jects (Virilio 2009; Armitage and Virilio 1999). The placement of works is often a call
to place, marking locations with awareness, over against the proliferating urban ‘non-
places’ of anonymous transit and commerce—the mall, the airport, Starbucks, big box
stores—as described by Marc Augé (Augé 2009). Street art is driven by the aesthetics of
material reappearance.

Contexts of Street Art 1990–2010: Reception, Theory

and Practice
The genealogy of street art is now well documented.6 Every art movement has its own
myths of origin and foundational moments, but the main continuity from the early
graffiti movements of the 1970s and 1980s to the diverse group of cross-over artists
and urban interventionists recognized in the 1990s (Blek le Rat, Barry McGee, Shepard
Fairey, Ron English, Banksy, WK Interact, José Parlá, Swoon) and the new cohort of
artists recognized since 2000 (for example Os Gemeos, Judith Supine, Blu, Vhils, JR,
Gaia) is the audacity of the act itself. The energy and conceptual force of the work often
relies on the act of ‘getting up’—the work as performance, an event, undertaken with a
gamble and a risk, taking on the uncertain safety of neighborhoods, the conditions of
buildings and the policing of property (see Castleman 1984). As ephemeral and contin-
gent performance, the action is the message: the marks and images appear as traces, signs
and records of the act, and are as immediately persuasive as they are recognizable.
The history and reception of street art, including what the category means, is a case-
book of political, social and legal conflicts, as well as disputes in the artists’ own subcul-
tures. Political tensions remain extreme over graffiti, and urban communities worldwide
are conflicted about the reception of street art in the context of the graffiti and ‘broken
windows’ debates,7 and whether there can be any social differentiation among kinds of
street works. Many street artists working now have ‘graduated’ from simple graffiti as
The Work on the Street 239

name or slogan writing to a focused practice involving many kinds of image and graphic
techniques.8 By 2000, most street artists saw their work as an art practice subsuming
mixed methods and hybrid genres, executed and produced both on and off the street.
The ‘street’ is now simply assumed and subsumed wherever the work is done.
A useful differentiator for street artists is the use of walls as mural space. By the early
1990s, the mass media had disseminated the graffiti styles in New York and Los Angeles,
and some of the most visually striking images of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 were
its miles of graffiti and mural art. Throughout the 1990s, street art as city mural art was
spreading across Europe and to South America, especially Brazil, home of the Os Ge-
meos brothers, who combined influences from hip-hop, Brazilian folk culture and artis-
tic friendships with Barry McGee and other artists from Europe and the USA (Nguyen
and Mackenzie 2010: 358–63). In the past fifteen years, many street artists have gone
from underground, usually anonymous, hit and run, provocateurs pushing the bound-
aries of vandalism and toleration of private property trespass to highly recognized art
stars invited to create legal, commissioned wall murals and museum installations (see
Figures 10.12–10.17 and 10.23–10.26). Banksy, though by no means a paradigm case,
went from merry prankster, vandal and nuisance to an art world showman and post-
Warholian career manager with works now protected on the streets and studio objects
in high demand by collectors, auction houses and museum curators. The global commu-
nity of artists is now a network of nonlinear relationships that grow and cluster nodally
by city identity, techniques and philosophy of art practice.
While artists as diverse as Blek le Rat, Barry McGee, Dan Witz, Ron English, Shep-
ard Fairey, Swoon, José Parlá, David Ellis, Os Gemeos and Gaia have developed impor-
tant conceptual arguments for their work (whether explicit or implicit), street artists
mainly work intuitively in a community of practice with multiple sources of cultural
history, not through formalized theory. But the levels of sophistication in their work
reveal conceptual affinities and sometimes direct, intentional alliances with prior art
movements. Where Pop opened a new conceptual space anticipated by Duchamp and
Dada, inaugurating new arguments for what art could be, street artists took those argu-
ments as already made (and over with), and ran with them out the institutional doors
and into the streets. Street art became the next step in transformative logic of Pop: a re-
directed act of transubstantiation that converts the raw and non-art-differentiated space
of public streets into new territories of visual engagement, anti-art performative acts
that result in a new art category. Like Pop, street art de-aestheticizes ‘high art’ as one of
many types of source material, and goes further by aestheticizing zones formerly outside
culturally recognized art space. The ‘extramural’ zones of non-art space and the logic
of the art container are now turned inside out: what was once banished from the walls
of the art institutions (schools, museums, galleries) is reflected back on the walls of the
city. Street art thrives on the paradox of being the mural art of the extramuros, outside
the institutional walls.
Street artists are also being discussed as inheritors of earlier art movements, espe-
cially the ideas that emerged within Dada and Situationism: viewing art as act, event,
performance, and intervention, a détournement—a hijacking, rerouting, displacement
240 Art and Visuality

and misappropriation of received culture for other ends.9 Street artists reenact the play
and spontaneity envisioned by Debord and described by de Certeau, escaping the func-
tionalism and purposiveness of urban order by deviation and wandering (derivé ) across
multiple zones, rejecting and modifying the prescribed uses of the urban environment
(Knabb 2006). Parallel with some forms of performance and conceptual art, street art-
ists are at home with the fragment, the ephemeral mark and images that engage the
public in time-bound situations. Street art extends several important post-Pop and post-
modern strategies that are now the common vocabulary of contemporary art: photo-
reproduction, repetition, the grid, serial imagery, appropriation and inversions of high
and low cultural codes. Repetition and serial forms are now embedded in the visible grid
of the city.
Street artists take the logic of appropriation, remix and hybridity in every direction:
arguments, ideas, actions, performances, interventions, inversions and subversions are
always being extended into new spaces, remixed for contexts and forms never antici-
pated in earlier postmodern arguments. Street art also assumes a foundational dialo-
gism in which each new act of making a work and inserting it into a street context is a
response, a reply, an engagement with prior works and the ongoing debate about the
public visual surface of a city. As dialogue-in-progress, it anticipates a response, public
discourse, commentary, new works. The city is seen as a living historical palimpsest open
for new inscription, re-write culture in practice (see Figures 10.1, 10.4–10.7, 10.20,
10.27, 10.28).
Street art continually reveals that no urban space is neutral: walls and street topog-
raphy are boundaries for socially constructed zones and territories, and vertical space is
regulated by regimes of visibility. Leaving a visual mark in public urban space is usually
technically illegal and often performed as an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. The
artists understand that publically viewable space, normally regulated by property and
commercial regimes for controlling visibility, can be appropriated for unconstrained,
uncontainable, antagonist acts. From the most recent stencil works and paste-ups on a
city building in publically viewable space to formal objects made in artists’ studios or
site-specific projects in galleries and museums, each location is framed by institutions,
legal regimes, public policies, cultural categories—frequently overlapping and cooperat-
ing, often contradictory in a nonharmonizing coexistence.
Several techniques, mediums and styles now converge in practice: stylized spray-can
graphics and spray drawings from graffiti conventions; found and appropriated imagery
from popular culture, advertising and mass photographic images re-produced in stencil
imagery or other printing techniques; design, graphics and illustration styles merging
everything from punk and underground subcultures to high culture design and typog-
raphy traditions; many forms of print-making techniques from Xerox and screen print-
ing to hand-cut woodblocks and linocuts; direct wall painting, both free-hand and from
projected images; and many forms of stencil techniques ranging from rough hand-cuts
to multiple layers of elaborate machine-cut imagery. A wall piece in New York, Los
Angeles, London or Paris can combine stencil imagery with spray paint, pre-printed
artist-designed paste-ups, photocopy blow-ups and collage imagery, and all imaginable
The Work on the Street 241

hybrids of print making, drawing and direct wall painting. Unifying practices are mon-
tage and collage, shifting scale (up or down) and using the power of serial imagery and
repetition in multiple contexts. The photographic and digital photographic sources of
images are taken for granted.
Many artists associated with the movement are beyond category, and experiment
with installations, material interventions and many hybrid genres. Vhils carves imagery
into walls and buildings, recalling some of Gordon Matta-Clark’s deconstructions of
built spaces. José Parlá creates wall murals and multilayered panels and canvases as visual
memory devices, palimpsests of urban mark-making, material history, graffiti morphed
into calligraphy and a direct confrontation of AbEx action painting with the decay of
the streets and the life of city walls. David Ellis makes films of extended action painting
performances and creates kinetic sculptures programmed to make found materials and
instruments dance in a call and response with the rhythms of the city. Shepard Fairey
channels popular culture images through multiple stylistic registers, including Social-
ist Realism, constructivist and modernist graphic design, rock poster designs and Pop
styles all merged and output as posters and screen prints for street paste-ups, murals and
hand-cut stencil and collage works on canvas, panel and fine art papers. While there is
no easy unifying term for all these practices, concepts and material implementations,
theory and practice are as tightly worked out in street art as in any art movement already
institutionalized in art history.

Street Art and the Global City: All-City to All-Cities

Society has been completely urbanized . . . The street is a place to play and learn.
The street is disorder . . . This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises . . . The urban
space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and
signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place
where speech can become ‘savage’ and, by escaping rules and institutions, ­inscribe
itself on walls.
—Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 1970 (Lefebvre (1970) 2003: 19)

Street art is truly the first global art movement fuelled by the Internet.
—Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective, 2010
(Nguyen and Mackenzie 2010: 141)

More than 75 per cent of the developed world now lives in cities and urban agglom-
erations; lesser developed regions are moving in the same direction.10 The future is the
global networked world city. Although the globalization of the ‘network society’ is un-
evenly distributed, globalization is primarily enacted through a network of cities.11 One
of its effects is a change in the idea of the city itself, a regional site incorporating vast
amounts of population mobility, flows of intellectual and material capital, expanding
242 Art and Visuality

beyond historic and local identity politics. All art movements have developed in cities,
but street art is distinctive in having emerged as a direct engagement with the postmod-
ern city: the artists and the works presuppose a dialogic relationship, a necessary entail-
ment, with the material and symbolic world of the city.
Though closely tied to locations and the temporal performative act, the practices
of street art as well as the works themselves vacillate between the specific materiality
of urban space, street locations, local contexts, and the exhibition, distribution and
communication platform of the Internet and Web. Street artists since around 2000
continually code-switch back and forth between the city as a material structure and
the ‘city of bits’,12 the city as information node, the virtual ‘space of flows’ (Castells
2000, 1989), networked and renderable in multiple digital visualizations. With pro-
liferating Web sites and popular media coverage, most street artists are not only aware
of being seen on a global stage, speaking locally and globally, but they actively con-
tribute to the global Web museum without walls, documenting their work digitally
as it is executed. First and foremost, there is the material moment, the physical act of
doing the art in a specific location and with specific materials (spray paint, stencils,
print and poster paste-ups, direct painting and every conceivable variation). But more
and more, street art is being made and performed to be captured in digital form for
distribution on Web sites and YouTube—the work of art in the age of instant digital
dissemination.13
Street art has emerged in this moment of accelerated and interconnected urban-
ization, and it’s no surprise that street art is most visible in global world cities where
concentrations of people, capital, built infrastructure and flows of information are the
densest. In many ways, street art is a response to this concentrated infrastructure with its
unequal distribution of resources, property and visibility. Street art reflects globalization
while resisting being absorbed into its convenient categories. Street artists interrupt the
totalizing sense of space produced in modern cities with a local, place-bound gesture, an
act that says ‘we’re here with this message now’. Street artist are also known for travel-
ling to specific locations to do their work in as many contexts as possible, documenting
the work for Web sites as they go. The work is fundamentally nomadic and ephemeral,
destabilizing in its instability.
For New York graffiti writers in the 1970s, having your name seen ‘all-city’ (the trains
traversing every borough) was ‘the faith of graffiti’ (Mailer and Naar 2010). This faith
has now been transferred to visibility ‘all-cities’ through the many Web sites and blogs
that document and archive street art, most of which are organized by city. Since the late
1990s, the imagery and practices of street artists have been spreading around the world
at Internet speed, artists tracking each others’ work, styles, techniques, walls and sites.
The Art Crimes Web site, the first graffiti site in the Internet, launched in 1995, and
the Wooster Collective, now a leading aggregator of all categories of street art, started in
2001 (Art Crimes Collective 1995; Wooster Collective 2001; Howze 2002). Through
individual and collective artists’ Web sites, Flickr image galleries, Google Maps tag-
ging and blogs, the faith of street art has migrated to the digital city, achieving visibility
­all-cities.
The Work on the Street 243

Extramuros/Intramuros : Streets, Cities, Walls

I’ve always paid a great deal of attention to what happens on walls. When I was young,
I often even copied graffiti.
—Picasso (Brassaï 1999: 254)

[Modern paintings] are like so many interpretations, if not imitations, of a wall.

—Brassaï (Brassaï 2002: 13)

A good city is a city with graffiti.

—Miss Van, 2007 (Neelon 2007)

De Certeau cites a statement by Erasmus, ‘the city is a huge monastery’ (de Certeau
1984: 93), a reference to the premodern image of the walled city and the walled mon-
astery as boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The metaphors of intramuros and ex-
tramuros, inside and outside the walls, run deep in Western culture. They name both
material and symbolic spaces, zones of authority and hierarchies of identity (Brighenti
2009a,b). The premodern metaphors remain in many institutions—schools, colleges
and universities, and urban space itself. Paris, arguably the home of the modern idea
of the city, still retains the idea of metropolitan expansion zones extramuros, the ban-
lieues, outside the historic, and once walled, city centre. In modern cities without the
internalized history of the classical and medieval defensive walls, the structure of streets
and buildings, highways and train yards creates marked boundaries, territories, zones
and demarcations of hierarchical space, a psychogeography of spaces. Street artists have
a well-developed practice for placing works in this structured space, where the well-
­chosen placement of a work often builds more credit than the work itself.
Surfaces that form the visible city are vertical: visibility becomes a contest for using
and regulating vertical space. The wall is a metaphor for verticality—buildings, street
layout and boundary walls form the topography of the visible in public space, or more
appropriately, publically viewable, space (see Brighenti 2009a,b). Vertical space is highly
valuable in modern cities, driving the value of ‘air rights’ above a property and the verti-
cal surfaces which can be leased for advertising. When concentrated in spaces like Times
Square in New York, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, advertis-
ing surfaces achieve the status of totalizing spectacles, walled enclaves of manufactured
and regulated visuality.
One of the major obsessions of modern art theory has been the cultural wall: the
problem of institutional walls, the over-determined modernist ‘white cube’ of four gal-
lery walls (O’Doherty 1999), the bourgeois commoditization of wall-mountable works
representing symbolic capital in domestic space, the conceptual use of art institution
walls as an abstract surface for ephemeral works requiring no permanent or durable
244 Art and Visuality

material form, walls as boundaries, limits, enclosures, territories, zones and concepts of
art on, off or outside the walls. This theorizing is enacted as a series of arguments that
presuppose, and only make sense within, the intramural art world. For many avant-
gardes, the bourgeois domestic gallery or museum interior, a wall system for objects,
provides the scene for irony and subversions precisely because it is everywhere stable,
entailed, presupposed, always-already there. For conceptual art, it was the question of
the objecthood of the work, its independence from wall space other than as a structure
of verticality to be used, or not, in the installation of a work. Performance art challenged
everything except the presupposition of the constitutive intramural art space for the rec-
ognition, reception and visibility of the art act as art.14
In a recent essay, Mel Bochner reflected on the move in the 1970s and 1980s to draw
and paint directly on walls, redirecting the question of art as object to one of concept
on surface (Bochner 2009). It was still a question of intramural art institution walls, and
one that had been already raised in Andy Warhol’s famous show at Leo Castelli’s in 1966
when he covered every wall in the gallery with Pop-coloured cow wallpaper, using actual
printed wallpaper, and taking object-less flatness all the way. Bochner reflects that War-
hol’s move combined with the impact of the graffiti written in the May 1968 Paris stu-
dent uprising signalled a new awareness of direct encounters with the inscribed surface
of a wall: it is immediate and temporal. ‘These works cannot be “held”; they can only
be seen.’ Bochner’s concluding observation could easily be expressed by a street artist:
‘By collapsing the space between the artwork and the viewer, a wall painting negates the
gap between lived time and pictorial time, permitting the work to engage larger philo-
sophical, social, and political issues’ (Bochner 2009: 140). OK, the street artist would
say, but reverse the orientation of the walls: what was formerly a debate about work
done in institutional art space has now been turned outward into public space, or, more
fully, let’s erase the zones and demarcations and acknowledge a continuum between art-
­institutional space and the public space surrounding everyday life.
Let’s consider a few routes through which street art wall practices were anticipated
but not fulfilled by avant-garde attempts to break the wall system. I’m not interested in
developing myths of origin or a genealogy of practices that could legitimize street art in
an art historical narrative, as if street art were a long-repressed, internalized ‘other’ finally
bursting out on its own. Rather, when read dialogically, the moves, strategies and argu-
ments being restated in street art practice become visible as intuitive and conceptual acts
with equal sophistication and awareness of consequences.
We can trace a nonlinear cluster of concepts and practices extending from postwar
neo-Dadaist artists down to the 1980s and the art world reception of Basquiat, Jenny
Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose works, as different as they are in medium and con-
cepts, presuppose the intramuros/extramuros symbolic system. Conceptual and strate-
gic connections to recent street art practice are found in Robert Rauschenberg’s image
transfers and assemblage works, Cy Twombly’s large mural paintings of writing and
graffiti gestures, the works of the décollage artists begun in the late 1940s, especially by
Jacques Villeglé in Paris, and the ‘matter’ and wall paintings by Antoni Tàpies in Barce-
lona in the 1950s–1980s. An ur-text for the tradition is Brassaï’s Graffiti, photographs of
The Work on the Street 245

the paint marks, image scratches and writings on Paris walls from the 1930s–1950s, the
first collection of which was published in 1961 with an introduction by Picasso (Bras-
saï 2002). Known as the photographer of the Paris streets, Brassaï made photographing
graffiti a life-long project. The Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of Bras-
saï’s graffiti photographs in 1956 and the Bibliothèque Nationale organized a Brassaï
retrospective in Paris in 1964, both of which had a major influence on artists and the
modernist discourse about primitivism, outsider art and the unselfconscious expression
of the untrained savant. The art world debate about walls, graffiti and the authentic
outsider provided one context for the reception of Basquiat and Haring in the post-Pop
1980s. Also beginning in the 1980s, Barbara Kruger extended the debate about walls
and appropriated images for a feminist conceptual critique that both crossed the wall
boundaries and disrupted the white cube of gallery space by presenting all walls, ceilings
and floors as a continuous surface of image and text.
Artists in the Abstract Expressionist and Neo-Dadaist traditions quoted or appropri-
ated the look or the Romantic myth of graffiti as a gesture to be incorporated in large,
mural paintings. The appropriation made sense only as a move in a specific kind of
argument about painting that involved breaking down the pictorial surface with gra-
phism, writing and symbols, usually with a down-skilling or deskilling of mark-marking
and other nonpictorial elements. Cy Twombly’s works in the 1950s show the trans-
ference of street wall acts and gestures, ‘surrogate graffiti’, ‘like anonymous drawings
on walls’.15 Twombly’s ‘allusions’ to writing on walls and blackboards were a means to
smuggle graffiti gestures into painting as a sign of the primitive, raw, spontaneous and
pre-formal, writing overtaking pictorial space.16 Rauschenberg, who initially appeared
in shows with Twombly, constructed combine and collage works incorporating nearly
all possible graphic gestures and image appropriations in wall-like systems (Mattison
2003: 41–104). Rauschenberg’s deconstructed image- and sign-bearing materials were
the escape hatch that launched appropriation art as an ongoing encounter with what is
found in the city. As Leo Steinberg noted, ‘Rauschenberg’s picture plane is for the con-
sciousness immersed in the brain of the city’ (Steinberg 1972). At the time, a similar
move inside painting was developed by Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, whose paintings ap-
propriated the materiality of the city wall with its codes for communal inscription and
palimpsest history.
What emerged in the 1950s–1960s as a formal argument about painting ‘degree-
zero’, a reduction of means to the baseline materiality of surfaces, a reduction down to
the bare walls as a minimal signifying unit of plane space, was converted into a mate-
rial practice by street artists in the 1980s–1990s. Instead of smuggling in nonart acts on
walls as a disruptive move within the grand narrative of painting, street art starts from
the reversed wall, the interchange and promiscuous mix of cultures intra- and extra-
muros, as the now always-already state of the world’s imaging system. The reversal re-
veals the urban wall as we’ve already known it, though often occluded in misrecognition:
the wall as the primary signifying space of the human built environment, the picturing
plane par excellence, a kind of deep structure in the generative grammar of visuality, part
of a centuries-long cultural unconscious. We can’t get over the wall.
246 Art and Visuality

This awareness of the signifying materiality of the urban wall was explored persua-
sively by two other artists in the 1950s–1960s, Jacques Villeglé and Antoni Tàpies, art-
ists who have continued their practice to the present day. Villeglé’s works are made of, or
from, torn street posters, a move that both scaled up and reversed the process of Dadist
collage and redirected the anonymity of posters pasted and torn away by the hands of
passersby.17 Villeglé usually named his decollage pieces by the streets, squares or metro
stations from which he extracted the found and torn posters, many of which had graffiti
and other paste-up additions added by others. He ‘deglued’ the street-scale posters and
papers and then reapplied them to canvas and paper supports to be mounted on exhi-
bition walls, thus reversing nonart/art wall spaces and allowing the extramural realm of
anonymous, layered public walls to penetrate the intramural space of the gallery, mu-
seum and art collection. It was a move that inserted a sign of the ephemeral, public street
experience without engaging in its practice. This technique is now used by many street
artists who create studio-produced canvases and wood panel works using various collage
techniques with found and prepared papers.
Antoni Tàpies, the Catalonian artist known for his interpretation of Dada, art brut
and art informel (formlessness), transposed the function of city walls onto his canvases,
often marking them with raw graffiti gestures, crosses, Xs, and ritual and territorial
marks.18 His appropriation of the city wall went back to growing up in Barcelona and
experiencing the city walls as both a cultural identity and a tableau on which the daily
violence of fascist oppression was inscribed and memorialized in the 1930s–1940s. For
him, the direct marks in matter were signs of the undeniable presence of human action,
the traces of history and memory imposed materially and directly, and not through il-
lusionistic images which can only be signifiers of absence. He turned the external in-
scribed surface of walls inward, into interior space and the inward space of symbols and
meditation. In the 1950s he discovered Brassaï’s photographs of graffiti and the theories
accompanying the reception of Brassaï’s work, further motivating his move to making
paintings as quotations from walls.
Tàpies inserted the materiality of old, marked city walls into painting, using marble
dust, sand and clay; he marked the materials like territory identity signs, but limited to
the demarcated surface of a painting. In his essay ‘Communication on the Wall’ (1969),
he recalled a turning point in the 1950s: ‘the most sensational surprise was to discover
one day, suddenly, that my paintings . . . had turned into walls’.19 Reversing exterior
walls to interior reflection, Tàpies represents walls not simply as material barriers but
as the medium for public marks of human struggle, presence, mortality and collective
memory. The secular extramural ritual of adding human presence to the palimpsest wall
in nonart space has been turned around to present itself in the intramural art space of
the studio, museum, gallery and art collection. Mutatis mutandis, street artists in Barce-
lona have extended Tàpies’s project by executing some of the most striking street mural
art in the world (see Figures 10.27 and 10.28).20
Around 1980, Basquiat made the transition from graffiti and his SAMO street iden-
tity to working out his famous street/studio fusion with lessons learned from the early
Pollock, Dubuffet, Twombly, Rauschenberg and Picasso (Marshall 1992; Mercurio
The Work on the Street 247

2007; Cortez et al. 2007). He reversed the walls again, eagerly joining the prestige sys-
tem of the art world, and was at home with large-scale mural paintings, creating paint-
ings that were walls of brut imagery, graphics and writing. When Basquiat abandoned
his street work for the intramural art world, there was an enthusiastic embrace of his
outsider cross-over status, as if he came from a curatorial central casting agency. He
emerged at a moment when ‘outsider’ and ‘primitive’ art were established as art market
and curatorial categories, and when the first wave of graffiti art had crossed over into the
gallery system. Basquiat’s and Keith Haring’s works were also received as viable moves
within a post-Pop continuum, both artists benefitting from art world and popular cul-
ture myths of the Romantic outsider artist. The next generation of street artists moved
beyond the wall problematic of the art world, and energetically embraced working as
outsiders. The nonart space of city walls remained open for intervention, and the rest is
now history.
Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, important wall-breakers in other directions,
should be cited as concluding examples of artists who intervened in the mediated city
and the urban wall messaging system. Both artists rose to international attention in the
1980s simultaneously with Basquiat and Haring, and both began by responding to the
cultural messaging system of New York City. Jenny Holzer began her LED aphorism
and posters in the late 1970s as interventions in public space, and she then developed
her signature style of large-scale text projections on city buildings and messages on ap-
propriated billboards.21 Barbara Kruger has produced a large body of work that com-
bines collaged or photomontaged appropriated images from mass media with slogans in
the Futura Bold type font directed towards a feminist critique of consumer culture. Her
works are like scaled-up magazine advertising spreads, and she often installs her work
like walls of posters and billboards, at times covering entire floors and ceilings of gallery
rooms.22 She has also produced works installed in public spaces, including billboards,
posters, bus stops and exterior museum installations.23 Shepard Fairey and others have
acknowledged Holzer and Kruger as major influences for using text messages and appro-
priated, stylistically encoded mass media imagery in works created for multiple spaces of
reception (Fairey 2009: 34; Spears 2010; Revelli and Fairey 2010: 44–55).
Street artists have broken the wall system even further by including the social intra-
muros/extramuros partitions as part of their subject matter. Public spaces and city walls
have become a heuristics laboratory for experimentation and discovery, the results of
which are brought back into studio art making, and vice versa. For many artists today,
making new art is not only about negotiating with ‘art history’, but about engaging
with the history of every mark, sign and image left in the vast, global, encyclopedic
memory machine of the city. The street, studio and gallery installation spaces now
continually intersect and presuppose one another; artworks are made for the spaces
that frame them. As Alexandre Farto (Vhils) explains, ‘I don’t discriminate between
outside and inside. I think it’s more about the way you embrace a particular space
and what you want to question with it’ (Nguyen and Mackenzie 2010: 10). Likewise,
José Parlá ‘never saw the difference’ between doing his illegal street work and his ex-
periments on canvas when he started painting in the late 1980s: ‘my generation grew
248 Art and Visuality

up seeing . . . Jean-Michel Basquiat, Futura and Phase2 and their gallery exhibitions
around the world . . . Regardless of the surface, for me it was all just art—and that’s it’
(Nguyen and Mackenzie 2010: 27).
The cultural wall system is capable of many reversals and inversions precisely because
the major art and property regimes are defined by secular extensions of the rule of in-
tramuros and extramuros. Within the institutional boundaries of the art world system,
we learn what the category of art is, what is excluded and excludable (the extramuros)
and what is included and includable. Visibility regimes remain embedded in our mate-
rial and symbolic wall systems like resident software always functioning as a background
process. The art world had a dream of art forms that subverted the received structures
and boundaries, but never imagined that outsiders would actually be doing it. Dada
didn’t overturn the intramural idea of art; it required and presupposed it. Dada was the
theory; street art is the practice.

Street Art and Rewriting the City

The way I look at the landscape is forever changed because of street art.
—Shepard Fairey, 2010  24

Much of street art practice follows the logic of transgressions, appropriations and tactics
described in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.25 De Certeau describes
how ordinary urban citizens navigate and negotiate their positions in power systems that
mark up city space. Breaking up the totalizing notion of those dominated by power as
passive consumers, de Certeau shows that daily life is made, a creative production, con-
stantly appropriating and reappropriating the products, messages, spaces for expression
and territories of others. For de Certeau, the term ‘consumer’ is a useless, reductionist
euphemism that obscures the complexities of daily practice. Consumers are more ap-
propriately users and re-producers. ‘Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless
ways on the property of others’ (de Certeau 1984: xii). Street art and urban artist col-
lectives are acts of engagement and reorganization, a therapeutics based on reappropria-
tions and redeployments of the dominant image economy and hierarchical distribution
of space experienced in metropolitan environments.
De Certeau described the strategy of city dwellers in their ‘reading’ of received cul-
ture with its normative messages and the active ‘writing’ back of new and oppositional
uses that become community identity positions (de Certeau 1984: xxi). He antici-
pated the idea of ‘read-write’ culture, the post-Internet context of all art practice, which
involves ‘reading’ transmitted information and ‘rewriting’ it back to the cultural ar-
chive, reusing it by interpretation and new context, the remix of the received and the
re-produced.26 Street art lives at the read-write intersection of the city as geopolitical
territory and the global city of bits. Not only are the material surfaces of buildings
and walls rewritten, but street art presupposes the global remix and reappropriation
of ­imagery and ideas transferred or created in digital form and distributable on the
The Work on the Street 249

Internet. Remix culture scans the received culture encyclopedia for what can be rein-
terpreted, rewritten and reimaged now. Displacements, dislocations and relocations are
normative generative practices.
Many street artists are nomads, moving around when possible in this connected and
rapidly continuous intermural global city. This is a very new kind of art practice, doing
works in multiple cities and documenting them in real time on the Web. Nomadic street
artists are now imagining the global city as a distributed surface on which to mark and
inscribe visual interventions that function both locally and globally. The act and gesture
performed in one location can now be viewed from any other city location, and docu-
mented, archived, compared, imitated, remixed, with any kind of dialogic response.
Banksy’s stencil works have appeared on Palestinian border walls as well as on the walls
and buildings of most major cities, instantly viewable through a Google image search.
Reading and rewriting the city has been globalized; the post-Internet generations of
artists navigate material and digital cities in an experiential continuum. The art of the
extramural world has reconceived both material and conceptual walls and spaces: the
extramural has become post-mural.

The Contest of Visibility

The future of art is not artistic, but urban.

—Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre 1996: 173)

New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Melbourne, Rio and Sao Paulo
are palimpsests of visual information in the consumerist attention economy, every vi-
sual signifier discharged in a real-time competition and rivalry for observers’ attention.
World cities have known territories and hierarchies, peripheries and zones for industry
or marginalized classes, all of which are assumed and exploited in street art. For street
artists, a city is an information engine: the daily flows of people for work, leisure and
consumption are information; the invisible communications network infrastructure not
only transmits information but its very density is itself information; streets, alleys, the
built environment is information; the presence or absence of buildings are information;
the commercial messaging systems in signs, advertising, logos, billboards and giant light
panels both transmit and are themselves information. Some of the information becomes
communication, addressable messages to passersby, advertising hailing us all to look and
receive. Ubiquitous, street-level, vertical advertising spaces are a normative experience
in every city, a protected zone of visuality now nearly inseparable from urban life itself
(see Figures 10.10 and 10.11).
Street art is thus always an assertion, a competition, for visibility; urban public space
is always a competition for power by managing the power of visibility (See Brighenti
2007, 2009a; Brighenti and Mattiucci 2009). To be visible is to be known, to be rec-
ognized, to exist. Recognition is both an internal code within the community of prac-
tice of street artists, and the larger social effect sought by the works as acts in public,
250 Art and Visuality

or publically viewable, space (see Figures 10.15–10.26). The acts of visibility, separable
from the anonymity of many streets artists, become part of the social symbolic world,
and finally, of urban ritual, repetitions that instantiate communal beliefs and bonds of
identity.
Street art contests two main regimes of visibility—legal and governmental on one
side, and art world or social aesthetic on the other—which creates the conditions within
which it must compete for visibility. Street art works against the regimes of government,
law and aesthetics as accepted, self-evident systems that normalize a common world by
unconscious rules of visibility and recognition. In each regime, there are rules and codes
for what can be made visible or perceptible, who has the legitimacy to be seen and heard
where, and who can be rendered invisible as merely the background noise of urban life.
Jacques Rancière has noted how politics is enacted by ‘the partition of the perceptible’
(French, partage du sensible), how the regulation, division or distribution of visibility it-
self distributes power: ‘Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a spe-
cific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable,
which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not
allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them’ (Rancière 2004b:
10). Advertising and commercial messaging space are made to appear as a guaranteed,
normalized partition of the visible in the legal regime. Street artists intuitively contest
this rationing or apportioning out of visibility by intervening in a publically visible
way. Street art thus appears at the intersection of two regimes, two ways of distributing
visibility—the governmental regime (politics, law, property) and the aesthetic regime
(the art world and the boundary maintenance between art and nonart).
The contest of visibility is clearly marked in the visual regimes for commercial com-
munication. As de Certeau observed, ‘from TV to newspapers, from advertising to all
sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vi-
sion, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting commu-
nication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic of the eye and of the impulse to read’
(de Certeau 1984: xxi). Every day, we consume more visual messages than products.
Street advertising has to be instantly recognizable, but with image saturation, it’s also
instantly disengageable, a contest between meaning and noise. All advertising messages
are constructed to interpellate us, calling us out to take up the position of the advertising
addressee—the consumer, the passive receiver.27 Street art pushes back with alternative
subject positions for inhabitants and citizens, confusing the message system by offering
the alternative subjectivity of gift-receiver, and blurring the lines between producers and
receivers.
Street artists often talk about their work as a reaction to the domination of urban
visual space by advertising in a closed property regime. Street art is a response to experi-
encing public spaces as being implicitly, structurally, forms of advertising, embodying
the codes for socialization in the political economy. In attempts to maximize the com-
mercial appeal of city centres, many cities have government-sponsored urban projects
that turn urban zones into theme parks with carefully controlled visual information
necessary for sustaining a tourist simulacrum. As Baudrillard noted, ‘today what we
The Work on the Street 251

are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of ad-
vertising’ (Baudrillard 1995: 87). Not merely messages for products and services, but
a social messaging system, ‘vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual’, that replaces lived
social experience with a fantasy of a consumerist community. The code of advertising
is socialization to the message system: ‘a sociality everywhere present, an absolute so-
ciality finally realized in absolute advertising . . . a vestige of sociality hallucinated on
all the walls in the simplified form of a demand of the social that is immediately met
by the echo of advertising. The social as a script, whose bewildered audience we are’
(Baudrillard 1995: 88).
Street art works to scramble this script, jam the communiqué, or expose its falsely
transparent operation, allowing viewers to adopt different positions, no longer simply
subjects of a message. Street art is a direct engagement with a city’s messaging system, a
direct hit on the unconscious, accepted, seemingly natural spaces in which visual mes-
sages can appear. Street artists intervene with a counter-imagery, acts of displacement
in an ongoing generative ‘semeiocracy’, the politics of meaning-making through images
and writing in contexts that bring the contest over visibility into the open. Walls and
structures can be de-purposed, repurposed, de-faced, refaced, de-made, remade.
Ron English, Shepard Fairey, Banksy and many others have made explicit subversion
of advertising space one of their main tactics. Ron English has high-jacked more than
1,000 billboards with his Pop ‘subvertisements’, becoming the exemplar of the culture-
jamming potential of street art.28 This approach has been the main motivation for Shep-
ard Fairey’s long-running ‘Obey’ campaign: images and slogans that provoke awareness
about public messages and advertising (Fairey 2009: ii–v and passim). Though criticized
for being simplistic, Fairey’s message targets the consumer subject directly: ‘keep your
eyes and mind open, and question everything’ (Fairey 2009: xvi). Swoon takes a subtler
but still pointed approach: ‘Lately I have wanted to give all of my attention to reflecting
our humanness, our fragility and strength, back out at us from our city walls in a way
that makes all of these fake images screaming at us from billboards seem irrelevant and
cruel, which is what they are’ (in Ganz and MacDonald 2006: 204).
In terms of visual communication space, privatized commercial messages are end-
lessly displayed on industrial scale on billboards, street posters and kiosks, and huge
lighted signs. The visual space of many cities is given over to advertising in protected
spaces rented from property owners. As de Certeau observed in ‘The Imaginary of the
City’, an ‘imaginary discourse of commerce is pasted over every square inch of public
walls’. The visible spaces of inscription for commerce, of course, can reveal precisely
where artists’ interventions will be most visible as a counter-imaginary language:

[Commercial imagery] is a mural language with the repertory of its immediate objects
of happiness. It conceals the buildings in which labor is confined; it covers over the
closed universe of everyday life; it sets in place artificial forms that follow the paths of
labor in order to juxtapose their passageways to the successive moments of pleasure.
A city that is a real ‘imaginary museum’ forms the counterpoint of the city at work.
(de Certeau 1997: 20)
252 Art and Visuality

This view is precisely what motivates many street artists: the city as a competitive
space of mural messaging, walls and nonneutral spaces with a potential for bearing
messages. Street artists seize the spaces of visibility for the messaging system. As Swoon
stated in 2003 on the methods of her Brooklyn collective, ‘we scour the city for the ways
that we are spoken to, and we speak back . . . Once you start listening, the walls don’t
shut up.’29
Street art also exemplifies the kind of cultural reproduction that de Certeau discov-
ered in actions that transgress not only the spaces where messaging can appear, but in its
obvious noncommercial, ephemeral and gratuitous form. It takes on the politics of the
gift, in direct opposition to most legal messaging on city walls and vertical spaces. His
description of popular culture tactics is parallel to the logic of street art:

[O]rder is tricked by an art . . . , that is, an economy of the ‘gift’ (generosities for which
one expects a return), an esthetics of ‘tricks’ (artists’ operations) and an ethics of te-
nacity (countless ways of refusing to accord the established order the status of a law, a
meaning, or a fatality) . . . [T]he politics of the ‘gift’ also becomes a diversionary tactic.
In the same way, the loss that was voluntary in a gift economy is transformed into a
transgression in a profit economy: it appears as an excess (a waste), a challenge (a rejec-
tion of profit), or a crime (an attack on property). (de Certeau 1984: 26, 27)

For the generation of artists in the 1990s, the walls became found materials to work
with, turning attention to what is normally, intentionally, unnoticed, visually sup-
pressed. The public gift of the street work, even if declined or disavowed, would always
be a mark of presence. As Barry McGee stated in 1995, graffiti was all about showing
‘signs of life. People are alive. Someone was here at that time.’30 Visibility is presence; to
exist is to be seen.
A clear statement of public intervention in city space is summed up in Swoon’s de-
scription of her Indivisible Cities project that she organized with artists in Berlin in
2003. ‘[T]here is a struggle going on for the physical surfaces of our cities.’

Indivisible Cities is a visual and cultural exchange focusing on artistic interventions in

the urban landscape. Creating itself out of the margins of our cities is a community
of people, more precisely it is a community of actions, a floating world of ephemera
and physical markings made by people who have decided to become active citizens in
creating their visual landscape. Every time someone reappropriates a billboard for his
or her own needs, scrawls their alias across a highway overpass, or uses city walls as a
sounding board for their thoughts and images for messages that need realization, they
are participating in this community. They are circumscribing a link to every other per-
son who believes that the vitality of our public spaces is directly related to the public
participating in the incessant creation and re-creation of those spaces. [Street art is]
a form of active citizenship that resists attempts at containment . . . I think that the
persistence of graffiti and street art in cities all over the world is evidence of a common
need for citizens to take a role in their environments.31
The Work on the Street 253

Street art provides ongoing signs of environmental reclamation, marking out zones
for an alternative visibility. Both regimes of visibility are disturbed, a disturbance that
also renders their falsely transparent operations visible as the social and political con-
structions they are.

Conclusions and Consequences: Street Art

in the Dialogical Field of Art
In providing an overview of the larger contexts of street art for visual culture, I’m pain-
fully aware of the omissions and generalizations one must commit to fulfill the task.
I can only provide some conclusions and consequences in a brief form here. Like all
cultural terms, ‘street art’ names and constructs a category useful in various kinds of
arguments, but is easily deconstructible as riddled with internal contradictions and con-
testable assumptions. And like Pop after the 1960s, some critics are already declaring
an ‘end’ to street art as a viable movement: street art, as the argument goes, has now re-
ceived art institutional recognition along with trivializing by media exposure and dilu-
tion by imitators and co-option by celebrity culture. For most artists today, street art is
simply a short-hand term for multiple ways of doing art in dialogue with a city in a con-
tinuity of practice that spans street, studio, gallery, museum and the Internet. This con-
tinuum of practice was unknown to artists in any prior cultural position. The term does
useful cultural work when street art is viewed as a practice that subsumes many forms of
visual culture and postmodern art movements, but played out in conflicting ways across
the visibility regimes and constitutive spaces of the city and art institutions.
Summing up, let’s retrace the network array of forces within which street art has be-
come a connecting node:

1. Street art reveals a new kind of attention to the phenomenology of the city, the
experience of material spaces and places in daily life, and has reintroduced play
and the gift in public exchange. Well-executed and well-placed street art rean-
chors us in the here and now, countering the forces of disappearance in the city
as a frictionless commerce machine neutralizing time and presence and claim-
ing all zones of visuality for itself. Street art rematerializes the visual, an aesthet-
ics of reappearance in an era of continual re-mediation and disappearance (see
Bolter and Grusin 2000).
2. Street art thwarts attempts to maintain unified, normalized visibility regimes,
the legal and policy regime for controlling public, ‘nonart’ space and the insti-
tutional regime controlling the visibility of art. It exposes the contest for vis-
ibility being played out in multiple dimensions, and the internal contractions
which must be repressed for the regimes to function. Street art will remain an
institutional antinomy because it depends on the extramural tensions of work-
ing outside art spaces that are commonly understood as ‘deactivating’ art. Art
space, the heterotopia of museum, gallery and academic institutional space,
is well recognized in its constitutive function as part of learned and shared
254 Art and Visuality

cultural capital.32 Public space, on the other hand, is understood as precisely

that space in which art does not and cannot appear, where we’ve learned that
art cannot be made visible as such. The spaces have been, and continue to be,
reconfigured, but the visibility regimes remain deeply embedded in our social,
economic and political order.
3. By subverting the cultural wall system and championing the ephemeral act of
art, street art reveals internal contradictions and crises in the parallel universe
of the art world. In the institutional art world, we only find unity in a consen-
sual disunity about the state of contemporary art, the institutional response to
popular visual culture, and the ongoing dissatisfaction with dehistoricizing, dis-
locating, institutional containers. There seems to be no escape from the intra-
mural self-reflexive authentication operations, no ‘outside the wall’. Hal Foster
aptly describes the effect of monumental institutional spaces like Dia:Beacon
and the Tate Modern: ‘we wander through museum spaces as if after the end
of time’ (Foster et al. 2004: 679). The art world isn’t dancing on the muse-
um’s ruins (as in Crimp 1993), but keeps the ‘museum without walls’ installed
within the institution.
4. Street art since the late 1990s is the first truly post-Internet art movement,
equally at home in real and digital spaces as an ongoing continuum, inter-
implicated, inter-referenced, the real and the virtual mutually presupposed.
This phenomenon is partly generational and partly a function of ubiquitous
and accessible technology in cities. Inexpensive digital cameras and laptops join
the Web’s architecture for do-it-yourself publishing and social networking in
a highly compatible way. Street art as a global movement has grown uncon-
strained through Web image-sharing and multiple ways of capturing and ar-
chiving ephemeral art.
5. Street art since the 1990s is a kind of manifesto-in-practice for the complex
forms of globalization, cultural hybridity and remix which are increasingly the
norm for life in global, networked cities. Street art’s embrace of multiple medi-
ums, techniques, materials and styles makes it an exemplar of hybridity, remix
and post-appropriation practices now seen to be a defining principle of ‘con-
temporary’ culture. I’d like to expand on this issue to explore some wider impli-
cations of street art and cultural hybridity.

Street Art and Contemporary Hybridity, Remix

and Appropriation: The Implications of Read-Write
Visual Culture
To riff on a police term, street artists have ‘known associations’ with hip-hop and post-
punk cultures, a trans-urban ‘mash-up is the message’ aesthetic that values a living, per-
formative, reinterpretation and recontextualization of received materials in real-time
practice. If collage is arguably the major aesthetic force in twentieth-century art forms,33
The Work on the Street 255

then hybridity, appropriation and remix have clearly become the forces for the early-
twenty-first.34 The key issue, which I will develop further in a forthcoming book, is un-
derstanding hybridity, remix and appropriation as surface forms of a deeper generative
grammar of culture, as visible or explicit instances of a structurally necessary dialogic
principle underlying all forms of human expression and meaning-making.35 The appro-
priative or dialogic principle in creative production is part of the source code of living
cultures. As part of the internalized, generative grammar of culture, the dialogic prin-
ciple is ordinarily invisible to members of a culture because it is not a unit of content to
be expressed, but makes possible the expression of any new content per se.
In street art, appropriation and remix of styles and imagery extend the prior prac-
tices of Pop and Conceptual Art genres,36 but street artists take the conditions of post-
modernity for granted, as something already in the past, already accounted for and in
the mix. The state of art-making today is no longer burdened with the curriculum of
postmodernism—mourning over the museum’s ruins and the dehistoricized mash-ups
of popular culture,37 cataloguing the collapse of high and low culture boundaries, and
finding uses for anxieties about postcolonial global hybridization and identity politics.
Remix is now coming into view as one of the main engines of culture, though long shut
up and hidden in a black box of ideologies. Behind so much creative work in art, music,
literature and design today is the sense of culture as being always-already hybrid, a mix
of ‘impure’, promiscuous, and often unacknowledged or suppressed sources, local and
global, and kept alive in an ongoing dialogic call and response.
Nicolas Bourriaud has argued that the cluster of concepts related to remix and ap-
propriation can be described as postproduction: recent art practices function as an alter-
native editing table for remixing the montage we call reality into the cultural fictions
we call art (see Bourriaud 2005, 2009b: 177–88). The editing table or mixing board
(terms from audio-visual postproduction) are apt metaphors for a time when so much
new cultural production is expressed as postproduction, received cultural materials se-
lected, quoted, collaged, remixed, edited and positioned in new conceptual or material
contexts. By making visible the reuse of materials already in circulation in the com-
mon culture, much street art has affinities with constantly evolving global hybrid music
cultures, which have subsumed earlier DJ, Dub, sampling and electronic/digital remix
composition practices.38
Street art is visual dub, extracting sources and styles from a cultural encyclopedia of
images and message styles, editing out some transmitted features and reappropriating
others, inserting the new mix into the visual multitrack platform of the city.39 The urban
platform is assumed to be read-write, renewable, and never a zero-sum game: you only
‘take’ when in the process of creating something that gives back.
The cultural logic of remix and appropriation has collided with the intellectual prop-
erty regime in the high-profile copyright case of Associated Press v. Shepard Fairey, which
hangs on the interpretation of Fair Use in the transformation of a digital news photo-
graph in Fairey’s iconic Obama poster portrait in 2008. The lawsuit has been settled out
of court with neither side conceding its point of law, which means that the macro legal
issues remain unsettled and with no change in legal philosophy going forward.40 The
256 Art and Visuality

case is not simply a matter for theory and practice in the arts and the publishing indus-
tries, but for the legal regimes now at a crisis point in adjusting to contemporary cultural
practices and digital mediation.41 Artists, writers, musicians, fashion designers, advertis-
ing creatives and architects all know that the active principle named by ‘appropriation’
is part of the generative grammar of the creative process. Appropriation is not imitation,
copying or theft. It’s conversation, interpretation, dialogue, a sign of participating in a
tradition (lit., ‘what is handed down’), regardless of whether the tradition is a dominant
form or an outsider subculture, or whether the artist takes an adversarial, affirmative or
conflicted position within the tradition.
Of course, neither street art nor Fairey’s post-Pop practices are special cases for art or
legal theory. But since the AP case is based on the practice of a street artist known for
appropriation and remix, it represents a ‘perfect storm’ of issues that can be redirected
to expose collective misrecognitions about artworks that lost sustainability decades ago.
The misrecognitions are maintained through our enormous social investment in the ide-
ologies of single authorship, originality, property and ownership. Misrecognitions about
production are further maintained by the positivist, atomistic logic of legal philosophy
on copyright and IP in which surface similarities between works are taken as the bases
for causal arguments about copy or derivation. Specifically for visual culture, Fairey’s
Obama images rely on a logic of remediation, recontextualization and stylized iconicity
that extends back to Rauschenberg and other Pop artists. Through the strategy of the
‘demake’ or down-skilled ‘remake’, a strategy observable in a wide array of twentieth-
century works prior to recent street art, generic portrait features present in a digital pho-
tograph have been rendered as a hand-made screenprint image.42 Of course, the uses of
the remake in Fairey’s and other artists’ practices are only one instance of multiple kinds
of expressions produced every day in the dialogic grammar of culture. The AP v. Fairey
case can generate a larger public awareness of these urgent issues and make it possible to
ask precisely those questions that cannot be asked when collective misrecognitions are
at stake. Artists producing works in all media and the public receiving them now live in
a culture with a legal-economic regime requiring a resyncing with reality that will be as
unsettling as the Copernican revolution.
With its ability to embrace multiple urban subcultures and visual styles in a globally
distributed practice, street art provides a new dialogic configuration, a post-postmodern
hybridity that will continue to generate many new kinds of works and genres. Now
working in a continuum of practice spanning street, studio, gallery, installation spaces,
digital production and the Internet, street artists expose how an artwork is a momentary
node of relationships, a position in a network of affiliations, configured into a contin-
gent and interdependent order. The node may have collective authorship, may have af-
filiations with media, images or concepts from other points in the network, near or far,
contemporary or archival, may take form in an ephemeral, material location and live on
through global digital distribution. The important thing for the artists is to keep mov-
ing and keep proving themselves for their mentor and interlocutor, the city. The artists
are mapping out in real time one possible and promising future for a post-postmodern
visual culture.
Figure 10.1 Gaia and palimpsest with other street artists (1), Soho, New York City, 8/2008. Pho-
tograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.2 Swoon (left), Gaia (right) and other artists, woodblock and linocut prints on paper and
acrylic on wall, W. 21st St., New York City, 7/2008. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.3 Swoon, W. 21st St., New York City, 7/2008. Detail. Photograph by Martin Irvine, ©
Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.4 Multiple artists, Soho, New York City, 8/2008. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Mar-
tin ­Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.5 Shepard Fairey and multiple artists, Candy Factory Building, Soho, New York City,
8/2008. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.6 Gaia and palimpsest with other street artists (2), Soho, New York City, 8/2008. Pho-
tograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.7 Herakut and multiple artists, W. 22nd St., Chelsea, New York City, 6/2009. Photo-
graph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.8 WK Interact, Houston St. and 1st Ave., New York City, 8/2005. Photograph by Mar-
tin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.9 Judith Supine, printed collage on wall, Chelsea, New York City, 7/2007. Photograph
by ­Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.10 7th Ave., New York City, vertical advertising space, with Empire State Building in
background. 10/2010. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.11 Plaça de Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona, vertical advertising space, 6/2010. Photo-
graph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.12 Shepard Fairey, wall mural, alley behind Irvine Contemporary, Washington, DC,
10/2008. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.13 Shepard Fairey and EVOL, wall murals, alley behind Irvine Contemporary, Washing-
ton, DC, 6/2009. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.14 Shepard Fairey and crew installing ‘Obama Progress’ mural at 14th and U Streets,
­Washington, DC, 10/2008. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
 Figure 10.15 Shepard Fairey, ‘Obama Progress’, completed mural, 10/2008. Photograph by Martin
­Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.16 Os Gemeos, mural, acrylic on wall, Houston and Bowery, New York City, 8/2009.
­Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.17 Os Gemeos, mural, Houston and Bowery, New York City, 8/2009. Detail. Photo-
graph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.18 Banksy, American Indian, Mission District, San Francisco, 10/2010. Photograph by
­Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.19 Banksy, wall mural, Columbus Ave., San Francisco, 10/2010. Photograph by Martin
Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.20 Berlin, wall behind Kunsthaus Tacheles, between Friedrichstrasse and Oranienburger
Strasse, 6/2007. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.21 Berlin, urban intervention and placement, off Alte Schönhauser Strasse, with the
Fernsehturm (‘television tower’) in background, 6/2007. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Ir-
vine, 2010.

Figure 10.22 Invader, Ron English, Shepard Fairey and others. Paris, Rue du Four, 7/2009. Photo-
graph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.23 Shepard Fairey, Peace Goddess collage, collage and acrylic on canvas, Grand Canal,
Venice. Venice Biennale, 6/2009. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.24 Shepard Fairey, Peace Goddess collage, Grand Canal, Venice, 6/2009. Close up. Pho-
tograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.25 Shepard Fairey, collage on canvas, St. Mark’s Square, Venice. Venice Biennale, 6/2009.
Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.26 Shepard Fairey, collage on canvas, St. Mark’s Square, Venice, 6/2009. Close up. Pho-
tograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
Figure 10.27 Barcelona, multiple artists, wall behind the Mercado St. José, 6/2010. Photograph by
­Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.

Figure 10.28 Barcelona, Btoy and other artists, stencil on paper and paint on door, Barri Gòtic,
6/2010. Photograph by Martin Irvine, © Martin Irvine, 2010.
The Work on the Street 271

Further Reading
Alonzo, Pedro and Alex Baker. 2011. Viva La Revolucion: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape.
Berkeley, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Gingko Press.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fairey, Shepard. 2009. OBEY: Supply & Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey, 20th Anniversary
­Edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.
Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.
New York: Penguin Press.
McCormick, Carlo, Marc Schiller and Sara Schiller. 2010. Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned
Urban Art. Köln: Taschen.
Nguyen, Patrick and Stuart Mackenzie, eds. 2010. Beyond the Street: With the 100 Most Important
Players in Urban Art. Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag.
Rose, Aaron and Christian Strike, eds. 2005. Beautiful Losers, 2nd edn. New York: Iconoclast and
Distributed Art Publishers.
Wooster Collective. 2001–2010. http://www.woostercollective.com/.

Notes
1. Arguments for this transition are appearing at an accelerated pace; see especially Nguyen and
Mackenzie 2010; Klanten, Hellige and Ehmann 2008; Chandès 2009; McCormick, Marc
Schiller and Sara Schiller 2010.
2. It would be impossible to recognize all the friends, colleagues and artists that have been part
of an ongoing dialogue that informs many of the ideas in this chapter, but I would especially
like to thank Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Roger Gastman, Pedro Alonzo and Jeffrey Deitch for
their dedication and commitment to boundary-crossing art forms.
3. Notable books include Gastman, Neelon and Smyrski 2007; Klanten et al. 2008; Lazarides
2009; Lewisohn 2008; Mathieson and Tápies 2009; Rose and Strike 2005; Shove 2009a,b;
Banksy 2007; Fairey 2008, 2009; Ganz 2004; Ganz and MacDonald 2006; Rojo and
­Harrington 2010; Swoon 2010; Nguyen and Mackenzie 2010; McCormick et al. 2010.
4. A highly perceptive description of the current scene of contemporary art is Terry Smith
2009 and 2006; see especially chap. 13, pp. 241–71; see the recent dialogue in October:
­Foster 2009; also telling is the Roundtable discussion on ‘The Predicament of Contempo-
rary Art’ in Foster et al. 2004: 671–9.
5. This is a central question approached in various ways in Marquard Smith 2008; see also the
now-famous volume of October devoted to the issue: Alpers et al. 1996; Foster 1996; and the
2005 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture, Jay 2005.
6. See especially Gastman et al. 2007; Gastman and Neelon 2010; Ganz 2004; Mathieson and
Tápies 2009; Nguyen and Mackenzie 2010.
7. The seminal argument about ‘disorder’ (also taken to be symbolized in graffiti) and crime
was stated in Kelling and Wilson 1982; further developed in Kelling and Coles 1996; the
application of this theory on graffiti policy in New York City has been well examined by Joe
Austin in Austin 2001.
8. The transitions and hybridizations across the variety of street art and graffiti art practices are
well documented in Nguyen and Mackenzie 2010 and McCormick, Marc Schiller and Sara
Schiller 2010.
272 Art and Visuality

9. The historical context for these theories is beyond the scope of this chapter, but see espe-
cially Klanten and Huebner 2010: 4–5; Burger 1984; Krauss 1986: 151–70; questions
of relational art in global cities is also usefully explored in Nicolas Bourriaud’s essays; see
Bourriaud 2002, 2009b; on the Situationist theory of detournement, see the key texts by
Debord in Knabb 2006 and the overview by Sadler in Sadler 1998.
10. See the World Urbanization Prospects, United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm.
11. For the conceptual models here, I am especially indebted to the research by Manuel Castells
and Saskia Sassen on the global city; see especially Castells 1989, 2000 and Sassen 2001,
2002, 2006, 1998.
12. See the works of William J. Mitchell: Mitchell 1996, 2000, 2005; and the Web site for his
‘Smart Cities’ project at MIT: http://cities.media.mit.edu/.
13. For example, from May 2008 to October 2010, the street art animation MUTO by
BLU was viewed 8.2 million times on YouTube: BLU 2008. A simple search on ‘street
art’ and ‘graffiti’ in YouTube yields more than 5,000 videos with millions of aggregate
total views. A search on the tag ‘street art’ in Flickr in November 2010 yielded more
than one million photos, appearing in many collective and group collections (see www.
fllicker.com).
14. This is affirmed in the recent exhibition of performance art at the Whitney Museum; in the
curator’s view, performance played out ‘the end game of Modernism in their various ruptur-
ings of the autonomous space of painting and its primary location—the vertical plane of the
gallery wall’ (Whitney Museum of American Art 2010).
15. The first quotation is from an essay by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1968, the second from a re-
view in 1953 by Lawrence Campell, in Del Roscio and Twombly 2003: 65, 25; see also Bird
2007.
16. Twombly’s ‘allusions’ to writing were famously described by Roland Barthes in ‘The Wisdom
of Art’ (1979); in Barthes 1984; reprinted in Del Roscio and Twombly 2003: 102–13.
17. The Pomidou Center in Paris organized a Retrospective of Villeglé’s work, Jacques Villeglé,
La comédie urbaine, September 2008–January 2009. Other important exhibitions include
L’informe, mode d’emploi, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, 1996 and Le Nouveau réalisme,
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2007. The artist has his own official Web site:
http://www.villegle.fr.
18. A good overview of Tàpies’s career is on the Web site for the Dia:Beacon exhibition in 2009:
Antoni Tàpies: The Resources of Rhetoric, http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/9.
19. Tàpies 2007: 117; also reprinted in Bozal and Guilbaut 2005.
20. During a visit to Barcelona in June 2010, I was struck by the historical layers of street mural
art visible in central zones around the city, including the walls on streets opposite the Mu-
seum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, which has an extensive collection of Tàpies’s works.
The street art was still securely extramuros in relation to the museum, and the artists’ aware-
ness of this binary relationship is clearly marked in their placement strategies.
21. See especially Holzer and Creative Time 2005; Holzer’s Web site, ‘Projections’, http://www.
jennyholzer.com/ (Holzer n.d.); Waldman and Holzer 1997; and Elizabeth A. T. Smith and
Holzer 2008.
22. Kruger’s recent exhibition at Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin was entitled Paste Up
(­November 21, 2009–January 23, 2010), indicating affinities with billboards and street art.
See http://spruethmagers.net/exhibitions/248.
The Work on the Street 273

23. Kruger designed a city-block-long installation on the façade of the Ontario Museum of Art in
2010; see http://www.ago.net/barbara-kruger, and the installation video: http://artmatters.
ca/wp/2010/05/barbara-kruger-installation-video/. She also recently created a location site-
specific work in lower Manhattan as part of the Whitney Museum’s ‘On Site’ series; see
http://whitney.org/WhitneyOnSite/Kruger.
24. Interview in Redmon 2010.
25. First published in French in1980 as L’invention du quotidian; English translation, 1984
(de Certeau 1984).
26. See Lessig 2008, 2005. The creative foundations of read-write and remix are explored in
Miller (DJ Spooky) 2004 and 2008, and Miller and Iyer 2009.
27. I’m extrapolating here from the standard model of the interpellation of the subject in
­Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970) (in Althusser 2001) and the
tradition of message-addressee analysis and reception theory.
28. See Ron English’s Web site: http://www.popaganda.com/index.shtml, and Nguyen and
Mackenzie 2010: 100–7.
29. From Swoon 2004. Some projects of Swoon and Toyshop from 2003–2004 are archived at
the collective’s Web site: http://toyshopcollective.org/.
30. Juxtapoz (Spring 1995): 69.
31. Statement: Swoon 2003; additional description of the project: http://toyshopcollective.
org/.
32. These concepts have been extensively developed by Pierre Bourdieu: see Bourdieu 1992,
1990, 1979.
33. One version of the often-cited comment by Donald Barthelme, ‘the principle of collage
is the central principle of all art in the 20th century’, was from ‘A Symposium on Fiction’
(1975), included in his collected essays, Barthelme 1999: 58.
34. See, inter alia, Letham 2007; Hebdige 1987; Miller (DJ Spooky) 2008; Lessig 2008;
­Bourriaud 2005.
35. The literature on this topic from multiple disciplines is huge, but my view draws from
­semiotics, linguistics, Bakhtin, reception theory and theories of appropriation; see Holquist
1990; Bakhtin 1992; Petrilli and Ponzio 2005; Evans 2009.
36. For a useful compendium of sources and arguments, see Evans 2009.
37. As expressed in the now-canonical statements by Douglas Crimp (1993) and Fredric
­Jameson (1991).
38. Bourriaud expands on the question of hybridity and postproduction as part of global,
­nomadic culture in Bourriaud 2009a,b.
39. The dub concept, derived from Jamaican reggae studio production, is excellently explored
by Veal 2007; see also Paul D. Miller, Miller (DJ Spooky) 2004, 2008 and Miller (DJ
Spooky) and Iyer 2009.
40. By way of disclosure, I negotiated the acquisition of Fairey’s hand-stenciled Obama
HOPE portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, and
I was a consultant for the legal firm representing Fairey in the AP lawsuit. It is ­difficult
to find a noncontentious summary of events in the AP v. Fairey case, but see The New
York Times archive of coverage (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/
people/f/shepard_fairey/index.html). A special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture,
8/2 (August 2009) was devoted to the topic of Obama in visual culture and political
iconography.
274 Art and Visuality

41. This is one of the most urgent issues of our time, which I will treat more fully in a forthcom-
ing book. For background, see Lessig 2008; Patry 2009; Vaidhyanathan 2001; Boyle 1996.
42. This point is persuasively argued by Cartwright and Mandiberg (2009); see also Sturken
2009.

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 Editorial Introduction

All the essays in this part of the collection consider the relationships between aspects of
visual culture, particularly those shaped by recording and communicating technologies,
as well as those with specifically aesthetic dimensions, and their wider social and politi-
cal setting. Also, in this context, the essays by Roth and Gardiner cast light on works
by two writers who, they maintain, should be better known to visual culture studies:
respectively Vilém Flusser and Henri Lefebvre.
Roy Boyne explores a tradition of public spectacle that has persisted throughout the
modern period. Both Futurism and Situationism contributed not only to the theory of
spectacle but also its practice, or in some respects its ‘counter-practice’. Here the power
of spectacle is discussed in relation to two aesthetic ideas: the sublime and aura. Follow-
ing Walter Benjamin, these need to be considered in the light of changes in the tech-
nology of image reproduction and distribution. More concretely, Boyne considers the
cinematic spectacle, architecture and large public artworks.
The Futurist Filippo Marinetti famously celebrated the naturally spectacular public
phenomena of industrial modernity. Marinetti seems to suggest that the role of avant-
garde art was to prepare in the public mind a positive, exciting image of the creative de-
struction integral to unending modernization. Both Left and Right eventually came to
exploit the idea that spectacle could create mass enthusiasm for their policies, and from
the twentieth century onwards, ‘bureaucracy and spectacle zigzag alongside each other
as two dominant abiding features of the Western world’.
Situationism and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle have been very influential as
diagnoses of contemporary visual culture and the devising of critical, oppositional strate-
gies. Up-dating Marx’s early theory of alienation, Debord argued that modern life is no
longer lived ‘directly’, but through representations, often fragmentary images that are
brought together by those who wield representational power, usually through the mass
media and entertainment industries, into ‘pseudoworlds’. Any resistance to this power
282 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

must include everyday acts of disruption of these ‘regimes of representation’, the trans-
gression in particular situations of habitual, passive or normal ways of visualizing, speak-
ing and thinking. Techniques and practices like psychogeography and the dérive (aimless
urban wandering or ‘drifting’) deliberately repudiated instrumental mobility, seeking out
the emancipatory potential of chance encounters and unpremeditated discoveries. With
détournemont the Situationist sought unexpected connections and novel experiences. This
de-familiarizing process was felt to be most applicable to the work of the cinema.
Repudiating a rationalized revolutionary strategy led and executed by a centralized
party in favour of spontaneity and disruptive cultural tactics, Situationism is often seen
as reaching a kind of consummation in the student movements of 1968. Arguably,
Debord’s critical theory of the spectacle failed politically, perhaps because it was insuf-
ficiently spectacular.
Boyne argues that spectacle is a compound of the natural, the human and the tech-
nological. Not only Futurism, but also other important forms of modernism displayed
enthusiasm for technology and the modernization process embodied in the energy of
collective spectacles. Walter Benjamin famously argued the mechanical reproduction of
images led to a loss of a sense of the ‘distance’ and ‘singularity’ of ‘aura’ and auratic ex-
perience. Instead of ‘sacred’ art modernity and mass society has ‘profane’ visual culture.
Benjamin, like Martin Heidegger, saw behind the elimination of aura a desire for ‘close-
ness’. Works of art in particular, cut loose from ritual and place, became free to circu-
late, leading to a proliferation of hybrid forms on the one side and the elaboration and
amplification of their commercial and political possibilities on the other. Boyne reviews
Miriam Hansen’s recent analysis, which suggests that Benjamin’s conception of aura was
much more complex and useful than is usually assumed.
Boyne summarizes the history of the idea of the sublime, concentrating on Edmund
Burke, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. Turning to David Nye’s political econ-
omy of the modern sublime, he draws attention to the development of the United
States’ railway system in the nineteenth century as a staged, spectacular demonstration
of the technological sublime and nationhood. Similar celebratory presentations of the
constructed worlds of bridges, dams and skyscrapers persisted throughout the first half
of the twentieth century.
The modern sublime that is inextricably connected with technological information
and image systems brings with it a suggestion of ‘surrender’ to the new, or of ‘terror’ be-
fore something of overwhelming power. Viewed on screen, it is domesticated, and so, as
Burke observed, able to be enjoyed and consumed.
Turning to cinematic spectacle, Boyne summarizes recent research into the history
not only of cinema technology but also of the skills of viewing and interpretation needed
by the cinema audience. Focusing on a series of ‘blockbuster’ films, he discusses the total
marketing of cinematic spectacle, suggesting the pertinence of Debord’s thesis that these
are ‘irresistible’, ultimately reassuring moments of commodified pleasure.
For some commentators, the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 inaugurated
the ‘terror spectacle’. Boyne discusses responses to an exhibition curated by Paul Virilio
which takes up the themes of man-made disaster and the modern visual media, linking
Editorial Introduction 283

technology, speed and spectacle. He also notes Rebecca Adelman’s remark that ‘zero vis-
ibility’ seems to be the preferred response to spectacular terror.
Turning finally to public art and architecture, Boyne discusses spectacle in relation to
aesthetics, functionality and in particular the ‘liberal democratization’ of urban space. As
case studies of different modes of ‘interactivity’—in design, conception or response—he
cites the Viaduc de Millau in Southern France, the sculptural D-tower in the Dutch city
of Doetinchem, Antony Gormley’s ‘fourth plinth’ project in Trafalgar Square, London,
and the BMW car plant building in Leipzig designed by Zaha Hadid. He suggests that
interactive spectacle may well be one of the dominant functions of new architecture and
large-scale public art.
In conclusion, Boyne takes up the theme of spectacular public art, exemplified by
the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London and the Grand Palais in Paris. Such works
seek to activate an experience of spectacle and scale, memory and allusion in the fabric
of the building itself, but also raise difficult questions about the means and purpose of
such events.
For Lisa Cartwright, feminism as a theoretical perspective has been one of the most
important contributors to the study of visual culture as it has developed and expanded
over the past forty years. Among its leading themes have been its ‘critique of discourses
of mastery and universal value’, its ’emphasis on embodied experience’, and its interest
in ‘subjugated and situated forms of knowledge, experience and pleasure as legitimate
and important areas of focus’. Feminists have also emphasized the gaze, meaning by this
acts of looking which contribute to determining someone’s identity and supposed social
attributes, and the organization of things, spaces and social relations through practices,
which include ways of seeing.
Cartwright reviews the place of feminism in the institutional development of visual
culture studies during the 1980s and 1990s, initially in departments of fine art, art his-
tory and film, but eventually embracing anthropology, history and sociology. Debates
continue as to the subject matter or field of visual studies, as well as theory and method,
and the place of feminism in this field. Cartwright suggests that feminist theory’s ap-
propriation and use of psychoanalytic, Marxist and semiotic ideas has made a unique
contribution to the development of visual culture studies.
Cartwright charts the evolution of notions of ideology in feminist approaches to vi-
sual studies, from a concentration on ‘negative’ stereotypes to an analysis of structural
features of representations that shape reception and audience appropriation. She notes
how Mary Kelly’s artworks brought psychoanalytical ideas into conceptualism, while the
theorist Jacqueline Rose pioneered a theory of vision applying to the gendered politics
of everyday life.
In the context of art history, feminism is often linked to the ‘cultural turn’ and the
‘new art history’, both of which gave prominence to political, institutional and economic
factors. In the 1970s Linda Nochlin made the point that it was not enough to promote a
few women artists to the canon of critical esteem but that what was required was a much
more radical critique of the very notion of ‘great art’ and the institutions that sustained
this male-dominated canon. The only truly radical solution to the ‘structural absence of
284 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

women’ was a fundamental revision of what counted as art and its history. Slightly later,
Griselda Pollock analysed the symbolic and institutional structures forming the condi-
tions for women’s aesthetic practice. Cartwright also discusses the sociological contribu-
tions of Janet Wolff and the semiotic and poststructuralist approaches of Michael Ann
Holly, Keith Moxey, Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal.
Cartwright returns to the influence exerted by the idea of the ‘feminine gaze’, in
which ‘being looked at’ is contrasted with a supposedly male position of active looking,
as well as to critiques and modifications of the original formulation, many of which are
being published in Camera Obscura. In the collection How Do I Look? feminist theory
and politics were applied to pornography, provoking a controversy about the ‘perceived
prudery’ of older feminist attitudes, with wider repercussion in the conduct and themat-
ics of visual culture studies.
In the area of art practice, feminism has also influential, for example Cindy Sher-
man’s gently ironical photographs of herself in scenes from various Hollywood genres,
Catherine Opie’s portraits of lesbians influenced by Lacanian notions, Barbara Kruger’s
use of familiar iconography, graphic techniques and sometimes sardonic captions, and
the Guerilla Girls’ performance interventions emphasizing art’s social context. More
recently, Kimiko Yoshida has used photography for critical comment on the emerging
global visual culture, while other artists have given a combination of theory and practice
a stronger presence in visual culture studies.
Scholars like Anne Friedberg and Lisa Nakamura have extended feminist approaches
into new media studies, analysing the role of the screen, mobile phone and the Internet.
The works of others, like Vivian Sobchack, have raised interest in embodied experience
in visual culture studies, while Donna Haraway has compared cross-media forms with
fluid identity construction. Other women artists and theorists have explored connec-
tions between feminism, technology and science studies, sexuality and visual culture.
Finally, Cartwright cites useful overviews of visual culture studies that emphasize the
continuing role of feminism in advancing research in this field.
Nancy Roth explores the contribution of the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser
(1920–1991) to the study of visual culture. She is particularly interested in Flusser’s ideas
about the relationship between images or, more broadly, the visual, in a culture ‘over-
powered by written language’. Like the media historian and theorist Marshall McLuhan,
Flusser speculates about the transition from a ‘linear’ writing culture to a visual one, a
new universe of ‘technical images’. Flusser is distinctive, however, in his grasp of the con-
nection between new visual media and pictorial or historical consciousness.
Roth initially reviews Flusser’s understanding of the conflicted relationship between
image and text. Two key events in this history are the invention of writing in the third
millennium bce and the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. He sees
writing as linear, serious and directed towards a goal, characteristics that eventually
come to structure a distinctive form of human consciousness. By the eighteenth century
writing had pushed images to the margins of Western culture. Yet because of its growth
in volume and complexity literate consciousness was faced with a growing crisis: dealing
with ‘unbearable’ demands of written texts, a failure to convey information clearly and
Editorial Introduction 285

quickly, and thus to serve human needs. The eagerness with which photography—the
first ‘post-historic’ medium—was seized upon demonstrates the severity of this impasse.
The proliferation of technical images means that the linear character of consciousness is
replaced by simultaneity and a kind of permanent stasis.
Uprooted from Europe by the Nazis, Flusser settled in Brazil, becoming a university
professor in the 1960s. Loss of his first cultural home, however, helped free him from
prejudices and assumptions, enabling fresh thinking about the emerging new media of
representation and communication. Although valuing profoundly the heritage of writ-
ing, Flusser raised the question as to whether writing had a future.
At the centre of his theory of communication, still unfinished at his death in 1991,
were the concepts of discourse and dialectic. Discourse is a set of ‘formal ideals and
history’, typically stored in print. Dialogue is open, exploratory and ephemeral, and a
source of new information. In principle cultures should be woven from both modes,
but Flusser feared that in much of the modern world discourse would be the dominant
force. Giving Martin Buber’s ideas a secular and existential twist, Flusser believed that
dialogue establishes and maintains an identity within a life worth living, and his hopes
and anxiety for new media were that ‘a profound change in the medium of communi-
cation inevitably means a profound change in the potential for dialogue, for making
meaningful creative contact with another human being’. For Flusser speech and writ-
ing were fundamentally acoustic, but new media were ushering in a radically new visual
consciousness. In order not to lose the cultural heritage stored in writing, Flusser called
for ‘envisioners’, those capable of translating between word and image.
Flusser was an admirer of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose method of
phenomenological ‘reduction’ or epoché he adapted and applied in a series of essays with
‘gesture’ in the title. Gestures are ‘movements of the body or tool’ that have no causal
significance, but which do encode intentions. In painting for example Flusser wants to
emphasize the organic wholeness of gesture, a kind of dynamic unity between canvas,
materials, tools and painter. However, Flusser suggests that in photography, the phe-
nomenon visibly impresses itself on a surface, almost along the lines laid down by em-
piricist philosophy. Roth explains how Flusser proceeded to analyse the photographic
gesture phenomenologically.
Photography enjoys a fundamental place in Flusser’s culture of technical images,
as a basic form of ‘apparatus’. All technical images are mediated by apparatus of some
kind, which entails an abstraction of consciousness from an immediate or purely sen-
sory engagement with the life-world (Lebenswelt). The apparatus of technical images
deals with particles too small to be perceived normally, selects and orders them through
a programme, transfers them to a surface, and stores them for as long as necessary. From
the first, photography displayed these characteristics. This is a very different idea of
photography from conventional ideas of ‘index’ or ‘trace’. Like the more sophisticated
technology that followed it, photography has always been a way of constructing im-
ages, ‘fictions’ or ‘projections’, out of particles devoid of intrinsic meaning. This insight
is difficult to grasp, argues Flusser, because of the predominance of assumptions that
characterize a literate culture still oriented to a world in need of representation. Flusser
286 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

highlighted the key difference between those who understand how new technologies
work to construct images, sounds and so on, and mere users who, as a consequence,
cleave to the older idea of mimesis or representation. The wider cultural danger here is
not only a failure to interact creatively with technology, but also the ways in which con-
victions about representation buttress discourse and impede dialogue.
Finally, Roth turns to Flusser’s approach to visual art. Somewhat impatient with in-
stitutional aspects of art, he continually emphasized the importance of creative activity
with technical images, which follows from the overriding importance of communica-
tion, or what Roth calls ‘real, creative contact or dialogue’. At the root of dialogue is an
exchange between memories, within the memory of the individual, between those of
different individuals or between people and ‘artificial memory’ of some kind, where this
may go as far as demanding of an apparatus unprecedented uses and results, a practice
of ‘einbilden’, which Roth translates as ‘imagine’ or ‘envision’. At this point, traditional
distinctions between creative artists and scientists dominated by methodological and
cognitive values become less useful, damaging even. Flusser’s call is for a culture of ‘en-
visioners’, restlessly dissatisfied with known codes and communicative habits, but con-
vinced that ‘surprise, invention, creative human dialogue can and should flourish in the
new universe of technical images’.
The phenomenology of Husserl and his students (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre in particular) have also been extremely influential upon the work of the unortho-
dox French Marxist Henri Lefebvre. During the past decade the influence of Lefebvre
on the study of culture has grown considerably. However, Michael Gardiner argues that
his ideas about vision have still to receive the attention they merit. Gardiner sets out to
show that while critical of some aspects of modern visual culture, in particular what
he calls ‘abstract space’, Lefebvre is not simply hostile to so-called ocularcentrism. His
more complex, nuanced position involved rethinking ‘decorporealized’ ideas of vision
and the development of alternatives in which a prelinguistic, multisensory engagement
with the world was prominent.
Gardiner begins by discussing Lefebvre’s criticism of Surrealism for being fixated on
disruptive but static and decontextualized images that belong to the ‘abstract space’ of
exchange value rather than the concrete space of lived experience, use value and ‘dialec-
tical reason’. This notion of a reductive and destructive relation to space and the natural
world, to which a certain modality of vision is critical, is one of the recurrent themes of
much of Lefebvre’s work.
Lefebvre contrasts modern space with premodern or ‘absolute’ space, for him a natu-
ral landscape established primarily by the symbolic mobility of the human body. This
­kinaesthetic space is experienced and understood by being ‘lived’ rather than appropri-
ated abstractly and intellectually. Eventually the growing power of urban centres saw the
growth of a more quantitative, homogenous space, measurable and readable. Abstract
space is characterized by hierarchical proscription, control and quantitative changes,
the elimination of qualitative differences, and ultimately the ‘commodified space’ that
has been globalized by neocapitalism. What makes all this possible, Lefebvre argues, is
ultimately ‘language’ as a means to distance ourselves from embodied life. Yet Lefebvre
Editorial Introduction 287

insists that all such linguistic codes and ideologies necessarily still operate in particular
historical and local circumstances.
Gardiner outlines three key factors in Lefebvre’s account of the emergence of ab-
stract space—the geometric, the visual and the phallic—and the possible origins of
a kind of abstracting gaze in Renaissance perspective. He notes connections between
Lefebvre’s critique of modern space and criticisms developed earlier by Nietzsche and
Heidegger.
In setting out his utopian alternative, Lefebvre concentrates on the democratic po-
tential inherent in modern urban life. It is important to understand the history and
contemporary working of abstract space in order to overcome it. Yet abstract space is
not as controlled and organized as it may appear, but rather uneven, folded, discontinu-
ous, features that appear to and through the lived body in its actions. In fact, the reality
of space is the body and its movements and gestures, the life of the prodigal, energetic
erotic body, a ‘practico-sensory totality’. In a style that influenced Situationism, Lefebvre
advocates a ‘revolt of the body’, rooted in the ‘cryptic opacity’ of a corporeality capable
of resisting the mapping and codification of analytic, linguistic reason.
Gardiner notes Lefebvre’s phenomenological insistence on multisensory perception,
in particular the virtual elimination from modern public life of an extended range of
olfactory experiences. However, hearing—the primary sense of the premodern era—is
central to Lefebvre’s argument, and he develops a detailed phenomenology of hearing in
the context of embodied everyday life. Lefebvre’s ultimate goal is to restore the senses,
including vision, to their proper interplay, richness and creative potential, to create a
philosophy of the concrete that can resist the dominance of abstract seeing.
In conclusion, Gardiner suggests that Lefebvre did not think that vision was intrinsi-
cally abstract and hegemonic; however, its modern deformation could be overcome by
restoring its relationship with the other senses. This led Lefebvre to advocate forms of
art not set apart from, but in intimate contact with, everyday, natural embodied life, and
capable of affirming the spontaneity and creativity of mundane experience.
The study of visual culture cannot evade questions about its own values and politics.
Ian Heywood suggests that the topic of Cubist collage raises immediate and unavoid-
able questions about the politics of experimental art and, necessarily, about the critical
and ethical standpoint of visual culture studies.
The context of Cubist collage in France in the early years of the twentieth century
is the process of modernization, widely theorized by historians, philosophers and social
and cultural theorists. Heywood notes a shift in ideas about what culture consists in, as
well as its relationship to other social, economic and political forces. He reviews a grow-
ing emphasis on the autonomous or prior structuring force of culture, and the impact of
ideas of textuality, emphasizing the indeterminacy of interpretation.
Heywood next discusses the values and politics of the quasi-discipline of visual cul-
ture studies in the context of its history and Bill Readings’s polemical analysis of hu-
manities in the late-modern university. He agrees with Readings that a demand for
‘participation’ for those classes and groups largely excluded from national life was at the
core of early British cultural studies.
288 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

In the USA there was a related, although less class dominated, demand for partici-
pation and inclusivity, which, however understandable, led eventually a lack of clarity
about the object of study and incoherence of critical and political values on the one
hand, and an ultimately timid assertion of ‘political pieties’ on the other.
The strengths of Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology of culture offset for many the
weaknesses of cultural studies. However, Readings argues that Bourdieu’s ideas are now
critically limited, crucially because national cultures aligned to national economics and
politics have been replaced by the global circulation of capital, leaving behind an empty,
impotent centre. This new situation makes questionable some of the founding assump-
tions of visual culture studies. Universities, as institutions that have to adapt to new cir-
cumstances, can no longer see themselves as places for the articulation and criticism of
national cultures. In the new millennium, with neither an authentic legitimating role
nor any defined object, culture is ‘over’, yet ironically it is at just this point that cultural
studies comes into being, typically seeking an uneasy accommodation between a tradi-
tion of ‘criticism’ and a sociological or historical account of the complicity of all high
culture, including critique—an impasse that we have come to call postmodernism.
While the Cubist collages made by Braque and Picasso between 1912 and 1914 are
not overtly or conventionally political, they do seem to be pictures of modern life, or
perhaps works in which an emerging vernacular visual culture meets highly self-aware,
experimental, ambitious art prepared to take dramatic risks.
Informed by the recent work of Christine Poggi, Heywood outlines some of Cubist
collage’s formal and substantive innovations, initially the use of frames and framing de-
vices within the work, and then the use of tromp l’oeil chair caning printed on oil cloth
in Picasso’s famous Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). He suggests that the collages
do not reject the ideal of perceivable pictorial coherence but reassert it with new feroc-
ity, embracing and arranging ‘profane’ materials and surfaces to suggest the work’s self-
­structuring, lending the work an aura of independence or authenticity.
T. J. Clark observes that Cubism shares a basic conviction of modernism: that truth
to the world in painting depends on truth to what painting consists of. What is peculiar
about it is its determination not to abandon or even tone down either demand. It fol-
lows that if the painting is to enter fully embodied life it must be rid of its merely ‘ob-
jective’ characteristics. Self-structuring in the context of ‘rough’ materials and ‘brutal’
techniques does not turn the collage into a ‘subject’, but it does suggest a certain awk-
ward, assertive autonomy among other mobilized visual objects of vernacular modernity.
Heywood turns to Cubism’s relations with newspapers, wallpaper and Symbolist po-
etics. He outlines the arrival of cheap newspapers and paper wall decoration during the
nineteenth century, and some of the critical conclusions that have been drawn from the
ways Cubism takes up and manipulates materials and devices drawn from this new vi-
sual and literate culture. Negative assessments, sometimes inspired by Bourdieu, need
to be reexamined in light of a more plausible account of the politics of Cubist practice.
Although Patricia Leighten’s account of the political and aesthetic radicalism of Picasso’s
early years contains much of interest, Heywood suggests that it oversimplifies Cubism’s
Editorial Introduction 289

formal challenge, and in particular its practical criticism of aspects of existing painting
practice. The underlying, unavoidable question is that of the work’s real subject matter.
Returning to images and theories of modernity and modernization, Heywood high-
lights not only the familiar theme of rapid and sometimes violently disruptive social
change, but also ongoing bottom-up efforts to reestablish orderly, reliable, legitimate
forms of life, the possibility of an everyday life worth living. In this larger cultural con-
text, Cubism may be seen as a highly paradoxical self-modernization, fused with an en-
ergetic, stressful re-embedding of painting practice.
 11

Sociology of the Spectacle:

Politics, Terror, Desire
Roy Boyne

Machiavelli implies that the inseparability of spectacle and politics is demonstrated when
the warrior-king publicly slaughters his triumphant and loyal second-in-command: an
extreme form of the political imperative that control must be demonstrated. During
the course of European history, this relation between power and spectacle became less
important. Michel Foucault (1976) described the public spectacle of an execution in a
manner reminiscent (although Foucault is more lascivious and less situated) of Christ
carrying the cross to Golgotha. In both cases these ritual events served, in part, to affirm
the power of the ruling order. Eighty years after the execution of Damiens, with the pub-
lic execution of Robespierre in 1794, with Paris still fresh in living memories (see Fig-
ure 11.1), a new form of strategic political security had taken shape, exemplified by the
timetabled administration of the reformatory, presented in Discipline and Punish. The
movement that Foucault described, from rule through permanent fear and intermittent
spectacle to administration, measurement and routine, was clearly substantial. It was not
definitive, however, and the second half of the twentieth century is effectively a new age
of spectacle, now permanent rather than intermittent.
The following chapter explores some of the main elements of spectacle. Futurism and
Situationism contributed significantly to the development of its forms in the first half
of the twentieth century, invoking questions of propaganda and resistance respectively.
The contribution of political ideologies is not dealt with to a great extent, but we should
note the use of spectacle as a key tool of political propaganda during the twentieth cen-
tury (Doob 1950). Following the discussion of Futurism and Situationism, the sources
of the power of spectacle are considered through the debates on aura and the sublime.
The complex connection between them is important not least because many people en-
gage with spectacle at a distance through visual media. The commentary on Benjamin’s
argument that technological reproduction destroys aura is set alongside an account of
the technological sublime. The nineteenth century may have been the start of the age of
Sociology of the Spectacle 291

Figure 11.1 Maximilien Robespierre and His Followers on Their Way to the Scaffold on 28 July
1794. From Auguste Maquet and Jules Edouard Alboise du Pujol, Les Prisons de l’Europe, Paris:
Administration de librairie, 1845 (public domain, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robespierre
Execution.jpg).

sublime engineering of and between cities, but then the twentieth can be seen as the time
of the screen, as illustrated through the discussion of cinematic spectacle which follows.
This discussion of spectacle closes with an engagement with architecture and large works
of public art.

Futurism and the Shock of the New

The contemporary history of politics, culture and spectacle may be said to begin in
1909, with Marinetti’s first Manifesto of Futurism. Its eleventh thesis opens as follows:

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of
the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing
of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric
moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on
clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gym-
nasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives. (Apollonio 2009: 22)
292 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Walter Benjamin, first analyst of the seductions of the arcade form, and aware of
the contradictions of Futurism, which appealed to both fascist and communist, wrote
that ‘Fascism, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a
sense perception that has been changed by technology’ and goes on to say that ‘Fascism
aestheticises politics, while communism politicizes art’ (quoted in Perloff 2003: 30).
Which perspective did Marinetti take? The answer is indeterminate. He was driven by
the future, and thought that it had to be realized by engineers, scientists and politicians,
and anticipated on the aesthetic plane by artists. He could not see—for he was in the
middle of things, and emotionally embroiled—that both communism and fascism en-
gaged with Futurism and sipped from its energies, in order to appropriate the visual and
put it into the service of a utopia. From Futurism forwards, the relation between power
and spectacle—once occasional, violent and cautionary, then submerged or modulated
by the emergence, growth and orderly timetabling of the great social institutions: trans-
port, employment, education, civil service, armed services, hospital, prison, church,
entertainment and the arts—became primary. However, this was not just a return of oc-
casional carnivalesque events, of intermittent transcendent and time-stopping episodes
of beauty, horror or both. From the early twentieth century, bureaucracy and spectacle
zigzag alongside each other as two dominant abiding features of the Western world.
These are areas that must be explored, but before we get to them, we should point at
two further lines into and, thickening, out of Futurism which concern the human com-
ponent of spectacle; we can do little more here than specify an example reference or two.
The first concerns the multitude (Boyne 2006) as crowd (Schnapp and Tiews 2006), and
the permanent link between mass presence/action and spectacle (Buur 2009; Newman
2007; Kohn 2008); the second is involved with the multitude as market (Arnoldi and
Borch 2007; Borch 2007; Kozinets et al. 2008). Crowd as target and as spectacle come
together for the suicide bomber, and we will return to this below.
As Christine Poggi (2002) points out Marinetti and his colleagues wanted to change
the will of the masses, to turn them from tradition towards the future. Their art, politics
and performances—unreflective and naïve much of the time—present this as their con-
stant motivation. Recent reassessments of Futurism (Adamson 2007; Fogu 2008) have
broadened out from the concern with fascism and aesthetics that dominated earlier dis-
cussions (Melograni 1976; Ghirardo 1996) in which scholars of fascist spectacle often
ignored the Futurists altogether. It was the association with fascism, but also its history
of disaggregation (Fogu), as well as the larger but fractured profile of surrealism (Ber-
nard 2009), that prevented Debord, the founder of Situationism, from recognizing that
Futurism had much to teach about spectacle.

Situationism and the Society of the Spectacle

Situationism was largely a Paris-based alliance of European avant-garde artists, writers
and poets which came together in 1957. It arose from a collection of small artistic move-
ments, including Lettrist International and the International Union for a Pictorial Bau-
haus. The leading figure was Guy Debord. The well-known CoBrA painter, Asger Jorn,
Sociology of the Spectacle 293

was also an adherent. Its most significant output was Debord’s Society of the Spectacle,
published ten years after the initial gathering. Only five years after this, the movement
dissolved itself. Debord’s book remains important, and the methodology of resistance,
designed by the Situationists to combat the social perversion they diagnosed, remains
a significant source of aesthetic and social inspiration even today. The opening state-
ment, in the 1973 film which Debord made of his text, is a clear expression of his basic
thesis:

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life appears as an im-

mense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into
representation. The images detached from each aspect of life merge into a common
stream, yet the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of real-
ity regroup themselves into imaginary unities, separate pseudoworlds that can only be
looked at . . . even the deceivers deceive themselves. The spectacle is a concrete inver-
sion of life.

Debord’s Society of the Spectacle recognized the double subjugation of the individ-
ual, not just by everyday bureaucratic micro-surveillance, but—in some ways more
fundamentally—by the routinely emollient and controlling permanence of the regime
of representation. He called this ‘the spectacle’. His text is heavily imprinted by Marx’s
(1844) writings on alienation. The young Marx, under the influence of Hegel and
Feuerbach, said that capitalism fetishized commodities, and alienated people in three
ways. Their conditions of work were outside their control. What they produced did
not belong to them. Their connections to those they worked with were prescribed by
others. In sum, they were disconnected from their ‘natural’ human condition. Debord
updated this position to account for conditions in the second half of the twentieth
century. He changed the focus from the production of goods to the reproduction of
the capitalist social order. The prime locus of his analysis moved from the factory to the
city (Leach 1999). He switched the source of revolution from the class struggle of the
proletariat to the possibilities of general individual transcendence of everyday routines.
He imagined a replacement of Marx’s double emphasis on history and destiny, of the
history of class struggle and its eventual resolution into an egalitarian regime of free-
dom and equality, by the understanding that social life consists only of situations in the
present, and that these can be actively and creatively made, rather than passively and re-
petitively reproduced. Debord wanted, then, to liberate the individual from compliant
spectatorship, and he believed that resistance to this ‘society of the spectacle’ had to take
place in everyday life. As the debate within the Retort group suggests, the recognition
that ‘forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity’ are subjected to
‘the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market’ (Retort 2005: 19)
requires some form of strategic response.
Strategies of resistance were not obvious. The general regime of spectacle is power-
ful. The capitalist form had created the mass media, advertising and the emerging con-
sumerism already positioned to equate happiness with material wealth. The rational
294 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

development of cities, exemplified in Haussman’s nineteenth-century destruction of Pa-

risian neighbourhoods to make way for the ‘grands boulevards’, had continued with the
alliance between urban planners and the marketing of the motor car (Debord 1955).
Functionalism in architecture had developed as style. Overall, the passive reproduction
of everyday life was being secured through an increasingly visual culture which created
mass desires. For Debord, the need for resistance was obvious, but how?
One foundation of Situationist resistance methods was psychogeography. Debord
(1955) defined this as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geo-
graphical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour
of individuals’. His understanding was indebted to Ivan Chtcheglov (1953), who had
created the dérive—drifting—as disoriented urban engagement. Chtcheglov spoke of
this as a method of overcoming stale and stereotyped assumptions about the character
of different parts of the urban environment. Drifting was seen to be subversive. As if
a motorway were built, yet the drivers chose not to use it, and cycled without domi-
nant purpose through the villages, meeting with and reflecting on unfamiliar places
and people.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for
movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let them-
selves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there . . .
the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination
of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibili-
ties. (Debord 1958)

The other source of resistance was détournement: the making of unexpected connec-
tions. Debord’s discussion (with Wolman) in 1956 is itself a dérive. Looking back, a
more developed theory of resistance through détournement might have emerged in the
next year, when a manifesto document (Debord 1957) appeared, and led to the found-
ing of the Situationist International. What happened, however, was that the practice of
détournement became focused on the arts, especially cinema, and then linked to the con-
ceptual dérive that became the stock in trade of advertising. The following example from
Debord reveals not only a projected example of détournement, but shows the potential
significance of the technique within the ‘society of the spectacle’ which is subverted by
means of its own techniques, and points to propaganda and counter-propaganda strate-
gies (already well-understood by Goebbels and others):

It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest effec-
tiveness . . . we can observe that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one of the most important
films in the history of the cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the other
hand, it is a racist film . . . But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable . . .
It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the mon-
tage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of im-
perialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. (Debord and Wolman 1956)
Sociology of the Spectacle 295

The Situationist International did not have an overall strategy within which the tac-
tics of dérive and détournement would be purposefully employed. Their politics were
gestural, and their hope was for spontaneous break-out from spectacle. From a distance
it might seem as if the May events in 1968 Paris to some extent vindicate this resolute
refusal of instrumental reason. From 1966 forwards there had been signs of student un-
rest, and when it did erupt in May 1968, slogans from Debord’s work appeared on the
streets: ‘Down with spectacular-commodity society!’ (Merrifield 2005: 68). However,
far from presenting the spontaneous coalition between workers and students as a Situ-
ationist success story, Debord seemed more concerned with purifying the Situationist
core, breaking from his longstanding friend Henri Lefebvre (whom he accused of plagia-
rism), and eventually moving to Italy, to purvey advice on the edges of the Brigato Rosso.
His attempt to conceptualize spectacle as the negative core and target of a humanist-
Marxist critique of society failed. Ironically, this failure is explained in part by his inabil-
ity to present his vision in a spectacular way. It was something he could have taken from
the Italian Futurists, but did not.
In his brief reflections on Debord’s Commentaries—an underlying theme of which
was the coming together of the two world systems in 1989—Giorgio Agamben (1990:
7) drew the lesson from the very exaggerated claims of massacre at Timisoara, in the final
days of the Ceausescu regime in Romania:

Timisoara, Romania, represents the extreme point . . . the secret police had con-
spired against itself in order to overthrow the old concentrated-spectacle regime while
television showed . . . Auschwitz and the Reichstag fire together in one monstrous
event . . . corpses that had just been buried or lined up on the morgue’s tables were
hastily exhumed and tortured in order to simulate . . . the genocide that legitimized
the new regime. What the entire world was watching live on television, thinking it was
the real truth, was in reality the absolute non-truth . . . In this way, truth and falsity
became indistinguishable from each other and the spectacle legitimized itself.

The analysis from Debord, as Baudrillard (1994a) was also explaining it, was that
the relation between spectacle and reality is an internal one. If that relation is to be dis-
mantled, the entire system of which it is part must be transcended.

Aura and Sublime

If we share neither the position of the Italian Futurists that spectacle is both instrument
and aesthetic expression, nor the Situationist position that spectacle is systemically de-
ceitful, how are we to understand it? We might begin by saying that spectacle as a fun-
damental phenomenon is compound: natural, human, technological. The Futurists were
enthralled by technology, as their first manifesto salute to speed and war, and much of the
work thereafter demonstrates. This enthusiasm permeated modernism, from Duchamp to
Joyce (Henderson 2007). Unsurprisingly, the connection between modernism and spec-
tacle has led towards the positive and negative recognition of the technological sublime
296 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

(Nye 1996). Furthermore, accelerating practices of environmental self-mutilation dis-

play a sense of the human corruptibility of the natural sublime of Schiller, Casper David
Friedrich and other romantics. At the very heart of this is a dialectic of presence and ab-
sence which we can expose by considering the distinction between aura and sublime.
Walter Benjamin made his position crystal clear in 1936. Spectacle is simultaneous
collective experience. It has been expanded through mechanical (and now digital) re-
production; and something has been lost from such seemingly egalitarian encounters,
whether with art, landscape, artefact or particular people. Aura is lost. Aura required
distance, difficulty of access, and the loyalty and exclusion practices of cognoscenti. For
Benjamin, aura and mass society seemed to be incompatible:

Technical reproduction . . . enables the original to meet the beholder halfway . . . in

the form of a photograph or a phonograph record . . . The situations into which the
product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of
art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art
work, but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before a spectator
in a movie. (Benjamin (1936) 1973: 222–3)

Loss of authenticity is a consequence of mass-produced art calendars, museum mar-

keting, television documentaries on architecture, Shakespeare films and Beethoven on
CD. Multiple copies substitute for singular phenomena in special locations. Wide fac-
simile distribution eliminates aura though separation from context, history, performance
and expert knowledge proudly but parsimoniously shared. For Benjamin, this process of
dilution and erasure of aura arises from ‘the desire of the contemporary masses to bring
things “closer” . . . as offered by picture magazines and newsreels’ (225). As theatrical
performances are increasingly outnumbered by cinematic productions, the coherent in-
volvement of the spectator and actor with role and performance in the auratic recreation
of characters and theatre becomes far less defining of the modern era than the market-
ing of film stars, whose staged performances of themselves—compare the mimed per-
formances of their own recordings by singers on television—elicit the entitled opinions
of all and sundry. In the case of art, works formerly were set apart, and had ‘cult’ and
ritual value. Now such work has become secular, made for use and circulation, available
for the politics of propaganda and spectacle. Their form of value has changed from the
ritually specific to the generally exhibited. Benjamin tells us that ‘photography and film
are the most serviceable functions of this new function’ (227) and that the shrivelling of
aura leads to the cult of personality. Thus begins the era of Warhol’s invitation to all for
a few minutes of fame, extending into the universal public appearance of daily lives on
Facebook and through Twitter.
Miriam Hansen (2004, 2008) shows this account of aura to be partial. It is well un-
derstood that aura engages with distance: ‘a strange weave of space and time: the unique
appearance of a distance, however near it may be’ (Benjamin 1999: 519). Hansen goes
beyond this already complex view, to look at the other sources for Benjamin’s thought,
in three ways. First, she opens the possibility of intergenerational aura. Second, she
Sociology of the Spectacle 297

discusses aura as a form of perception which invests phenomena with ‘the ability to look
back at us’ (Hansen 2008: 351). Third, she considers the theological and mystical roots
of aura in ideas of individual halo and presence. Her discussion of old photographs ex-
pands the relation of aura and distance by adding temporality to spatiality. The photo-
graph of a dead man already contains the line into the future, and this can sometimes
be seen more clearly as time passes. Ludwig Klages, a key source for Hansen, thought
that souls could return; and much of the culture through which Benjamin passed as a
young man was suffused with archaic and Gnostic memories. Thus it was that, finding
that Benjamin cited Novalis, in his dissertation of 1919, to the effect that inanimate
objects can return the gaze upon them, Hansen wrote: ‘The reflexivity of this mode of
perception, its reciprocity across eons, seems to both hinge upon and bring to fleeting
consciousness an archaic element in our present selves, a forgotten trace of our material
bond with nonhuman nature’ (2008: 346). However, Benjamin lived when connections
to the past were being broken apart. He wrote just before the outbreak of the Second
World War,

The replacement of [ ] narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects

the increasing atrophy of experience . . . It is not the object of the story to convey a
happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather it embeds it in the life of
the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience. (161)

He lamented the changing times, and it seems likely that Hansen’s recovery of a pro-
gressive logic from his thought, through which aura is placed under protective erasure
through the 1936 essay—defined as attacking auratic simulation—leaving authentic
aura ready to re-imagine collective experience at some point in the future, owes more to
Benjamin’s schooled instincts than to his refined cognition.
While it may be too early to come to a judgement on aura, this may not be true for
the sublime. As a concept, the sublime has a clear modern history. From the seventeenth
century, the term came to be used by Milton, Dryden and others to refer to things or
people at the highest level. By the eighteenth century, ‘the sublime’ had come to refer
to exalted things in art, nature and human affairs. In 1757 Edmund Burke published
a treatise on the sublime, in which he sought to connect the core of the concept of the
sublime to terror and amazement, but by the time of Kant, the link to terror—though
still understandable—had weakened. What remained from Burke’s formulation was,
however, the link between the sublime and the ‘strongest emotion which the mind is ca-
pable of feeling’ (Burke 1757: part 1, ch. 7) Kant (1790) further developed the idea in
that part of his Critique of Judgement, which concerned aesthetics. Kant asked what are
judgements of beauty, and how are they different from judgements of the sublime. He
wrote that the former are disinterested: the judgement comes first, and then we may
take pleasure in what we have judged to be beautiful. He thought that such judgements
were universal, so that all would agree with them. He added that they were necessary.
He concluded that beauty might be seen as motivated to display itself. Against the idea
of beauty, Kant set that of the sublime. The sublime refers to overwhelming experience
298 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Figure 11.2 Arnold Böklin, Odysseus and Calypso, 1883, Wikimedia commons, GNU Free Docu-
mentation License (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arnold_B%C%B6cklin_008.jpg)

like encountering a violent storm or confrontation with an extraordinarily huge build-

ing. The former, he referred to as ‘dynamic’—relating to its immense force—the latter,
he spoke of as mathematical, indicating that our response was a reaction to sheer scale.
In both types, he noted that the encounter could be pleasurable.
Not long after, Friedrich Schiller set things out dramatically. He used the story of
Calypso and Odysseus (pictured here in Figure 11.2 by Arnold Böcklin, 1883), and
showed that while Odysseus could remain with Calypso for some time, there would
come a point at which he was called back to engage with the world. Calypso’s beauty
could not triumph over the call of the world, and its varied component challenges.
Schiller (1801: n.p.) concluded

The sublime affords us an egress from the sensuous world in which the beautiful would
gladly hold us forever captive. Not gradually (for there is no transition from depen-
dence to freedom), but suddenly and with a shock it tears the independent spirit out
of the net in which a refined sensuousness has entoiled it.

Schiller’s story illustrates some of the elements in the feminist debates about the sub-
lime. The main line, from Longinus to the present, is that recognition of the sublime is
evidence of subjective achievement, of resistance and survival in the face of inexpressible
forces. On the island, Odysseus was charmed by beauty and ease (as Christine Battersby
(1998) compellingly and critically explains, female beauty and charm become increasing
Sociology of the Spectacle 299

self-defining from the Enlightenment forwards). Once returned to the mainland, he

would show himself a man by holding firm against opposing forces. Barbara Claire
Freeman (1997: 4) explained that the self is supposed to discover its own sublimity as
it achieves emotional and intellectual mastery over the sublime through confrontation
with it. In critiquing this formulation, she saw a subordination of difference which ap-
propriated ‘rather than identifying with that which presents itself as other . . . function-
ing not to explicate but to neutralize excess’. She goes on to argue that the foundation
of this strategy of neutralization is an implicit engagement of the sublime in the mode
of spectacle. Odysseus does not dive into the volcano, but masters his fear as he skirts
its edge, always as an onlooker. The essence of the sublime (both in its direct experience,
and then in its retelling) is that the line between spectator and spectacle is crossed, that
the man (and it is almost always a man) is tested and triumphs. Thus she argues (1997: 8)
that a deceitful (because the man flirts but does not fully engage) and ‘dominant ide-
ology of misogyny haunts canonical theories of the sublime’, a position she sustains
whether discussing the celebration of selfhood in Wordsworth’s ‘egotistical sublime’ or
its abjection in Keats and Coleridge.
The feminist critique of the sublime is not the only negative voice to be heard. In addi-
tion to the Heideggerian critique of technology, which can be easily turned towards a cri-
tique of the work of David Nye, whom we shall shortly discuss, the concept of the ‘false
sublime’ deserves some attention. The term was coined in 1850 by the American poet
and painter Washington Allston, who drew a distinction between the moral sublime and
the false sublime. He spoke of horror and pity when faced with a victim of the Inquisition
on the rack, and suggested that some might see this as an example of the sublime, as con-
frontation with something awe-ful. But he refused the idea that the sublime be separated
from the moral order entirely, writing that ‘Sympathy alone is insufficient as a cause of
sublimity’, and refusing the solely horrific and frightful as belonging to the sublime:

If we ascend . . . into the moral, we shall find its influence diminish in the same ratio
with our upward progress . . . Elegance . . . Majesty . . . Grandeur; in the next, it seems
almost to vanish, and a new form rises before us, so mysterious, so undefined and elu-
sive to the senses, that we turn, as if for its more distinct image, within ourselves, and
there, with wonder, amazement, awe, we see it filling, distending, stretching every fac-
ulty, till, like the Giant of Otranto, it seems almost to burst the imagination: under
this strange confluence of opposite emotions, this terrible pleasure, we call the awful
form Sublimity. (Allston 1850: n.p.)

As we turn to the material development of the world in North America, a new era was
coming: the time of the railroad. Between 1828 and 1869, Americans ‘integrated the
railroad into the national economy and enfolded it within the sublime’ (Nye 1996: 45).
The nineteenth century development of technology in the United States produced
machines and structures that strengthened the sense of national belonging among the
working, middle and upper classes. In 1828, to celebrate the agreement to build a rail-
road between Maryland and Ohio, thousands of people paraded in celebration of a
300 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

development which had barely started. They did so in a way that affirmed their mem-
bership of American society, by showcasing their occupations. David Nye documents
this general relation between technology and national hope. When the two approach-
ing ends of the transcontinental rail tracks met in 1869, a golden spike was driven into
the ground to mark the occasion. Every blow of the hammer was telegraphed across
the United States, sparking ‘a celebration of the technological sublime from coast to
coast’ (74). Yet, only eighteen years later most of the rail system of the United States
had been stilled by striking workers, and the technological sublime had become in-
stantiated by the building of bridges, followed by the erection of skyscrapers. In the
years between the building of the Niagara Suspension Bridge in 1855, and the erec-
tion of the Empire State Building, completed in 1931, the dominant form of the tech-
nological sublime became architectural. Each major architectural achievement during
this time became a moment for celebrating the essential relation between nationhood
and technology.
It is, however, part of the technological sublime that its condition is transient, since
there will come a larger building or a greater machine, and even a new modality. The re-
placement of architecture by military technology may even signal the end of sublimity.
The nuclear bomb was created in secret, and even if it was tested in public for a short
time—in front of large crowds in Nevada—it could not create the sublime reflex once
its legacy of death and radiation was understood. It replaced Burke’s sublime formula of
terror and awe with the much more forbidding connection between death and disease,
as the movement towards the safe use of nuclear energy faltered from the 1970s through
to the present day.
What this exploration of the technological sublime against the shimmering of aura
reveals is a part of the power of spectacle. If aura means the preservation of enchantment
but always at a distance, and the sublime demands surrender to what is newly arrived or
has been an overwhelming presence for as long as any can remember, both forms of af-
fect will be at play, for those in the forefront and those watching safely in their homes.
It may be true that a remote screen cannot convey what it is truly like to be at a Cape
Canaveral launch, or in the midst of an earthquake. It can, however, create the desire to
be there—or the relief at being safe.

Cinematic Spectacle
The first demonstration of the impact of cinematic spectacle might have occurred when
some of the audience in 1896 found themselves moving out of the way as the Lumières’
cinematic train pulled into Marseille station. The train was moving on-screen, of course,
but the audience had not experienced such moving pictures before, and may have been
uncertain how to behave. Tom Gunning argued that cinema took some time to develop
story-telling, and was first of all engaged in showing things. He developed the idea that
early cinema was, what he called, ‘a cinema of attractions’. The narrative instinct was
not long in coming, but Gunning thought that the cinematic function of revelation was
always available:
Sociology of the Spectacle 301

[despite] the introduction of editing and more complex narratives, the aesthetic of at-
tractions can still be sensed in periodic doses of non-narrative spectacle given to audi-
ences . . . The cinema of attractions persists in later cinema, even if it rarely dominates
the form of a feature film as a whole. It provides an underground current flowing be-
neath narrative logic. (1989: 38)

Over time, film audiences and critics developed their skills and understanding, sur-
viving and adapting to sound, colour, and then screen size. The history of filmic screen
technology has not, however, been consistently linear. Cinemascope was criticized when
first developed, as unsuitable for serious drama (Barr 1963: 5). It took nearly a decade
to become fully accepted, by which time an even bigger format (70mm) had arrived.
Subsequent developments have taken place culminating in IMAX films, and new-
generation 3-D films from 2009. Such movement has been seen as following a line
begun with the mediaeval and early modern cathedrals (Griffiths 2006): locations which
were developed to capture the soul.
Geoff King relates his 2005 collection, which contrasts Hollywood spectacle with
reality TV, to the destruction of the World Trade Centre. It is an irresistible move, but
we should go back a little, to note a series of films from 1977 through to 1999: Star
Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Termina-
tor 2: Judgment Day, The Matrix. These seven Hollywood productions are at the core
of the ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon (Bordwell 2006: 1–12), which concerns the total
marketing of cinematic spectacle; now co-ordinated worldwide: to reduce the impact
of piracy. It is more than coincidence that all of these films can be placed within the
genre of fantasy—widely defined. They illustrate Debord’s thesis that spectacle is a
fabulous and irresistible creation. As he put it in paragraph 153 of The Society of the
Spectacle:

the social image of the consumption of time is exclusively dominated by leisure . . .

moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance and as desirable
by definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of
real life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really
happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher level of
intensity.

This passage from Guy Debord could almost have been paraphrased into Robert
Kolker’s statement in 2000:

The ideological structures of Spielberg’s films ‘hail’ the spectator into a world of the
obvious that affirms the viewer’s presence (even while dissolving it), affirms that what
the viewer has always believed or hoped is (obviously) right and accessible, and as-
sures the viewer excitement and comfort in the process. The films offer nothing new
beyond their spectacle, nothing the viewer does not already want, does not immedi-
ately accept. (257)
302 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

As we now return to consider 9/11, the inauguration of terror spectacle (as Douglas
Kellner has intimated), we must ask if terrorism has come to be defined by the princi-
pal aim of rolling back globalization, yet through the use of its science, technology and
communication networks. This may be ironic, but it is not contradictory. Paul Virilio
(1994) linked cinema, security and surveillance in the 1990s, and then after 9/11 began
to work on the idea of the accident as a general category for man-made disasters, and
called for a museum of such events to alert the world’s populations of what might be
to come:

it is the whole of history that comes out of cinematic acceleration, out of this move-
ment in cinema and television . . . this constant pile-up of dramatic scenes from every-
day life on the evening news . . . catastrophes of all kinds—not to mention wars . . .
Where the broadcasting of horror is concerned, television has . . . provided us with an
instantaneous transmission of cataclysms and incidents that have broadly anticipated
disaster movies. (2003: 63–4)

The exhibition which Virilio mounted at the Cartier Foundation in Paris (Novem-
ber 2002—March 2003) was not generally acclaimed. The negative reviews criticized
it for opposite reasons. On the one hand, Hyland (2003) drew attention to the way
that an intimate focus on those directly affected by an ‘accident’ will lead away from
the critical questions of actual responsibility; on the other hand, Nechvatal (2002) as-
serted that the approach ‘failed by submitting to an abstract aesthetic of the Romantic
Sublime’. Even though Virilio’s approach is epochal, and his critique of the alliance
between technology, speed and spectacle makes him resist stopping the chain of causa-
tion too early, his exhibition was seen to draw a general lesson that had already been
learned.
To illustrate the impossibility of totally certain protection, however, is another mat-
ter. It takes us to the idea of societies of control (Deleuze 1992), and to the connec-
tion between screens as spectacular media and as surveillance media. Looking again to
the legacy of 9/11, Rebecca Adelman has noted that, beyond the technology of airport
screening, ID systems and high-visibility policing:

The US, in its current anti-terror campaign, has charted a divergent relation to the
visual, a tactically flexible subversive relation to the spectacle . . . First among [their
strategies] is the proliferation of surveillance . . . faith that sufficient panopticism will
prevent terrorism . . . like surveillance, secrecy balances sight and the unseen in a cal-
culation aimed at preventing future spectacular defeats . . . The creation of the cat-
egory of ‘enemy combatants’ and the use of infinite detention . . . are not glamorous,
but they are crucial . . . zero visibility . . . as a rejoinder to the spectacle. (Adelman
2009: 152–3)

It is a further irony, that while spectacle is a major weapon of terror, a key modality
of response will be silence.
Sociology of the Spectacle 303

Towards the Interactive Spectacle: Trends

in Public Art and Architecture
Traditional large-scale architecture is still important. It has been defined by its use, its
image and its history. From classical antiquity through the early European cathedrals,
then later castles and palaces, and on to factory development and skyscraper office space,
built for leasing, function has always been prime. The purpose of permanent struc-
tures usually outlives the impact created by the first viewings, even if that might not
be the case for a work such as Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, erected in 1981 and destroyed
in 1989 (Serra 1990). Aesthetic and public impact, however, are generally valued in
themselves, and sometimes can enhance functionality. Thus, for example, the Viaduc
de Millau (see Figure 11.3) has become not only a source of pride for the inhabitants of
the Southern Aveyron in France, that pride was also a prerequisite for the level of local
energies achieved in the area’s initiative to maximize the regional economic impact of
the bridge.
The planning of a bridge over the immediate Millau conurbation, which would
keep the traffic at the level of les grands causses, limestone bluffs which characterize the
area, was begun in the 1990s. It took quite some time for the political and economic
actors in the Southern Aveyron to work out that they needed to actively respond to
this item on the national agenda. Perhaps a little late, but nevertheless, an innova-
tive research project, extending over 2003–2006, was funded by both the state and
the regional prefecture. Researchers and students (from the Ecole Normale for rural
society in Clermont-Ferrand), local actors, and national actors worked together in
an action research and development project for one year. The core principles of the
research development project illustrate that this wonderful bridge became an inter-
active spectacle: as it was being built it was surrounded by a continual public-private­

Figure 11.3 Viaduc de Millau. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millau-Viaduct-France-2–20070909.jpg.

304 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

dialogue, based on principles of permeable frontiers across all interests, primacy

of network creation, recognition of ineluctable spatial transformation, and essen-
tial cross-territorial synergies (Lardon et al. 2007). A second, different but perhaps
clearer, example of an interactive spectacle is that of D-Tower in the Dutch city of
Doetinchem (see Figure 11.4). It was completed in 2005, and records happiness,
love, fear and hate daily using different questions, answered every other day by a
substantial group of e-respondents. The 12 metre tower changes colour to illustrate
where in the city there is the most love (pink), happiness (blue), fear (yellow) and
hate (green).
The 2,400 people who occupied the fourth Trafalgar Square plinth for an hour each
over 100 days in the summer of 2009—under Antony Gormley’s caretakership—might
also be seen as interaction between event and context. Was this art? Antony Gorm-
ley passed on the question, indicating it was for others to categorize what he brought
into being. Did the plinth fall into the development of public art which has marked
the last twenty years? As a public art creator himself, it would have been hard for him
to say that this work was not in some way related to the remainder of his oeuvre. He
was not, however, asked this question. The critics nevertheless answered it. Jonathan

Figure 11.4 D-Tower, Doetinchem. www.v2.nl/lab/projects/d-tower/leadImage_preview.

Sociology of the Spectacle 305

Jones (2009) (not a member of the Anthony Gormley fan club) said that the work was
designed to be an exercise in failed communication, with the plinth’s occupants ‘try-
ing desperately to communicate against obstacles imposed by Gormley’. Adrian Searle
(2009), in the same newspaper, three months earlier, placed the scheme in the tradi-
tion of living sculpture which goes back one hundred years, and thought it might be
Anthony Gormley’s best work. On balance one might argue that it was another mo-
ment in the possible dissolution of spectacle. As contrasted with The Angel of the North
(undemocratic, spectacular and soon loved), the implied request to 2,400 people, indi-
vidually, to hold our attention for one hour, and to make, even if only in one case, the
front page of the newspaper, or the first item on the TV news—against the constraints
of the context—was resoundingly rejected. The liberal democratization of performance
art is anti-spectacle.
A final example of interactive spectacle is worth considering. The BMW car plant in
Leipzig, with its central building designed by Zaha Hadid, opened in 2005. It is pre-
sented as a site of production, of architecture and of education: as spectacle within the
modern global economy. It is a place where tours are not merely possible, but where they
are part of the design of the plant, which is—in May 2010—fully booked for group
tours (under the title of ‘Architektur trifft Produktion’ or ‘Architecture Meets Produc-
tion’) every day of the week for the next three months and beyond. It is factory as spec-
tacle, both internally and externally.
What can we conclude about the interactive spectacle? Perhaps not that it is a new
form, but the best newer developments are adapting to multifunctional realities as cre-
atively as they can, without losing sight of their main purpose(s), and extending those
purposes where possible. We are perhaps entering a new age of multifunctionality, with
spectacle being one of those functions.

Conclusion
Spectacular public art has been on display at Tate Modern for ten years now. The
Turbine Hall is the site of an annual commission from Unilever, beginning with the
giant egg-carrying spider, titled Maman, by Louise Bourgeois. In 2003, Olafur Elias-
son installed The Weather Project, a huge sun at the end of the Hall. Four years later
Doris Salcedo made a crack in the floor of the Hall. In 2009, Miroslav Balka was
commissioned to build his huge steel box there. None of these examples of public
art remain in the Hall, but each new commission, for as long as Unilever can stand
this, will speak to its predecessors in different ways. Wonder and warnings come to-
gether variously. Just as they emanated also from Richard Serra’s five megalithic struc-
tures beneath the glazed roof of the Grand Palais in Paris (see Figure 11.5), following
Anselm Kiefer’s Falling Stars in 2007. The Grand Palais and Serra’s structures worked
together in a way that would not have happened in the darker space of the Turbine
Hall, inclining the viewer to conclude that space and spectacle interact, affecting the
experience, the memory and the impact, perhaps as much as the event or structure
in itself.
306 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Figure 11.5 Richard Serra, Monumenta 2008, Grand Palais, Paris. © ARS, NY and DACS, Lon-
don 2010

As for the intended functions of spectacle—whether aesthetic, historic, economic,

ideological, celebratory or some combination—each planned event or structure will see
the prior questions posed: why are we doing this? How are we doing this? With whom
are we doing this? Then as soon as the work is finished in creating the spectacle, ques-
tions of its impact (Boyne 2006), its prior justifications, and its part in fashioning the
future, cannot be avoided, even though they may be answered fully only—if ever—
after many years. There is more public curiosity now about what such work does than
was the case when Adorno wrote, ‘it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-
evident­ any more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to
exist’ (Adorno 1997: 1).

Further Reading
Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/
sionline/.
Hall, S. and S. Neale. 2010. Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press.
Sociology of the Spectacle 307

Mau, B. and D. Rockwell. 2006. Spectacle: An Optimist’s Handbook. London: Phaidon Press.
Shaw, P. 2006. The Sublime. London: Routledge.
Vidler, A., ed. 2008. Architecture between Spectacle and Use. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
See also Adamson (2007), Benjamin ((1936) 1973, (1939) 1973), Nye (1996), ­Perloff
(2003), Retort (2005), Schnapp and Tiews (2006).

References
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in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Adelman, Rebecca. 2009. ‘Reconfiguring the Spectacle: State Flexibility in Response to Imaged
Terror’, in Marianne Vardalos et al. (eds), Engaging Terror: A Critical and Interdisciplinary
Approach. Boca Raton, FL: Brown Walker Press, 149–58.
Adorno, T. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, G. 1990. ‘Marginal Notes on Comments on The Society of the Spectacle’. http://
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Allston, Washington. 1850. Lectures on Art. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11391.
Apollonio, U. 2009. Futurist Manifestos. Boston: MFA Publications.
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­Spectator’, Art and Text, No. 34 (Spring): 31–45.
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 12

Art, Feminism and

Visual Culture
Lisa Cartwright

As art historian Amelia Jones notes, feminism is one of the most important theoretical
perspectives from which visual culture has been theorized over the past forty years (Jones
2010). The field of visual culture studies centres on the analysis of practices of looking
and visual representation in a wide range of arenas: art, film, television and architecture;
new, popular and alternative media forms and entertainment cultures; and everyday
institutional contexts such as law, religion, science, medicine, information and educa-
tion. Feminism has influenced this expansion of the field from its former and more
conventional focus on works of art and film in a number of ways: through its critique
of discourses of mastery and universal value; through its emphasis on embodied experi-
ence; and through its attention to subjugated and situated forms of knowledge, experi-
ence and pleasure as legitimate and important areas of focus. The field of visual studies
continues to encompass the study of fine art, however there is not the assumption of its
higher merit. Professional, institutional, everyday, popular, private, banal, diasporic and
subculture image and design cultures and visual practices are approached with equal se-
riousness across the field, in keeping with the feminist viewpoint that regards situated
and subjugated forms of human practice as equally important to the canon of scholarly
analysis as highly valued, broadly recognized forms of imaging and visual practice. Work
in the field ranges widely across forms of visual or audiovisual expression and everyday
ways of seeing. The objects of visual culture study range from works of fine art to popu-
lar, sub-, and independent image cultures and to images and imaging technologies in
science, technology, medicine and health. Importantly, visual studies has been innova-
tive in emphasizing the study of practice in institutions and with technologies through
which visual culture is organized and looking is practiced, covering settings that range
from art galleries, museums and malls to laboratories, kitchens and the streets. Femi-
nism’s contribution to this turn to diverse sites of visuality and visual practice has been
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 311

considerable, beginning with the feminist theory concept of the gaze as an important
feature of the constitution of the human subject in its discursive context. The terms
‘practice’ (which emphasizes embodied social activity) and the ‘human subject’, under-
stood as a socially situated and constituted entity, derive directly from feminist theory.
These are among the core concepts in visual studies work as distinct from art history
and some areas of cultural analysis in which practice, the constitution of subjectivity,
and the gaze are not primary organizing features. The study of collecting, curating and
displaying has extended from its earlier focus on works of art and objects of ritual and
science to everyday objects and the instruments and technologies used in the organiza-
tion of things and the organization of spaces of practice in everyday work, study and
leisure. Ways of seeing or practices of looking as they are organized around subject posi-
tions based in identity and realms of discourse has been a key aspect of work in the field.
In some cases the key organizing terms of work in visual studies draw from the familiar
intersectional nexus of gender, sexuality, race, class and ability; however, to these terms
have also been added subcultures and other intersectional identity groupings, as well as
professional and institutional categories of identities such as that of the scientist or doc-
tor. Associated with the latter sort of designation of identity is the idea that discursive
fields constitute provisional and intersectional subject positions inflected by ways of see-
ing and ways of conducting one’s practice that are deeply situated in history, geography,
nationality, political context and so forth.
The relationship of feminism to visual culture’s field formation is important to note.
Visual culture studies became institutionalized through college and university pro-
grammes in the late 1980s and 1990s during the height of critical theory and continen-
tal philosophy’s influence in the humanities, and its influence was felt primarily through
and across departments of fine art, art history and film studies. However, the focus on
aspects of life beyond the arts and entertainment brought visual studies into currency in
other disciplines, most notably anthropology, history and sociology. A scholarly journal
(The Journal of Visual Culture) was launched in 2002, and an international association
(Visual Culture International) was formally inaugurated in 2010. These two entities are
marked by their interdisciplinarity and by lively controversy about such field-building
questions as these: what is, and what should be, the place of art history (one of the foun-
dational fields of visual culture study) and work on periods prior to the twentieth cen-
tury in visual studies? This question is motivated by the fact that the field has tended to
be concentrated around more recent periods and forms, though this is also increasingly
the trend in art history, where attention to more recent periods outstrips work on earlier
periods. Globalization, diaspoic cultural changes, and new media in relationship to art
practice, collecting and display are all aspects of visual studies that have been influenced
by feminist theory’s emphases on intersectionality and subjective practice. Another key
field question concerns methods and theories around which the field coheres, and where
feminism continues to stand in this context. These are questions that arise as the field’s
international network grows, and as scholarship identified as visual studies or visual cul-
ture studies proliferated throughout the humanities in the 1990s and made headway
in the social sciences in the 2000s. There has been significantly more work identified
312 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

as being in visual studies coming from the fields of communication, anthropology and
sociology journals and departments during the first decade of the 2000s as compared to
the 1990s.
Feminism has been an important approach in visual studies from the inception of
the field, providing key methodological frameworks to the field in all of its aspects
ranging from methodology to subject matter. Unlike other new disciplines emphasizing
visuality in the late 1900s such as film and media studies and cultural studies, visual cul-
ture studies emerged after second-wave feminist theory had already established a pres-
ence in more established academic disciplines such as art and art history, literature and
history, and after the turn to Marxism, psychoanalysis and semiotics were brought to-
gether in feminist theory work within the women’s studies field, bringing into question
the empirical designation of its key term (‘women’) and prompting some departments to
change the key term to ‘sexuality’ and/or ‘gender’, terms that allowed for the inclusion
of masculinity and femininity as fluid terms of identification not fixed subject positions,
and incorporating queer studies into the field. In this regard the relationship of feminist
theory to visual culture studies is unique in that feminism—specifically, feminist theory
through the psychoanalytic, Marxist and semiotic turn of the early 1980s—has had a
formative influence on visual studies from the ground up. Whereas film studies, cultural
studies, ethnic studies, black studies and women’s studies programmes emerged as disci-
plines at about the same time (from the 1970s forwards), visual culture studies emerged
as a discipline designated by a name and programmes devoted to it about a decade after
the institutionalization of these prior fields, and was significantly shaped by methods,
theories and ideas about disciplinarity already at work in them—and particularly in
feminist theory engaged in a semiotic theory of sexual psychology and identity. Inter-
estingly, though science and technology studies emerged as a disciplinary area during
roughly the same period as film studies and has consistently generated work on represen-
tation in scientific practice, that field has remained relatively less open to the paradigms
and approaches that moved from film studies to visual studies, deriving instead more di-
rectly from social science–based information studies and, less strongly, through engage-
ment with art history (though this engagement has more commonly been comparative
rather than methodological).

Feminist Film Theory and Practice

Two works out of the British context are now legendary foundations for a kind of
feminist visual theory that countered the empiricism of the American liberal feminist
approach: Claire Johnston’s 1973 essay drawing on Roland Barthes’s idea of myth to ex-
amine, through an approach adapted from semiology, the concept of woman in classical
Hollywood cinema; and ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) in which Laura
Mulvey introduced psychoanalysis as a means through which to analyse male pleasure in
looking and the representation of the female body as the passive object of the male look.
Whereas Johnston’s essay introduced the framework of semiotics to feminist analysis
of film, Mulvey introduced key concepts from Freudian psychoanalysis to consider the
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 313

relationship between sexuality and the gaze as a relational practice—an idea that remains
in use currently, though with significant revisions and variations. At the same time,
1970s second-wave feminist scholarship in the USA included widely read, now iconic
critiques of gendered stereotype focusing on film (Haskell (1973) 1987; Rosen 1973).
The empirical and sociological approach represented in those works was the backdrop
against which emerged the US feminist theory that would contribute to the ground-
ing of visual studies. In the early 1980s, US scholars Constance Penley, Janet Walker,
Elizabeth Lyons and Janet Bergstrom launched Camera Obscura, a journal of film and
feminism to present an alternative to the empirical and sociologically based US feminist
film scholarship that was beginning to organize around the critique of stereotype and
gender roles. They had studied with or participated in dialogues with those engaged in
the circles around Johnston and Mulvey’s works, some of them had trained in the semi-
otic, psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches developed in Paris through the seminars of
film theorists Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour, and they were engaged with ideas
generated in the writings of the London-based m/f collective (a journal devoted to psy-
choanalytic feminist theory with which film theorist E. Anne Kaplan was involved) and
Screen (a film theory journal with which Mulvey was involved). An important aspect of
the visual studies paradigm launched with Camera Obscura is the role of the feminist vi-
sual theorist as curator of ideas and theories—a role occupied by this journal throughout
the three decades of the field’s existence. Journal founder Contance Penley has played a
major role in shaping the field not only through her own writing on feminism and film
theory, science, popular culture and new media, but also through her curator-like role
as editor of contributions to a journal that has remained at the centre of the visual cul-
ture studies field. Penley also was a founding member of the first graduate programme
in the United States devoted to the field: the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at
the University of Rochester.
Another important aspect of film theory in its relationship to visual studies is the
innovation there of the idea of the filmmaker as theorist. In her classic essay, which is
widely reviewed in numerous sources, Mulvey, who is a filmmaker as well as a theorist,
introduced the idea of a feminist counter-cinema and, importantly, she herself was in fact
a key practitioner in that mode. She identified feminist counter-cinema as being within
the tradition of the avant-garde—a cinema that would ‘free the look of the camera in its
materiality in time and space’ as well as offering the spectator a Brechtian stance of ‘pas-
sionate detachment’ as against the seductive masculine position of scopophilia offered
in conventional mainstream narrative film. Feminist counter-cinema, which included
the filmwork of Mulvey and her then collaborator Peter Wollen, presented an important
model for the tradition in visual studies of production (or art, film and media) as a form
of critical theory practice. Mulvey’s article made important contributions to the theory
of the gaze as noted below, however, it also served as a kind of visual theory call to prac-
tice, suggesting formally new ways to work the field aside from the tradition of critical
writing and speaking. It is important to note that although Mulvey’s essay is typically
noted as her foundational work in the field, in fact it was a theory that accompanied a
vital film practice through which many of her ideas were articulated. ‘Visual Pleasure’
314 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

was bracketed by the release of her films Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (produced
with Wollen in 1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (also produced with Wollen, 1977).
Both represent a kind of theory through practice, a way of working that would become
key in art and film practice from the 1980s onwards due in part to Mulvey’s founding
influence on a generation of would-be scholars to become visual producers of critical
theory works of art and film.

Feminism and the Theory of the Gaze

The working concept of ideology in visual culture studies initially drew on the writings
of the political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose understanding of ideology derived
from Lacanian psychoanalysis the idea that ideology cannot adequately be understood
as false consciousness or as existing within a moral framework of right and wrong be-
liefs and good and bad representations or practices. Feminist writing in film studies
of the 1970s offered models of critique that followed older paradigms including the
pre-Althusserian Marxist understanding of ideology, the practice of deriding negative
stereotypes, and the Frankfort School critique of mass culture. Althusserian notions of
the subject and ideology were taken up widely by feminist theorists of visual culture
in the late 1970s and early 1980s interested in addressing the place of sexuality not
simply as it is reflected in the contents of works of art and cinema (in projects arguing
for ‘positive’ and against ‘negative’ representations of women, as in the works of 1973
by Rosen and Haskell, for example), but as structuring principles that shape a work of
art or film, or that shape the reception of works in context and over time. Sexual dif-
ference is understood to be enacted or articulated through these works at the formal
level and in their reception context, rather than simply standing as ideology-generative
themes or representations in the work. In the projects that centred around the journal
m/f in Britain, for example discussions shifted away from critique of images of women
(or their absence in representations) to developing theories about desire and looking
in the discursive field of the gaze. The artist Mary Kelly was very much engaged in this
dialogue when she produced her groundbreaking serial process artwork titled Post-
Partum Document between 1973 and 1979 (Kelly 1999). Entering the familiar ‘female’
subject matter of the mother-child relationship so familiar through the work of earlier
women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, this subject matter was a radi-
cal challenge to conceptual art which during the period was still engaged in a pointed
evacuation of content and culture in favour of form and structure. The subject mat-
ter provided Kelly with a framework through which to stage questions raised in the
feminist collective’s working through of concepts of female subjectivity and agency in
Freudian and Lacanian writing. Rather than documenting the process of separation
and development in her child, Kelly used the piece to stage key questions about inter-
subjectivity, the work of the mother, and the nature of marking (with framed dirty dia-
pers as an interesting textual contribution to the then sterile field of conceptual art and
to the then current range of familiar marking implements). Coming out of the same
collective context regarding the field of the gaze, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986)
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 315

is a theory book by Jacqueline Rose, the noted British feminist theorist of literature and
visual culture, who was also among this British network of feminists engaged in close
reading of psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. Rose developed a theory of visuality and
the gaze as concepts that pertain not just to visual images and media texts, but also to
relationships of looking in the subject’s negotiation of the world. In the early 1980s
the French writer Michel de Certeau wrote about the quotidian practices of looking in
everyday life (de Certeau 1984), however, his account never directly and analytically
engaged the dynamics of seeing or the role of the visual in constructing the world en-
countered by the subject. Rose simultaneously delved into visuality and the psychic
life of the subject engaged in a networks of looks and looking practices, drawing on
the psychoanalytic concept that the gaze is a constitutive aspect of human subjectivity,
that sexual difference is a structuring aspect of the subject’s emergence into the social
order, and developing a theory of psychic interiority relative to the external world of
looking—all aspects of looking practices missing from the account of everyday life
­offered by de Certeau at about the same time. Rose developed a concept of the gaze
not as the looking practice of an individual, but as relational field in which subjects
perform and interact with others and with objects, whether we are aware or not of our
place within the dynamic. Drawing on Lacan, she described the field of vision as one
that is always structured around and through desire and sexual difference. Understand-
ing the ways in which desire and sexuality are not simply reflected in the content of
images or appearances, but also structure looking practices as a nexus of power, agency
and the human subject’s psychic life has been a fundamental aspect of visual culture
studies since the beginning of the field, and the model of power in looking is well theo-
rized in Rose and other foundational texts from this period.

The Cultural Turn and Feminist Art History

In art history, visual culture studies emerged as a discipline most directly in conjunc-
tion with changes that art historians described variously as a ‘cultural turn’ (Diko-
vitskaya 2005) and a ‘new art history’ (Harris 2001). The ‘cultural turn’ refers to a
shift among art historians towards an examination of the place of art in its broader
national, institutional, political, economic or material cultures. This approach drew
from feminist methodology for models of thinking about culture in an interdisciplin-
ary analytic framework. An important early contribution was the 1971 essay by the
feminist art historian Linda Nochlin ironically titled ‘Why have there been no great
women artists?’ Nochlin’s title was ironic in that it repeated and reframed a question
then being asked by art historians newly concerned with the status of women in the
fine arts following the influence of second-wave feminists. Throughout the history
of art, the studio system through which artists train had been largely a domain of
men. Even in cases in which women were able to receive training, work by women
was rarely exhibited and sold by major galleries. Dramatically under-represented in
museum exhibitions and collections, art by women was largely ignored, dismissed as
minor or derivative, or embraced in a patronizing manner by art critics and historians.
316 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Nochlin wrote that to resuscitate the handful of under-considered female artists, as

some art historians had begun to do, was a worthy task, however, this project tacitly
reinforced a problem inherent in the very way in which the question was framed.
The problem is that the question failed to address the issue of the social conditions
­required for what counted as ‘greatness’. Instead of resuscitating and elevating women
artists to the status of their male counterparts, she proposed that we analyse and
­critique the social and institutional conditions that made possible the production of
what counts as ‘great art’. Nochlin noted that this approach has been dismissed for
being too much in the domain of sociology and not art history. But it was exactly
this kind of interdisciplinary, sociological approach to art history that she called for.
Deriding the sort of art history that casts artistic greatness as a matter of genius, as
‘miraculous, nondetermined, [and] asocial’, she argued in favour of an art history that
is ‘dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented’; that takes into
account the ‘total range of [art’s] social and institutional structures’. Her challenge to
the core of art history was bold and direct: She aimed to ‘reveal the entire romantic,
elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the
profession of art history is based’ (Nochlin 1971).
Nochlin’s essay was published during the early years of second-wave feminism, a time
when Marxist feminist analyses of labour and the economy were widely embraced by
scholars in a range of fields. Even art historians who were not inclined to work within
the Marxist critique of the economy took up this approach, because it posed an alterna-
tive to the romantic view of individual artistic genius. The lack of ‘great women artists’
was understood as a structural absence or absenting of women in art training, social
networks and institutions. This was a set of conditions no simple ‘opening of the insti-
tutional doors’ could change. Rather, what counted as art—its forms, its concerns, its
media—needed to change.
The idea that women constituted a structural absence from the field opened the door
to a range of approaches that allowed scholars to develop a more nuanced understanding
of the paradox that whereas women were under-represented in art practice, they were
over-represented as objects depicted in art by men. Writing shortly after Nochlin, the
art historian Griselda Pollock considered among other things the social circumstances
through which female artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot painted and
drew the sorts of scenes representing female subjects in the home, as against their male
counterparts who painted the landscapes and architecture of the public sphere. What
distinguished the work of Pollock from art historians engaged in the reclamation of
great women artists from the past was her sustained use of psychoanalytically informed
Marxist feminist theories and her direct engagement with feminist film theories of the
male and female gaze. Rather than valourizing the women artists she wrote about for
working with distinction in a male-dominated field, and rather than arguing solely in
favour of celebrating the overlooked importance of a female point of view reflected in
these artists’ works, Pollock drew on the Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist theory of
the Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to ask her now-classic question,
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 317

‘can the subaltern [woman] speak?’ in order to address the sexual, racial and colonial
structures of modernity in which these female artists practiced (Spivak 1988; Pollock
1997). She interpreted their work as being engaged in a critical dialogue with that mi-
lieu, expressed through the compositional forms of drawing and painting rather than
strictly in representational iconography or literal meanings. Her analysis of the formal
and esthetic aspects of the work suggested that we should consider elements such as
framing and composition and the relationships of the male and female gaze both repre-
sented, implied and invited in spectators as structural expressions and interventions in
a discursive cultural sphere articulated at the level of the image. The concept of the gaze
at play in Pollock’s essay was very much tied to developments of the concept to feminist
film theory, as discussed below.
Janet Wolff’s Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (1990) was another
major contribution to feminist visual culture studies. She introduced an approach that
offered sociological methods as means to addressing the gendering of culture as a struc-
turing principle rather than as an added feature to the interpretation of art. Wolff trained
in sociology at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, one of
the key programmes in the foundation of cultural studies, with Stuart Hall (the pro-
gramme was started in 1964). She combined British cultural studies and visual studies
in the early 1990s when she joined the faculty in art and art history at the University of
Rochester, where she helped to found one of the first graduate programmes in the field.
After her groundbreaking The Social Production of Art was published, she consistently
addressed issues of gender as well as class and culture in considering art from a sociologi-
cal standpoint informed by British cultural studies methods, along the lines called for by
Nochlin in her classic essay described above.
Semiotics must be mentioned as an important component of feminist theory in-
forming visual studies, and it cannot rightly be folded into a discussion of the cultural
turn. Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey and Norman Bryson (1991) and Bryson and
Mieke Bal (1991), writing in the USA, brought semiotic theory from literary theory to
art history, opening up approaches to the work of art as a text open to semiotic interpre-
tation. Rather than reading the work of art in linguistic terms they adapted semiotics to
the study of the visual image, specifically painting in its historical context. Among this
group, Mieke Bal brought the technique of close analytic to the study of the visual image
in a manner informed by a feminist psychoanalytic view. The introduction of semiotics
as a core component of visual studies, however, was also from film studies, dating back
to the feminists who trained with Metz and the foundational essay of Johnston discussed
above. Whereas in art history semiotics was adapted to the analysis of the static text and
the nature of the gaze figured in it and in relation to it, in film studies semiotics was
adapted to the analysis of serial frames, sequences and shots. The analysis of meaning in
narrative became an important aspect filtering into visual studies through the generation
of film scholars trained through the Screen theory tradition and Camera Obscura, where
works of narrative cinema tended to be featured more frequently than works of experi-
mental or nonnarrative cinema.
318 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

The Gaze in Art History and Film Studies

Nochlin introduced the concept of a ‘feminine gaze’ as a counterpoint to the concept
of a dominant ‘male gaze’ that organized the esthetic and formal aspects of the field.
The concept of the gaze was under discussion among feminists engaged in psycho-
analytic theory in Britain, France and the United States during this period. It would
become a cornerstone of both feminist film and art theory following from Nochlin’s
essay and an influential essay given as a paper at about the same time by the British
filmmaker Laura Mulvey (1975). Mulvey introduced her highly influential critique of
visual pleasure and narrative cinema in 1975, discussing not only the content of clas-
sical film representations of women, but also formal elements such as framing, shot
duration and camera position. She showed how formal elements organized the way
spectators look, setting up a sexual dynamic of the gaze in which looking is associated
with the active, masculine position and being looked at (being the object of the gaze)
is the feminine position, typically occupied by women. This formulation: women as
object of the look, men as the subjects who look, has since held a central place in the
field of visual culture studies, though often as a source that is critiqued (including by
Mulvey herself ), adapted and appropriated. The binary formula of the male spectator
as an active figure who controls the look and the female body as the object of the look
has been subject to extensive discussion. Theorists of the1980s and 1990s introduced
the provisos that we can also speak of a female gaze (Doane 1987; Stacey 1987, 1994);
that masculinity and femininity are fluid social and psychical positions which are not
always attached to one’s biological status as either male or female and are complex
and subject to oscillation, making any singular identity position relatively untenable
(Sedgwick 1990; Rodowick 1991); that the female position should be understood as
one that can be maintained across all points of identification (de Lauretis 1984, 1987);
that we must account for masculine, gay and lesbian subject positions among specta-
tors and performers (Silverman 1992; White 1999); and that we must account for race
and ethnicity as well as sexuality in discussing the female spectator (hooks 1992; Bobo
1995). Central to all of this work was the film journal Camera Obscura, which was the
first English-language periodical devoted to feminist visual culture theory. Starting as
a film journal, Camera Obscura evolved into a journal of media and culture. The book
How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (1991), edited by the Bad Object-Choices read-
ing group, was an important collection of works introducing key issues in queer visual
studies, including sociologist Cindy Patton’s proposal of pornography as part of safe-
sex vernacular in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, Kobena Mercer on racial dif-
ference and the homoerotic imaginary, and Judith Mayne on female authorship in film,
focusing on the US director Dorothy Arzner.
How Do I Look? originated in a conference in 1989 focused upon the study of
pornography, until then an under-considered area of popular and subcultural visual
media. In the same year, Linda Williams published the classic Hard Core: Power, Plea-
sure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989). The book was a milestone in visual culture
studies not only for applying the psychoanalytic, semiotic approach to the film genre
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 319

of pornography, but also ­because it challenged some of the tenets of feminist critique
by refusing to take a negative critical stance on a genre and a sector of the film indus-
try that was heavily under fire from anti-pornography feminists for its depictions of
women as passive objects of the gaze. The book grew out of an early moment in femi-
nist politics, the so-called feminist sex wars famously associated with a 1983 Barnard
conference at which feminists against pornography were faced with the critique from
sex-positive feminists across the straight, lesbian, trans and S&M communities who
argued that the feminist position against porn foreclosed on women’s pleasure in im-
ages of women and desire in relation to fantasy, and ruled out consideration of women
as workers in the sex industry, confining feminists to a position of moral conservatism
and mistakenly equating representation with violence. The launching of On Our Backs
(1984–1994), the first women-run sex tabloid for a lesbian audience, was a direct
response to the perceived prudery of the anti-porn stance embodied in the feminist
newspaper Off Our Backs (1970–2008), which generally avoided discussion of sexu-
ality to focus on politics and other aspects of lesbian feminist culture. Although the
feminist sex wars were not a chapter in visual culture studies per se, they informed the
field’s scholarship by playing out a public debate about representations of women and
the place of lesbian desire in that issue in a way that profoundly influenced feminist
scholarship in the field. The sex wars also launched decades of work studying pornog-
raphy with colleagues and students, generating studies of women in the industry and
gay and lesbian subcultures—topics that upended the characterization of the field as
solely exploitative and demeaning. This aspect of visual studies has been a critical area
through which the field has gravitated away from the model of critique towards other
modes of analytic practice.

Art Practice and Feminism

During the period that feminist film theory was emerging as a major aspect of intel-
lectual work, a number of feminist photographers produced work that engaged with
some similar ideas about visual culture and sexuality. Cindy Sherman’s black-and-
white photographic series ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977–1980) famously articulated a
critical theory of the gaze through photographic form. In her self-portraits of the
1980s Sherman dressed and posed in settings evoking classical mid-century cinema
to make ironic commentary about a period of visual culture known for its relegation
of women to the position of object of the look. Sherman posed in clothing and sets
reminiscent of and modeled on stills from films of the classical Hollywood cinema of
the 1940s and 1950s, evoking scenes of female beauty and domesticity with subtle
and ironic twists. Viewers could hardly fail to note the critique in these send-ups of
the classical Hollywood cinema. Her work was never heavy-handed and condemning
but rather came off as a wry critical embrace, allowing for a kind of double-edged ap-
preciation of the culture of the ‘male’ gaze while making the viewer uncomfortably
aware of the power dynamic behind the role of the woman who held and returned
the look from the image or screen. Whereas old photographs of mid-century movie
320 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

stars appropriated and reused can make us appreciate the same ironies, the fact that
Sherman herself appropriated, authored and also performed these roles in such stilted,
highly mannered compositions lent a sharp, funny and smart edge to the critique.
Photographer Catherine Opie’s large and colourful 1991 portraits of butch dykes
were given a title that explicitly drew on Lacan’s notion of the phallus in relationship
to power: ‘Being and Having’. Opie’s butch subjects use dress, pose and composition
to perform types in a tongue-in-cheek and campy manner, confronting the camera
face-on. Barbara Kruger, a commercial artist, used her graphic techniques and type-
face to construct collage and print pieces commenting explicitly on ironies of sexuality
and power, drawing on formats and themes of mass media concern and making ironic
text statements in juxtaposition to the familiar iconography of magazine and newspa-
pers advertisements. These are just a few of the artists of the period 1977 through the
1990s who were widely cited by visual studies scholars, and who also engaged in art
practice as theory.
The concern raised in the 1970s by Nochlin about the exclusion of women art-
ists from the canon continues to be brought to our attention through the work of the
Guerrilla Girls, a feminist performance group of anonymous women who since 1985
have taken the name of dead artists (Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz, for example; see
Guerrilla Girls 1998) to appear in public wearing masks and making interventions at
museum and gallery functions. Their interventions draw attention to sexism in the arts,
mostly through humor. Do women have to be naked to get into the Met museum?, one
of their posters asks—and in their interventions at museums in person they have posed
the same sorts of questions. Less than 5 per cent of the artists in the modern art section
are women, the poster notes—but 85 per cent of the nudes are female. Although the
Guerrilla Girls do not work in the theoretically dense frameworks of visual theory, they
do engage in the sociological tradition of emphasizing that art is always in social context.
In this they are very much within the field of visual culture, as well as in the tradition
of institutional critique, an area of art practice in which artists’ work in installation and
performance foregrounds questions about the institutional politics and policies of mu-
seums, galleries, collecting and display. This performative tradition of critical theory was
engaged in early on by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña (1995), whose ‘Couple
in the Cage’ performance of 1997 was a hilarious and biting send-up of the colonial
gaze and romantic notions of natives expounded in museums of man and art. The artists
dressed as a ‘native’ couple housed in a cage for museum display, a living diaorama of
racialized display and a reference back to the tradition of human displays in museums
of man and in circus and freak shows. That their preposterous performance as members
of a lost tribe was received at face value by museum and gallery visitors in 1997 was a
frightening reflection on the place of critical thinking in the public sphere. Fusco was
and remains an important contributor to visual culture studies as a figure who has con-
sistently worked as a curator, a writer, and a performance artist in her practice. With
Jennifer Gonzalez, Fusco is among a small but growing group of visual culture studies
scholars working on questions of racial difference and postcolonialism in feminist visual
culture.
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 321

Feminist Critical Art Practice and Visual Culture

in the 2000s
The photographer Kimiko Yoshida, like Opie and Sherman, uses portraiture as a means
of making critical political commentary about visual culture in a manner that is in-
formed by visual culture theory. In a series that spanned seven years during the 2000s,
Yoshida transformed herself into the brides of the world, making ironic commentary
about globalization and the culture of femininity. Graduate programmes in visual cul-
ture studies such as the one at the University of Rochester have tended to promote the
strategy of combining practice and theory, resulting in the ability of practitioners to have
careers such as that of Tina Takemoto, the San Francisco–based performance artist who
works on questions of embodiment and illness and who also writes criticism and theory
of visual culture, racial identity, the body and illness. Combined practice-theory has had
a much stronger presence in visual culture studies since 2000, and work such as Take-
moto’s that spans feminist, queer theory, critical race theory and disability studies across
writing and performance is increasingly visible in the field.

New Media, Feminism and Visual Culture

New media studies has been a key area for the expansion of work in feminist visual cul-
ture studies. One of the key scholars in this area is Anne Friedberg, one of the founders
of an early graduate programme in visual studies (at the University of California at Ir-
vine) and a film studies scholar whose work on the cinematic gaze in the context of win-
dow shopping (1993) was one of the most influential books on the postmodern in visual
culture studies. Her 2006 book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft synthe-
sized thinking about visual culture in a world in which screens have proliferated, from
the drawing devices of the Renaissance to the present-day world of computer, cell phone
and GPS screens. In her book Digitizing Race, Lisa Nakahara (2007) extends ideas about
visual culture into the domain of new media, taking into account the ways in which the
Internet is structured through notions of racial difference even as it is touted for bridg-
ing racial boundaries. Rather than condemning or bemoaning this fact, Nakamura uses
visual culture studies methods to analyse and uncover the mechanisms through which
racial identity is forged in the virtual space of the Web.

Embodiment
Because the emphasis in visual studies remains with the human subject understood as a
complex materially situated being, questions of embodiment and phenomenology of ex-
perience have been important theoretical and methodological threads in the field, with
a turn to emphasis in the 2000s on intersubjective experience (a topic raised explicitly
by Mary Kelly in her Post-Partum document but not widely investigated until recently)
rather than the subject in the singular. Vivian Sobchack has made major contributions
to theories of embodiment in film and new media visual culture with her Address of the
322 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Eye (1991) and her contribution to the study of embodiment and moving image cul-
ture, the book Carnal Thoughts (2004). The latter book brings to the fore the role of
embodied experience in sense-making as a neglected concern in the previous decades of
visual theory, during which work on knowledge and visuality tended to be centred in
the concepts of mind and thought without adequate attention to the body and embod-
ied experience. Recent work in feminist affect studies has moved in this direction, fol-
lowing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s introduction to the writings of Silvan
Tomkins (Sedgwick and Frank 1995) and Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling (2004), in
which Sedgwick writes about how people embody linguistic and nonlinguistic concepts
through the concept of performativity. Though not a central figure in visual studies,
Sedgwick has nonetheless been an important influence there in shaping fundamental
approaches and theories of the relationship of the body to linguistic practice in the fields
of practice and the gaze conceived as a multisensory space.

Art, Technology and Visual Culture

Feminist science and technology studies has offered some important new work in
visual culture studies. At about the same time that art historians took the cultural
turn, science and technology studies scholars were raising questions about women’s
standpoint and issues of race and cultural identity in science and technology studies.
Donna Haraway, in her classic Cyborg Manifesto, offered an ‘ironic dream of a com-
mon language for women in the integrated circuit’—a configuration of a network that
emphasized a kind of crossing of media forms as well as borders between identities
and fields (Haraway 1991). Anthropologist Rosalind Petchesky, using a different set
of methods, proposed that we consider the sonogram and fetal imaging in terms of
power and politics of the visual (Petchesky 1987). Her method is very much in keep-
ing with the Althusserian turn towards seeing culture and medicine as integral to the
workings of the political economy. Scholars trained in an interdisciplinary framework
across film and media studies and science and technology studies took up these con-
cerns about scientific and medical imaging to produce critical accounts of represen-
tation that addressed sexuality and gender (see for example van Dijck 1995, 2005;
Cartwright 1995). An early collection reflecting this convergence of science and tech-
nology studies with visual studies through feminism can be found in the collection
edited by Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley and Paula A. Treichler (1998). A number
of women artists working in the paradigms and practices of the scientific laboratory
have taken up questions of visual culture from within this context. Notable among
these artists are Kathy High, the New York–based media artist who since the 1980s
has produced video and new media work raising critical questions at the intersection
of science, sexuality and visual culture; Beatriz da Costa, the southern California–
based bioartist who works directly in tissue culture; and Natalie Jeremijenko, the New
York–based performance artist who has included engineering technologies of vision
and surveillance to track toxic chemicals and to re-engineer the environmental land-
scapes of the everyday.
Art, Feminism and Visual Culture 323

Overviews of the Visual Culture Field That Emphasize

Feminism and Art
Useful overviews of visual culture studies include Mirzoeff (1999, 2000); Dikovitskaya
(2005); and Sturken and Cartwright (2008). Mirzoeff, Sturken and Cartwright all give
significant attention to feminist contributions to the field. Useful overviews of femi-
nism and visual culture are Jones (2010) and Carson and Pajaczkowska (2001). Carson
and Pajaczkowska frame the subject through the categories of fine art, design and mass
media. Jones, who is an art historian, traces theoretical and historical aspects of femi-
nism and visual culture study across a diverse range of fields and topics that closely map
the fields and topics that informed the history of the field, with articles representing
most of the key foundational work of feminist visual studies. Fields covered include art
history, art practice, and science and technology studies. The volume includes work by
activists and artists as well as scholars, highlighting questions of race, class, nationality
and sexuality, and includes a very useful introduction that traces the development of the
field. Jones’s book is a key text for anyone wishing to understand feminism’s place in the
foundation of visual culture studies.

Further Reading
Fusco, Coco and Brian Wallis. 2003. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self.
New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Guerrilla Girls. 1998. The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Art. New York:
Penguin.
Jones, Amelia. 2010. Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Nakahara, Lisa. 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. 2008. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual
Culture, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey. 1991. Visual Theory: Painting and
­Interpretation. New York: HarperCollins.
Carson, Fiona and Claire Pajaczkowska. 2001. Feminist Visual Culture. London: Routledge.
Cartwright, Lisa. 1995. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis:
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Cartwright, Lisa, Paula A. Treichler and Constance Penley. 1998. The Visible Woman: Imaging
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324 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

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 13

Visual Consciousness: The

Impact of New Media on
Literate Culture
Nancy Roth

The shape and scope of visual culture crucially depends on how ‘visual’ is related to an-
other kind or level of culture, often inexplicitly understood to be linguistic or literary.
In the most familiar understandings of this relationship, ‘visual’ is a mode of perception
distinguished from ‘acoustic’, so that the edge between them appears between speech
(acoustic) and written text (visual). The meanings of images are then enmeshed with,
discussable through, or, as Flusser might propose, overpowered by written language.
Barthes’s celebrated discussion of the Panzani advertisement shot through with verbal
associations in ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes 1977), Benjamin’s well-known ob-
servation about a caption effectively anchoring the meaning of a photograph (Benjamin
1991), Foucault’s scopic regimes, set forth in detail in written texts (Foucault 1999), are
among the most familiar examples.
Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) may in fact be unique in his grasp of the ‘visual’, first,
as a form of consciousness rather than a mode of perception, and second, as profoundly
antagonistic towards writing—or more exactly towards the form of consciousness writ-
ing sustains. Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), like Flusser, projected the possibility of
writing becoming obsolete, and began to think about some of the implications: ‘His-
toric man may turn out to have been literate man. An episode.’ (McLuhan 1997: 127).
There are striking similarities in the way both define their objects of study, and despite
McLuhan’s reputation as an exuberant technophile, he and Flusser shared a sense of
profound loss at the prospect of writing’s demise. Yet the differences are crucial. In the
present context, they help to appreciate Flusser’s unique grasp of new media as actually
mediating a new universe, of ‘technical images’ as the form this mediation takes, of writ-
ing as a cognitively acoustic rather than a visual medium, and of contemporary culture
as increasingly rewarding and developing pictorial—as opposed to linear or, as he prefers
to call it, historical consciousness.
Visual Consciousness 327

Because only a small fraction of Flusser’s writing is currently available in English, and
very little of that is specifically concerned with the rise of a new visual culture, I would
like to introduce some elements of his perspective here. Whether his specific predictions
prove to be accurate or not, his view of our current cultural situation as a struggle be-
tween literate and visual consciousness is productively unsettling, promising to stimu-
late genuinely new questions, models and insights into the communicative context we
share.
The following chapter begins with ‘Image to Text—and Back Again’, a brief account
of technical images, underscoring their intractable opposition to writing. Bodenlos—a
German word meaning ‘without grounding’ or ‘rootless’ and the main title of Flusser’s
autobiography (Flusser 1992)—then sets Flusser’s sense of a new visual consciousness
in the context of his own biography. The next section, ‘Gestures’, takes a closer look at
Flusser’s largely phenomenological approach to media, focussing on his own experience
of the antagonism between text and image as the basis for his contention that new media
are visual. ‘Apparatus’ then considers some implications of visual automation. The final
section, ‘Art’, moves into the hopes and fears Flusser expressed as a witness to the rise
of the new visual consciousness, along with some notes about the challenges he has left
to us.

Image to Text—and Back Again

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ
Moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

—Omar Kayyám (trans. Edward FitzGerald)

In a series of books first published in German in the mid-1980s, Flusser outlined a his-
tory of media in which images and linear writing are in constant conflict (2000, 2011a,
2011b). The narrative is shaped by two key events. The first is the invention of writing
in roughly the third millennium bc, transforming societies that had until then relied on
human memory and images (oral transmission) as their primary means of storing and
transmitting information, ancient Greece in the time of Socrates and Plato being the
prime example. The second is the invention of photography. Flusser credits the inven-
tion of writing to a slow-burning intolerance of the sort of ‘woolly’, circular, unproduc-
tive thinking supported and recorded through images and speech. His favoured image is
Moses descending the mountain to confront the worshippers of an image—the Golden
Calf—with the Law, a serious, respectable, clear, and above all written document, con-
structed in lines that go in one direction, towards a goal.
Over centuries, through ancient inscription and medieval scriptoria to Guten-
berg’s moveable type, the thoughts and deeds of historical, linear consciousness were
328 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

preserved, debated and distributed in writing. This form of consciousness came to

dominate magical, image-based thinking, and to support, as Flusser claimed, ‘every-
thing we value in the Western inheritance (2011b: 53). But writing did not obliter-
ate the force of images: ‘Only in the eighteenth century, after a three-thousand year
struggle, did texts succeed in pushing images, with their magic and myth, into such
corners as museums and the unconscious’ (2011b: 147). A restless, literate, linear con-
sciousness that always moves forwards, pictured as a Moving Finger in the famous
quatrain cited above, makes harsh, ultimately unsustainable demands on those who
read and write—Flusser says bluntly that historical consciousness has shown itself to
be ‘murderous and mad’ (2011b: 35). The poem crystallizes the pain and regret of at
least two highly literate consciousnesses—that of both writer and translator, with such
grace and economy as to resonate with many generations of readers. For as written
texts branched and proliferated, they became so complex as to often be incomprehen-
sible, and as the consciousness they support penetrated further and further into minds,
bodies, molecules and galaxies, the demands—to keep moving, to push further—be-
came unbearable. Flusser proposes, that is that photography was invented at the point
of—and because of—writing’s failure to convey enough information comprehensibly,
quickly enough to serve the needs of human beings who were beginning to glimpse the
limits of linear, literate thought. The early-nineteenth-century consciousness that was
‘burning with desire’ to photograph (Batchen 1997: 52) was one that had, in Flusser’s
framework, become dissatisfied with writing—or better, with the universe as it ap-
pears to linear, historical consciousness. This makes photography—the first automated
image—at once a descendant of writing, indebted to innumerable texts in the fields of
physics, chemistry and representation, and a force for overturning writing’s dominance
of the way we think, see, hope and fear.
Contemporary photography, having subsequently evolved into a vast array of what
he calls ‘technical images’, or ‘sounding surfaces’ (terms embracing photography and
the related media of film, video and digital image synthesis), appears just this side of
a historical watershed. If the term ‘pre-historic’ quite literally means ‘before writing’,
photography is, Flusser claimed, ‘the first post-historic medium’ (2002: 129). People
who rely primarily on technical images to communicate with one another no longer
think in terms of cause and effect, of events moving in one direction towards a goal or
conclusion, of historical sequences or grammatically ordered sentences. ‘Photographs
are dams placed in the way of the stream of history, jamming historical happenings’ he
wrote (2002: 128). The Moving Finger has stopped writing, it would seem; it trips a
shutter instead.

Bodenlos
Born in Prague in 1920, Flusser had just begun to study philosophy at the Charles Uni-
versity there when, at age 19, he realized that the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia
was threatening to destroy not only the German language he loved (he grew up speak-
ing both Czech and German, as well as the Hebrew he learned as part of his religious
Visual Consciousness 329

training), but also his life. Unable to persuade his family of the danger, he left Prague
with his fiancé, and eventually, after a brief stay in England, emigrated to Brazil. There,
separated from everything familiar—people, language, geography, values—he learned
that all of his family and friends—Czech, German and Jewish—had been murdered. In
the following years, he was sometimes suicidal. But he married, raised three children,
continued to study philosophy independently, learned Portuguese, and began to earn a
living as a writer of commentary on current affairs for newspapers and magazines—in
the new language. By the early 1960s he had become a university professor, first in the
philosophy of science and then in the philosophy of communications, a field he called
‘communicology’. Fluent at this point in five languages, English and French, in addi-
tion to his native Czech and the German, Flusser developed a pattern of translating texts
from one language to another, in order, as he said, to exhaust their possibilities. Trans-
lation would remain a central concept in his thought (Guldin 2005), and communi-
cation, exchange, connection to others would emerge as itself the means of generating
meaning, of continuing to live even with no access to one’s roots. To be bodenlos was still
to suffer, but it was also to be free as few can ever be, unbounded by the assumptions,
prejudices, obligations that accompany any concept of ‘home’ (2003).
Flusser’s sustained engagement with photography, and by extension with new media,
seems to have begun after his return to Europe in 1973, a move precipitated by strong
friendships, publication opportunities, and a deep disappointment with the political
situation in Brazil. The Flussers settled in Robion, in southern France.
The last two decades of his life brought both an unprecedented level of conventional
success—more publication and speaking engagements than ever before—and also a re-
newed struggle. He still sought routes into the unfamiliar, but now, rather than a new
language, geography or history, he was encountering new media, with their character-
istic ways of structuring thought, perception, time and space. This migrant from the
‘land’ of writing and history felt his hard-won skills threatened with obsolescence. Hav-
ing mastered some five natural languages, he was now faced with the prospect of learn-
ing the visual and mathematical codes in which photographs, television, video were
‘written’—of going, as he put it, ‘back to kindergarten’. In the Afterword to the second
edition of Writing: Does Writing Have a Future? (2011b), he expressed a painful aware-
ness of having written a book about breaking out of the old codes, something he himself
didn’t have the mathematical competence to do very well, but which would be of no in-
terest to those who could do it well, because they have no need to break out of anything:
‘they’ve already set [writing] aside in contempt’ (2011b: 164).
Flusser was killed in a car accident in 1991, his theory of communication still ‘under
construction’. At its centre of this theory are two interrelated concepts, discourse and
dialogue: discourse is fixed and official, the formal ideals or history shared by a group
of people—the most familiar forms today would be in print and broadcast—and held
in storage indefinitely; dialogue is exploratory, experimental and usually ephemeral—
and the only source of genuinely new information. Ideally, a society has a balance
of both modes of communication, but in his own situations—both in Brazil and in
­Europe—Flusser saw discourse, probably with the image of network radio and television
330 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

prominently in mind, as the overwhelmingly dominant force, so powerful as to all but

exclude the very possibility of meaningful dialogue, and so the possibility of creative so-
cial change. For he understood dialogue as essential to any sort of life that could justly
be called ‘human’.
Flusser drew his concept of dialogue from the theologian Martin Buber (1878–
1965), but transformed it from a religious concept into a secular one (Ströhl 2002: xv):
dialogue emerges as the means by which any of us establishes and maintains an identity,
is remembered, overcomes the loneliness and absurdity of our own inevitable death.
Flusser’s hopes and fears with respect to media revolve fundamentally, that is around
his sense that a profound change in the medium of communication inevitably means a
profound change in the potential for dialogue, for making meaningful creative contact
with another human being.
Flusser’s contemporary, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, seems never to have
sensed any such unbridgeable difference between old and new, and so never felt himself
on the ‘wrong’, that is the old side of the change. He tended to position himself as some-
one who could see shifts in the use and effects of media, could diagnose the perceptual
shortcomings of his critics by being just a bit ‘ahead’ of them (1997). In fact he seemed to
possess just the sort of sensitivity to the perceptual ‘climate’ of any given time and place
he repeatedly attributed to artists. Among the remarkable points of agreement between
McLuhan and Flusser, in fact, is a keen concern with clarifying and revaluing what might
count as ‘creativity’ under changing conditions. But unlike McLuhan, Flusser saw him-
self on the outside, describing, calling for a new form of creativity without himself being
able to participate very effectively in it.
It surely matters that Flusser, unlike McLuhan, was speaking as a migrant, as some-
one who had negotiated a completely unfamiliar situation, language, landscape and
culture more than once in his life. Again unlike McLuhan, Flusser witnessed the ad-
vent of personal computing, early image synthesis software and the Internet. But none
of this accounts for the neat reversal of their understanding of the perceptual difference
between writing and new media. For McLuhan understood writing to be visual, new
media to be acoustic, and himself—committed to oral over literary communication—a
harbinger of the new. Flusser, committed to oral communication yet deeply commit-
ted to writing as well, understood writing to be bound to speech in a way that ren-
dered both fundamentally acoustic. The consciousness he associated with new media
was, by contrast, so resolutely visual as to put his own skills, beliefs, assumptions—his
consciousness—under threat of obsolescence. Without definitively deciding whether
computer code is ‘language’, or programming a form of ‘writing’, he calls urgently for
translators, ‘envisioners’ who can make at least some aspects of the vast cultural memory
stored in writing accessible to a new consciousness.

Gestures
It seems clearer in retrospect than it was at the height of his fame in the 1960s, then, that
McLuhan modelled new media—particularly film and television—on speech, with its
immediacy and perceptual richness, its simultaneous engagement of tactile and acoustic
Visual Consciousness 331

as well as visual senses (Moos 1997). Flusser, by contrast, although he imagined the
universe of technical images as rather noisy—everyone, even machines, having learned
to speak—thought speech was already losing precision and subtlety, the power to oper-
ate as collective memory it had acquired over centuries under the ‘discipline’ of writing.
Both he and McLuhan read contemporary media shifts against the radical perceptual
changes known to have accompanied the invention of writing some three millennia ago
(Ong 1982). But Flusser looked more soberly at the persistent gap—spanning most of
writing’s history well into the nineteenth century—between the very few who were actu-
ally able to read and write and the many who could not. For Flusser, this gap translates
into the contemporary situation roughly as one between those who can, and those who
cannot ‘write’ computer code.
The respective disciplinary commitments of the two men do seem to have bearing on
the issue. McLuhan’s professional academic ‘home’ was in the history and criticism of
literature. Flusser’s central intellectual commitment, and this in spite of a radically trun-
cated formal education, was always to philosophy, to a rethinking of inherited questions
and categories—logic, epistemology, metaphysics and ethics—under changed condi-
tions. More particularly, Flusser’s early and lasting commitment to a phenomenological
method of inquiry seems to have enabled him to think past language, to project a visual
mode of thought quite completely different from the literate, or historical thought he
called his own.
From his earliest study of philosophy, Flusser admired the thought of Edmund Hus-
serl (1859–1938), widely regarded as the founder of phenomenology. And although
there were other thinkers who affected him deeply, Flusser’s approach to media old and
new relies on the phenomenological ‘reduction’, Husserl’s method of ‘bracketing out’
logical and causal assumptions in order to gain insight into the phenomenon under
consideration. He applied this method explicitly in a series of essays whose titles begin
with the word ‘Geste’, or ‘gesture’, among them ‘The Gesture of Writing’, ‘The Ges-
ture of Painting’ and ‘The Gesture of Photographing’ (1991). Gestures are ‘movements
of the body or a tool linked to the body that have no satisfactory causal explanation’
(1991: 8). They encode intentions, starting from the inside—from thinking or reflec-
tion—and moving towards the outside, towards other people. Within this framework
Flusser developed many of his most remarkable insights into specific communications
media.
In the essay entitled ‘The Gesture of Painting’ (1991: 109–26), Flusser almost literally
‘walks’ his readers through a phenomenological reduction, pointing out the advantages of
such an approach. He asks us to consider the phenomenon of a painter at work, a human
body with a brush attached, a pattern of movements between an assortment of coloured
pigments and a canvas, alternating with moments of rest. We, as observers, are particu-
larly cautioned to avoid any preconceptions about why these movements may be occur-
ring, or even any assumptions about the relationships between parts of the scene, for
example body, pigments, brush, canvas, activity and rest. In this way, Flusser presents the
situation as a seamless integration between painter, paint, brush and painting, a percep-
tion inaccessible to anyone approaching the phenomenon with ‘commonsense’ knowl-
edge about the causally related entities involved in the gesture. Observed in this way, the
332 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

canvas seems to be controlling the whole gesture, since everything seems to be directed to-
wards it, to mean it. But ultimately, the gesture of painting presents us with an enigma, a
puzzle that forces itself on us. This allows us to identify it as a free movement (1991: 115).
The gesture of painting contains its own criticism, he says, which can actually be observed
in certain phases of the movement, such as a stepping back from the canvas or looking at
it in a particular way. In order to resolve the enigma it presents to an observer, the gesture
of painting actually requires that the observer in some sense participate in it. The goal of
such an analysis is not to enumerate causes and so to explain the phenomenon away, but
to press more deeply into the enigma, to experience it more fully.
‘The Gesture of Photographing’ approaches photography in a similar way inasmuch
as we are invited to analyse a photographer at work, and suspend all preconceptions
about causes of this activity. But Flusser points out a crucial difference at the outset:

The subject is the cause of the photograph and the meaning of the painting [italic in
original]. The photographic revolution turns the traditional relationship between the
concrete phenomenon and our idea of the phenomenon around. In painting, accord-
ing to this tradition, we ourselves form an ‘idea’ of the phenomenon in order to fix it
on a surface. In photography, by contrast, the phenomenon forms its own idea, for us,
on a surface. In fact the invention of photography is a delayed technical solution to the
theoretical debate between rational and empirical idealism.
The English empiricists of the seventeenth century thought that ideas impressed
themselves on us like photographs, while their rationalist contemporaries believed that
ideas, like paintings, were formed by us. (1991: 127)

This presentation of photography as a sort of materialization of philosophical possi-

bility, an alternative means of observing, reflecting, exchanging views about the world,
turns out to be the central goal of Flusser’s essay. Photography offers a means of philoso-
phizing without writing—in fact without language:

The gesture of photographing is a philosophical gesture, or to put it differently: since

photography was invented, it is possible to practice philosophy not only in the medium
of words, but also in that of photographs. The reason is that the gesture of photogra-
phy is a gesture of seeing, of that which the antique thinkers called ‘theory’, and from
which an image is produced they called an ‘idea’. Unlike most gestures, the gesture of
photographing is not directly concerned with changing the world or with communi-
cating to others, but is aimed at observing something and fixing the seeing, making it
‘formal’. The much-quoted Marxist argument that philosophers have tried to explain
the world (which is to say, observe and chat about it), when the point is to change it—
this argument is not very persuasive when it comes to the gesture of photographing.
Photography is something new, the result of looking at and changing the world at the
same time. The same is the case for traditional philosophy, although the resulting ideas
are less easily grasped. Its intelligibility is indisputably a moment of photography’s ad-
vantage over the results of traditional methods of philosophy. (1991: 134–5)
Visual Consciousness 333

Flusser goes on to analyse a particular instance of photographing: we are asked to

observe a gathering of people among whom a man is sitting in a chair smoking a pipe.
He is the photographer’s subject, and both the photographer and the other people move
around him. The analysis divides the ‘gesture’ into three parts: the movement of the pho-
tographer around the subject in search of the best standpoint, the manipulation of the
subject, and the judging—the photographer’s self-critical, reflexive gesture of selecting
the appropriate distance between the two. There is a fourth aspect, he admits, namely
the tripping of the shutter, but that, along with all the developing, sizing, printing of a
final image, lies beyond the gesture itself and so beyond the framework of the essay. In
the deft and persuasive, if complex analysis that follows, each of the three enumerated
aspects of the gesture of photographing is linked to aspects of traditional philosophy,
emphasizing the impossibility of confirming a clear traditional distinction between ob-
server and observed, and identifying still photography as the philosophic gesture par ex-
cellence. At the end, the essay opens a host of questions, such as whether the difference
between art and philosophy has not been eroded, or what impact photography has had
on scientific thought. At length it returns to the recognition of photography as a gesture
of seeing, ‘theoria’.
By contrast, ‘The Gesture of Writing’ (1991: 39–50) emphasized the orderly flow of
lines on a page, and the sustained force required to achieve such order. Appearing more
often in the first person than in many of his other essays, Flusser frequently resorts to
the word vergewaltigen, meaning to violate or to rape, when accounting for, first, the
‘translation’ of ideas—images—into the sounds of a spoken language, and then again
when those sounds are forced to obey the rules of letters, lines, sentences, grammar and
punctuation—in a word, the rules of orthography. In order to communicate in writ-
ing, that is both writer and reader must command the codes of one or another spoken
language, to in some sense ‘hear’ those acoustic codes. Photography, on the other hand,
requires no such detour through spoken language.
It is easy to misunderstand the distinction he is drawing between writing and tech-
nical images in terms of the traditional break between images and texts, as they appear
in, say, books illustrated with drawings or photographs. For both drawings and pho-
tographs usually function as traditional images in such contexts, which is to say they
serve linear texts, reflecting the very old struggle between linear, historical consciousness
overpowering magical, image-based thinking. At one point Flusser helpfully introduced
the example of a scientific text composed of lines of alphabetic code and mathematical
symbols, comparing it to an illustrated storybook (2011b: 24). In such a text, he sug-
gested, complex equations sit like visual islands, stubbornly refusing to enter the di-
rectional flow of linear text, demanding instead a visual, mathematical consciousness
to decode them. The break he sees opening now between writing and technical images
is located between alphabetic (acoustic) codes, and mathematical (visual) ones. That is
whether we are looking at video clips or listening to music or even reading a text online,
the transmission depends on mathematical, which is to say, visual, thought. This is bet-
ter observed from a standpoint other than the analysis of gestures. It opens at that point
in ‘The Gesture of Photographing’ where reference is made to an apparatus.
334 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Apparatus
Photography is just one of many media that support the universe of technical images,
the universe after writing. But for Flusser it appears as a kind of common denomina-
tor, something like the most basic form of the many image technologies that followed.
At one point he set out to define ‘technical images’ as those that involve an apparatus.
He never exactly retreated from this definition, but did feel the need to explain how the
use of an ‘apparatus’ involves a very high level of abstraction, a consciousness at several
removes—four, to be exact—from any immediate engagement with the life-world (first
speech, then traditional images, then writing, then technical images). An apparatus is in
some respects a machine, but greatly refined, unprecedented in its capacity to reach into
a universe of particles far too small, moving too quickly for human beings to actually see
or grasp, select them according to a program, register them on a surface far faster than a
human hand ever could, and store them indefinitely. Even at its inception, that is pho-
tography possessed the basic characteristics that mark communication in the universe
of technical images: it used an apparatus fitted with keys, it ‘worked’ with particles—
initially with light-sensitive molecules—at a speed and scale inaccessible to sense percep-
tion, it was ‘programmed’ to do certain things and not others.
This account breaks sharply with the far more familiar understanding of photog-
raphy as an ‘index’ or ‘trace’ of the world—and photography serves here as a kind of
model, or first instance of all the apparatus that soon join in the bidding to ‘record’
phenomenon, for example film and video and sound recording. Although Flusser does
not deny the apparatus’s potential to function indexically, and in fact confirms, in ‘The
Gesture of Photographing’ that the technology permits subjects to imprint themselves
on a surface, ‘like a fingerprint’, he does not see this as being, or as ever having been its
most characteristic or most significant function. As he discusses it in ‘The Gesture of
Photographing’, photography is characterized both by the subject’s manipulation of the
photographer and the photographer’s manipulation of the situation.

The objectivity of an image (an idea) can be nothing but the result of manipulation
(observation) of any situation. Any idea is false inasmuch as it manipulates that which
it comprehends, and is in this sense ‘art’, which is to say, fiction. Yet in another sense
ideas may be true, namely if they truly comprehend that which they observe. This
may have been what Nietzsche intended in saying that art is better than truth. (Flusser
1991: 145)

For Flusser, then, digital photographic technology does not introduce a new me-
dium, but allows us to see clearly for the first time what photography always was, namely
a means of constructing images out of inherently meaningless particles. Photographs
are and always were fictions, projections. In a passage distinguishing photographs from
electronically synthesized images, he contends that both are projections, but that this
is more difficult to understand with photographs for two reasons: first, because pho-
tographs seem to be copies, rather than projections, and second, because photographs
Visual Consciousness 335

seem to be made by someone—a photographer—rather than calculated using software

designed by so many as to have become anonymous: ‘At first glance, a photo of an air-
plane does not reveal that, just like a synthetic computer image, it signifies a possible
airplane rather than a given one’ (2002: 131).
The reason this has become clear only recently and only to some people, or probably
only to some people part of the time, is that ‘most of us (including most photographers)
are still caught up in historical, progressive, enlightened consciousness. Thus photo-
graphs are received with a different consciousness from the one that produces photo ap-
paratuses’ (2002: 131). That is the consciousness that receives photographs (and that, to
a large extent, makes them) understands, appreciates, categorizes them in relation to a
still-dominant, writing-based system of values, in a world understood to be meaningful,
real, and so worth representing. The consciousness that designs cameras, film, chem-
istry and software understands the world to be the end result of an inconceivably vast
play of chance. It sets about engaging in that game, playing with probabilities, using
apparatus to compute tiny, meaningless bits of it into images that project a conception
of the world, that confer meaning. Post-historic images (and this embraces the whole
range of electronic communication technology, including sound reproduction) do not
‘represent’ things in Flusser’s formal vocabulary, but more exactly calculate and compute
them—and always did.
Flusser’s hopes and fears for a future in which technical images gradually erode the
functions, the values and assumptions of literate thought are therefore unrelated to
any threat to the camera’s—or any other apparatus’s—perceived special relationship to
‘truth’. He would not deny the possibility of such relationship, but he would insist that
it always depended on a particular configuration of people, apparatus, time and place.
His hopes and fears are rather bound up with the disjunction in consciousness between
makers and users of apparatus, the gap between those who are able to operate humanely
within the apparatus, and those who engage with it as a kind of ‘black box’, opaque and
impenetrable. It is, approximately, a disjunction between those who believe they are tak-
ing pictures, recording meaningful information, and those who understand that they
are making pictures—conferring meaning. Or, to put it another way, it is a disjunction
between a belief that it is possible to distinguish definitively between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’
images (a belief of literate, historical consciousness), and a belief that fictions may be
more or less comprehensive, satisfying or inspiring, depending on the clarity, depth and
intensity of engagement between senders and receivers of those images.
This disjunction looms large in Flusser’s structure of thought because it threatens
to effectively block the use of technical images for genuine dialogue. Flusser fears, that
is the tendency of users to understand technical pictures as in some sense reliable, or
‘true’, to reinforce discursive structures of communication, that is those structures that
deliver a kind of general consensus, a shared meaning about a particular group of people
(discursive structures embrace the ancient model of the Roman amphitheatre and the
contemporary one of centralized broadcast). For in reinforcing discourse, they simulta-
neously threaten to impede the development of genuinely dialogic structures, opportu-
nities for playful, creative exchange.
336 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Flusser’s view may be clearer in contrast to that of John Szarkowski, the highly influ-
ential curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art between 1962 and
1991, and certainly among the most articulate of users of photographic apparatus.

Our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens is impartial,
and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner. This faith may be naïve
and illusory (for though the lens draws the subject, the photographer defines it), but
it persists. The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer
hides his hand. (Szarkowski 1966: 12)

Szarkowski himself suggests that the ‘faith’ in photographic truth may be naïve and
illusory, but still speaks approvingly of the photograph’s detachment from the photog-
rapher (or at least the appearance of detachment) as the medium’s identifying feature;
Flusser would deny such detachment, and perhaps Szarkowski would not disagree. But
Flusser would also see the ‘hiding of the hand’ itself as potentially dangerous. For to the
extent that the image seems to appear without human intervention, it begins to exclude
human decisions, the possibility of generating new, unexpected, surprising information.
It begins to locate human beings within a ‘black box’, as functionaries who are effectively
controlled by the apparatus. If by ‘apparatus’ we understand a structure of ‘automated’
transactions that extend beyond the immediate design, manufacture, marketing and
sale of a particular camera, if we imagine automated decisions that reach back from the
photographer to those who may have commissioned him or her, to descriptions of ‘need’
generated by automated market surveys, to a proliferation of concepts of ‘new’ and ‘ad-
vanced’, or even ‘acceptable’ that seem under the control of no one in particular, the fear
becomes real and present. In light of such pressures, Flusser is emphatically opposed to
the hiding of hands. Rather he sees our longer-term well-being resting on the generation
and shared celebration of surprises, improvisations, improbable communication never
anticipated by hardware, software, chemical or corporate designers, for only in this way
can truly new information be generated.
Flusser displayed an almost even balance between optimism and pessimism regard-
ing the rising universe of technical images, grasped in relation to the first promise of the
Internet. In many ways he welcomed the proliferating automation of human labour—
including mental labour—but feared that it would itself become automatic, making ev-
erything more and more predicable, less and less informative, excluding the possibility
of creative dialogue to the point where human life would become unbearable. He also
projected the possibility that the universe of technical images would be the first truly
human culture exactly because automation would free human beings from the need to
work, and allow them the leisure, along with the speed and flexibility of communica-
tion, to lead a life of joyous, playful celebration. But in order for this to happen, ster-
ile, conventional unidirectional communication models, ostensibly inherited from the
hierarchical patterns characteristic of writing and print culture, must give way to an
open exchange among human beings who mutually acknowledge one another’s distinc-
tive skills, tastes and potentials and limitations. He is disparaging in his judgement of
Visual Consciousness 337

cultural criticism that tries to identify ideological causes or malicious villains as a means
of intervening in an increasingly automated process. He calls instead for a closing of the
gap between those who design and those who use the apparatus, for users who can sur-
prise themselves and one another. Users must, in short, learn to use, to creatively ma-
nipulate the new codes.

Art
McLuhan, borrowing the phrase from Ezra Pound, famously referred to artists as ‘the
antennae of the race’ (1964: xi), people who could, by virtue of an exceptionally acute
awareness of their own sense perception, appear to predict the future, alerting the rest
of us to imminent changes in perceptual conditions. McLuhan further recognized the
broad potential of ‘obsolete’ media to serve as platforms for gaining valuable critical
insights into the contemporary communications, for example that painting might be
in a strong position to criticize, say, television. The ideas seem to be related, at least
indirectly, to his more general contention that techniques or processes that have been
superseded—replaced partially or entirely by faster or more efficient ones—tend to take
on a heightened aesthetic value (1964: ix, 32). Etching, lithography or, more recently,
film-based photography, for example retire from commercial employment to an ‘after-
life’ in art colleges and artists’ studios. There, they are subject to a very different struc-
ture of appreciation and valuation. Had McLuhan ever considered the range of media
available at contemporary art colleges—from painting, drawing, modelling and cast-
ing, through many print processes including photography, to film, video and computer
image synthesis—he would presumably have accepted them all, as most students as well
as lecturers do, as potential means of innovative communication in the present.
Flusser seems to have had little patience with ‘art’ as he found it defined institu-
tionally. He once dismissed ‘the ridiculous isolation of an avant-garde’ (1996: 240)
as something completely alien to contemporary communication. With some hesita-
tion, he supported the incorporation of schools devoted to the study of specific arts—
conservatories and art schools—under the more general category of ‘communication’
colleges (1996: 239). Nor did Flusser ever extend anything like McLuhan’s blanket
­recognition of ‘old’ media as potential means of communicating meaningfully in the
present, although he clearly did recognize at least painting as a meaningful contem-
porary medium. Perhaps if he had considered the art college’s temporal ‘collapsing’ of
media, it would have presented an example of what is happening to history, an instance
of considerable ambiguity about moving ‘forwards’ in time, and a clear sense of the past
pooling up around us—techniques, texts, biographies all being available simultaneously
in no inherently meaningful order.
But for all his seeming ambivalence towards institutionally identified ‘art’, Flusser re-
peatedly stressed the urgency of a particular type of visual practice, the need to claim—or
reclaim—the inventive, creative potential of technical images. ‘Art and human are synon-
ymous, and they both mean that we deny the fullness of the world (its being such). They
both mean that we are not animals governed by habit, but human beings, meaning artists’
338 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

(2002: 56). For Flusser grounds the whole purpose of human life in communication—in
the possibility of making real, creative contact—dialogue—with other people, and in
having that creative moment remembered past the point of any one person’s death.
Flusser defines dialogue as an exchange of information between at least two memo-
ries. These memories may be human or artificial; the critical thing is that the exchange
be open—there can be no prescription, no sanctity of established categories, no uni-
directional flows. He accounts for one common model of creativity, the lonely genius
alone in study or studio, as a dialogue between different aspects of the same memory,
as Newton, for example making the connection between celestial mechanics and the
fall of an apple to the ground. But exchange between memories is invariably a far faster,
more exciting process. One memorable example he gives of creative dialogue involves a
hypothetical chess game. The rules of the game are complex enough to provide nearly
infinite possibilities and so considerable scope in themselves for creative, absorbing en-
gagement; but the moment of genuine creativity—of ‘connection’, or dialogue—would
come when both players look up from the game and decide—together—to change the
rules, to really ‘play’ (1985: 109–10).
Flusser is convinced that the requisite technology is already largely in place, but that
we ourselves, our habits of thinking and behaviour, our inherited convictions stand in
the way of using technical images in playful, creative exchange. In his more optimis-
tic passages, he describes a kind of practice that engages in such play, that forces the
apparatus—whether literally boxes with control buttons or more generally automated
processes that engage human beings—to produce what they were never programmed
to produce, namely, new, improbable, surprising information. This would be a funda-
mentally visual practice inasmuch as it would involve the ‘writing’ of algorithms, rather
than of linear text, whatever the mode in which anyone might ultimately communicate:
visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory or all of the above. He designated such practice with
the German word einbilden, which may be translated as ‘imagine’, yet has additional
resonances with ‘envision’ or ‘visualize’ or even ‘hallucinate’; he kept the term neatly
­distinguished from darstellen, to represent or depict, which is what traditional images
do, namely painting and drawing—whether they are depicting ‘real’ objects or imagi-
nary ones.
Flusser looks to envisioners, in any case, to ensure that the new technologies do not
become completely automated, that they are used to generate new information, to put
creative human intelligences in touch with one another and with artificial intelligences,
to generate surprising, unpredictable images, sounds, situations and events. It is Flusser’s
hope that such people, who may as well be students of science or engineering or market-
ing as of art, will find ways of ‘writing’ innovative code, of resisting a persistent tendency
towards sameness and predictability, and of turning the vast potential of technical im-
ages into meaningful dialogue.

A scientific text differs from a Bach fugue and a Mondrian image primarily in that it
raises the expectation of meaning something ‘out there’, for example atomic particles.
It seeks to be ‘true’, adequate to what is out there. And here aesthetic perception is
Visual Consciousness 339

faced with a potentially perplexing question: what in the text is actually adequate to
what is out there? Letters or numbers? The auditory or the visual? Is it the literal think-
ing that describes things, or the pictorial that counts things? Are there things that want
to be described and others that want to be counted? And are there things that can be
neither described nor counted—and for which science is therefore not adequate? Or
are letters and numbers something like nets that we throw out in order to fish for
things, leaving all indescribable and uncountable things to disappear? Or even: Do the
letter and number nets themselves actually form describable and countable things out
of a formless mass? This last question suggests that science is not fundamentally so dif-
ferent from art. Letters and numbers function as chisels do in sculpture, and external
reality is like the block of marble from which science carves an image of the world.
(2011b: 25).

In the universe of technical images, then, art can no longer claim either ‘the visual’
or ‘creativity’ as its particular province. Nor, conversely, can science make a special claim
to knowledge. In fact Flusser sees a conventional concept of ‘art’ as largely obstructing a
clear apprehension of the new technical possibilities:

We speak of ‘computer art’ when we are looking at the new images on monitors, as
if we were concerned only with a new technique for producing images. By using the
category ‘art’ we block our own access to these images. Computer keys simulate men-
tal processes. These glowing images are nearly unmediated—if ‘unmediated’ means
anything to such estranged creatures as human beings are—images drawn from the
brain outward. It is therefore misleading to call these published and particularized
dreams ‘art’ without adding that all previous art is only a hesitant approach to these
images. Even understood in this way, however, the concept of art is a category that
bypasses these images. Most computer images produced so far have been fabricated in
laboratories, not in artists’ ateliers transfigured by Benjamin’s aura. Images produced
in laboratories make at least as strong an aesthetic impact as those produced by ‘com-
puter artists’. Such images disregard the boundary between the category ‘art’ and the
category ‘science and technology’. Science presents itself as an art form and art as a
source of scientific knowledge. (2011b: 28–29)

The conceptual category of art itself, then, is seen to be bound up with historical
consciousness, linear thinking—and ultimately with writing. ‘Envisioners’, seeing the
world as a massive play of probabilities, become accustomed to sharing memory with
others, to using apparatus developed by others; ‘artists’, by contrast, ostensibly belong
to the universe of writing, the universe that recognizes, reveres originality. Linear con-
sciousness, he contends, seeks a beginning, an author—a founder of a city, an author
of a text (2011a: 96). Writing made a world of authors and authorities. When the faith
wears thin, when no textual ‘frame’ or context seems strong enough, persuasive enough
to contain them, images no longer necessarily have an author, a founder, a beginning, a
direction or an end.
340 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Could the quatrain that opened this chapter be ‘translated’ into a technical image?
Could there be a recording or a film of the smooth, unstoppable forwards flow of time,
past the breaks in the lines, the piety and the tears, to the end of ‘it’, of history, of writ-
ing? In his admirable short study of the pioneer of motion pictures, Eadweard Muy-
bridge, the filmmaker Hollis Frampton left us with a rare insight into the way a technical
image maker might regard the flow of history. Near the end of an elegant account of
Muybridge’s life, showing how its various threads could be understood to converge on
a single moment, Frampton rewrote a quotation from the sculptor August Rodin with
which he had introduced his essay. Rodin’s observation, made at the time Muybridge
was working, contended that artists tell the truth and photographers lie, for in fact time
does not stop. In Frampton’s rewriting, ‘It is the photograph which is truthful, and the
artist who lies, for in reality time does stop’ (1983).
Flusser seems to credit any one of us with the potential to be differently conscious
in different contexts and situations—older codes coexist with newer ones. He makes no
pronouncement of inevitable disaster or probable triumph. But specifically as a writer,
addressing readers of alphanumeric code, he admonishes us not to languish in com-
placency with respect to the codes we know and value, but rather to be translators,
envisioners, writers of algorithms who resist a comfortable automation of our commu-
nicative relationships, who insist that surprise, invention, creative human dialogue can
and should flourish in the new universe of technical images.

Further Reading
Flusser, Vilém. 2002. Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik Eisel. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans., with an Introduction by Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1997. Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication, ed. Michel A. Moos.
Amsterdam: G&B Arts International.
Wiesing, Lambert. ‘Aesthetic Forms of Philosophizing’, in C. v. Eck, J. McAllister and R. v. de
Vall (eds), The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
­University Press, 108–23.

References
Texts quoted from the German volumes are my translations.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, Image-Music-Text. New York: The Noonday
Press, 32–51.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 1997. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA
and London: MIT Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1991. ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’, Gesammelte Schriften Vol II:1, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser. Frankfurt a.M: Surkamp ­Taschenbuch,
368–85.
Visual Consciousness 341

Flusser, Vilém. 1983. Für eine Philosophie der Photographie. Göttingen: European Photography.
Translated as Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2000). London: Reaktion.
Flusser, Vilém. 1991. Gesten: Versuch einer Phänomenologie. Düsseldorf and Bensheim: Bollmann
Verlag.
Flusser, Vilém. 1992. Bodenlos: Eine Philosophische Autobiographie. Düsseldorf and Bensheim:
Bollmann Verlag.
Flusser, Vilém. 1996. Kommunikologie. Mannheim: Bollmann Verlag.
Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Introduction by Hubertus von Am-
elunxen. Translated by Martin Chalmers. London: Reaktion. First published as An eine Phi-
losophie der Photographie. Göttingen: European Photography. 1983.
Flusser, Vilém. 2002. ‘Photography and History’, in Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik
Eisel. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 126–31.
Flusser, Vilém. 2003. The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, ed. Anke Finger,
trans. Kenneth Kronenberg. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press.
Flusser, Vilém. 2011a. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Introduction by Mark Poster, trans-
lated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Ins
Universum der technischen Bilder, Göttingen: European Photography, 1985.
Flusser, Vilém. 2011b. Does Writing Have a Future?. Introduction by Mark Poster, translated by
Nancy Ann Roth. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Die Schrift:
Hat Schreiben Zukunft? Göttingen: European Photography, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. 1999. ‘Panopticism’, in Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (eds), Visual Culture: The
Reader. London: Sage and the Open University, 61–71.
Frampton, Hollis. 1983. ‘Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract’, in Circles of Confusion.
Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 69–80.
Guldin, Rainer. 2005. Philsophieren zwischen den Sprachen: Vilém Flussers Werk. Munich: ­Wilhelm
Fink Verlag.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: Mentor. Reprinted with an
­Introduction by L. Lapham. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1997. ‘Culture without Literacy’, in Media Research: Technology, Art,
­Communication, edited with commentary by Michel A. Moos. Amsterdam: G&B Arts
­International, 126–38.
Moos, Michel. 1997. ‘McLuhan’s Language for Awareness under Electronic Conditions’, in
­Marshall McLuhan, Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication, edited with commen-
tary by Michel A. Moos, Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 140–66.
Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York:
Routledge.
Ströhl, Andreas. 2002. ‘Introduction’, in Vilém Flusser, Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik
Eisel. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, ix–xxxvii.
Szarkowski, John. 1966. The Photographer’s Eye. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
 14

The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’:

Henri Lefebvre on Vision,
Space and Modernity
Michael E. Gardiner

One cannot look the philosophical sun in the face.

—Maurice Blanchot (1997: 87)

Despite his status as (in the words of long-time admirer Fredric Jameson) ‘the last great
classic philosopher’, for a lengthy period the ideas of the heterodox (and heretical) French
thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) were greatly neglected in the ­English-speaking
world. The last ten years or so have witnessed a remarkable reversal of this situation,
however, with a flood of new translations, monographs and other publications. These
have been instrumental in kick-starting something of a renaissance in Lefebvre studies,
through which we are beginning to grasp the full range, fecundity and philosophical
depth of his work. Inevitably in any such process of critical reappraisal and reconstruc-
tion, however, there are gaps and oversights. Lefebvre’s treatment of vision, which can be
primarily (though not exclusively) found in his sprawling 1974 masterwork The Produc-
tion of Space is arguably one of these (Lefebvre 1991a). Although his interest in this topic
has not gone entirely unnoticed, it has generally been relegated to something of an aside
within wider analyses of Lefebvre’s work on space, particularly in the wake of the English
translation of The Production of Space. As such, it has not usually been regarded as an
issue worthy of independent examination, and nor has much effort been made to locate
Lefebvre’s account of visual phenomena vis-à-vis the wider spectrum of his work and
interests. Furthermore, there has been little commentary on the philosophical roots of
Lefebvre’s construal of vision, apart from scattered references to Lacanian psychoanalysis
or Nietzsche and Debord, and virtually no attempt to relate Lefebvre’s position on this
question to the burgeoning literature on visual theory and culture. For instance, such
major works as David Michael Levin’s The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 343

Situation (1988) and Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-
century French Thought (1993) each contain only a brief mention of Lefebvre.
The central goal of this chapter will be to address at least some of these oversights,
and to affirm that Lefebvre can add substantive value to the current debate over vision.
Oftentimes, commentators have interpreted Lefebvre’s argument about the close affin-
ity between the dominance of vision in the post-Renaissance era and the creation of a
specifically modern form of what he calls ‘abstract’ space, and the deleterious effects that
flow from this, as a straightforward species of ‘ocularcentrism’ (see Dimendberg 1998:
24; 42, n26). Lefebvre undoubtedly is critical of a particular mode of visuality, one that
he associates, through a series of complex arguments, with modernity. However, via a
careful reading of The Production of Space, and by relating the core themes of this book
to other of his major works and ideas, it is possible to tease out a more nuanced, and
certainly more defensible position on vision. I will proceed, firstly, through a consid-
eration of Lefebvre’s account of the historical emergence of abstract space and the role
played by a certain ‘decorporealized’ way of seeing in this process. Next, I will outline his
critique of this ‘logic of visualization’ through Lefebvre’s understanding of human em-
bodiment, with reference to his main philosophical influences on this issue, especially
Heidegger and Nietzsche. Crucial to this task will be to reconstruct his (admittedly frag-
mentary) suggestions as to alternative modalities of perception, which is an integral part
of his clarion call in support of ‘the right to difference’. In seeking to subvert the hege-
monic aspect of the modern form of visuality and the role it plays in the domination of
space, Lefebvre promotes a multisensorial, synesthetic engagement with the world that,
arguably, has its roots in a key idea of ancient Greek philosophy: aisthesis. This concept,
the origin of the modern term ‘aesthetics’, refers to a prelinguistic world of shared per-
ceptual experience, involving all the senses, wherein the workings of the body are fully
enmeshed with the world. It is through this corporeal disclosure of the sensible world
that notions of meaning and value are actively formulated. In later Western thinking,
however, the human perceptual realm and its co-extensiveness with the physical world
became increasingly divorced from more abstract knowledge-claims, in which truth is
equated with representation (see Kane 2007; Sandywell 2011). The conclusion of
this chapter will focus more directly on this question of a reconstituted aesthetics in
­connection with Lefebvre’s understanding of visual phenomena.

The Production of ‘Abstract Space’

A useful point de repère might be to linger briefly on a curious, almost offhand comment
Lefebvre makes about the Surrealists in the opening chapter of The Production of Space.
Although initially fascinated by Surrealism’s avant-garde iconoclasm and preoccupation
with the textures of everyday life, Lefebvre eventually faulted their tendency to posit
such fleeting nonrational experiences as amour fou (‘mad love’) or the ‘marvellous’ as
techniques for escaping from the perceived banality of the everyday. In cultivating the
irrational and the ‘bizarre’ as ends to themselves, the Surrealists expressed a ‘transcen-
dental contempt for the real’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 29). In The Production of Space, Lefebvre
344 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

takes this further, suggesting that the aesthetic techniques of Surrealism privilege the re-
ified visual image over a more processual act of seeing. That is in making a fetish of decon-
textualized, static imagery, designed to disrupt the observer’s habitualized perceptions
and jolt him or her into a transfigured state of awareness—such as the apple-faced busi-
nessman in Magritte, or Dali’s lobster telephone—Surrealism fails to adopt ‘a “listen-
ing” posture, and curiously neglects the musical both in its mode of expression and, even
more, in its central “vision”’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 19). In the flash of ‘profane illumination’
that accompanies the Surrealist image, the world stands revealed as ‘total transparency’,
thereby deranging the senses, arresting time, and immobilizing the viewer in a ‘sort of
ecstasy’ (Breton 1990: 133; see also Jay 1993: 236–62). Through such purely aesthetic
gestures, in which the object is overwhelmed by a superfluity of meaning, Surrealism
promotes an ‘immobile space’ that is in reality, a projection of abstract Reason. Accord-
ingly, despite its intentions, Surrealism reinforces instead of supercedes the perennial
bourgeois separation between spirit and matter, mind and body, ideal and reality, time
and space. For Lefebvre, the key point is this: Surrealist images are phantasmic echoes of
the rarefied logic of exchange-value, rather than an expression of the embodied, practical
appropriation of use-value, the latter unfolding according to the temporal rhythms of
lived experience and the sensual needs of what he referred to as the ‘total man’ [sic, and
passim], something that must be grasped (if always tentatively and incompletely) by the
operations of what he called ‘dialectical reason’ (see Collinge 2008).
In unpacking this somewhat cryptic pronouncement on Surrealism, it is possible to
glimpse the central argument of The Production of Space and related texts: that the practi-
cal and symbolic symbiosis humankind had built up vis-à-vis the natural landscape over
eons, including the deep encrustations of collective memory, is now in acute danger of
being supplanted by an alienated, hyper-rational, and ultimately destructive relation to
space, wherein the natural world is ‘reduced to materials on which society’s forces oper-
ate’ (Lefebvre 2009: 187). Crucial to this development is the promotion of a reified and
disembodied way of seeing, which denigrates the other senses and renders problematic
the connection between space and time. Yet, at the same time, the present conjuncture
also harbours distinct possibilities for genuine human fulfilment, plenitude and the re-
alization of a truly global ‘community of difference’. To grasp this provocative formula-
tion, however, we need to backtrack through a discussion of Lefebvre’s historical schema
regarding space, which is not without its controversies (see Kouvelakis 2008).
In its most basic formulation, Lefebvre argues that space is not a mere backdrop or
‘container’ in which human interests and activities unfold. Rather, every society produces
a distinctive space—each appropriates the spatial realm in a particular way through its
practical activity and mode of production. In premodern societies, space was appropri-
ated through the immediate human dimension, in tandem with the idiosyncrasies of the
local culture, such as its methods of establishing duration or distance. In the context of
what Lefebvre terms ‘absolute space’, we relate to the natural landscape primarily through
analogical extension of the human body itself, and hence there was a distinct symme-
try between the microcosm of the body and the wider universe (Lefebvre 1991a: 111).
Important spatial points (natural springs, salt licks, mountain passes), as well as the
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 345

aleatory paths that link them, are opened up and invested symbolically and ritually with
magical, affective and sacred properties. For Lefebvre, these sensual meanings are not so
much ‘texts’ as three-dimensional ‘textures’, marked with the traces of on-going physical
and symbolic human contact, or what he terms ‘archi-texture’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 118).
We make sense of this landscape not through a mode of ‘reading’ akin to linguistic com-
prehension, but by way of ‘living in that space, of understanding it, and of producing
it’, via a ‘scrawling hand’ that has both verbal and nonverbal elements (sounds, touch
and so on) (Lefebvre 1991a: 47). Moreover, there are always ‘blank’, which is to say ‘un-
readable’ (and hence ‘cursed’) spaces that remain dark, threatening and beyond human
control or comprehension, relegated to the category of terra incognito. Even after popu-
lations grew and congregated in emerging city-states, political systems became more for-
malized, and human constructions more elaborate, references to nature continued to be
incorporated into architectural and urban design and associated with the rituals enacted
within such spaces, which were intended to establish an equilibrium between the Logos
of humanity and the cosmos of nature (Lefebvre 1991a: 48).
Lefebvre is careful not to present absolute space as a homogeneous, generic form of
spatial production. For instance, he takes note of the many political and economic dif-
ferences between ancient Greek, Roman and early Medieval societies, as well as their di-
vergent conceptions of the body and corresponding modes of analogical reasoning. But
one thing they share is a milieu where time and space are inseparably linked, in which
humans relate to the world in a manner that is not conceived abstractly but lived ‘im-
mediately (i.e. without intellectual mediation)’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 241). In any event, for
a series of complex reasons that Lefebvre only hints at in The Production of Space, this
localized nature eventually recedes, and the trend of human societies is increasingly ‘to-
wards the quantitative, towards homogeneity, and towards the elimination of the body’
(Lefebvre 1991a: 111). What really shifted this process into high gear was the transfer
of power from the rural to the burgeoning urban areas, and from agricultural to artisa-
nal (and eventually commodity) production, in Western Europe beginning around the
twelfth century. By this time, asserts Lefebvre, absolute space was ebbing away, along
with the vision of a pan-European ecclesiastical order dominated by Catholicism. What
emerged instead was the ‘space of a secular life, freed from politico-religious space . . . a
benevolent and luminous utopia where knowledge would be independent, and instead
of serving an oppressive power would contribute to the strengthening of an authority
grounded in reason’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 256). Interestingly, Lefebvre observes that in the
overwhelming spectacle that the massive cathedrals of this period presented to the illiter-
ate masses, we see the glimmerings of a specific ‘visual logic’ that eventually dominated
the modern era, as well as the triumph of the phallus over the procreative female organs.
Whereas the Medieval church was obsessed with subterranean cultic spaces, with its
saint’s bones and catacombs, a rapidly consolidating abstract space would disinter these
musty relics and fetishes, literally ‘decrypt’ by exposing them to the withering glare of
Logos, logic and the law.
These dark, enchanted and sacred spaces were gravely weakened, but did not cease
to exist entirely. They were transformed into what Lefebvre calls “‘heterotopical’ places,
346 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

places of sorcery and madness, places inhabited by demonic forces—places which were
fascinating but tabooed’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 263). Whilst this ‘heterotopy’ suggests a veiled
reference to Foucault’s well-known ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), Tom McDonough argues
that Lefebvre derives this concept, not from the root word ‘utopia’, but rather ‘isotopy’.
Heterotopy refers, then, to places that are not only ‘other’ in relation to abstract space,
but also ‘of ’ the other, where the marginalized and excluded dwell, and ‘what remains
disjointed, fragmented, uncontrollable, excluded, or dissociated’ (McDonough 2008:
316). Traces of absolute space also survive in the perennial bourgeois nostalgia for the
‘home’ (Lefebvre mentions the work of Bachelard and Heidegger in this respect), and
also in certain artistic forms and practices. Although such countervailing tendencies
should not be underestimated, due to the relentless pressure of capital accumulation and
urbanization, rapid scientific and technological advances, and the consolidation of new,
interlocking systems of power, surveillance and control, abstract space came to domi-
nate, firstly in Western Europe, and eventually the globe. Abstract space tightly regulates
the uses to which spatiality can be put, and hence must be understood as the site of pro-
scription, control and the forcible repression of heterotopical spaces. If we are unable to
think and act outside such limitations, the realm of possibility vis-à-vis abstract space
is restricted to merely quantitative extensions and ‘improvements’—faster motorways,
more retail outlets, speedier broadband access—as opposed to any qualitative transfor-
mation in our collective way of living.
For Lefebvre, abstract space is a ‘bulldozer or tank’ that rides roughshod over all qual-
itative differences, especially embodied and natural ones. It strives to project the world
as transparent, homogeneous and depthless, proffering a set of meanings that are fully
legible and self-evident. Examples are hardly difficult to find in our world of identikit
strip-malls and bland suburban vistas. As Lefebvre himself notes in his Introduction to
Modernity, the concretized, grid-locked monstrosity of the postwar ‘new town’, which
exists on the very ‘threshold of sociability’, is a place where everything is ‘clear and intel-
ligible. Everything is trivial. Everything is closure and materialized system. The text of
the town is totally legible, as impoverished as it is clear’ (Lefebvre 1995: 119). There is a
kind of ‘flattening out’ of spatial complexity and the depth of human experience occur-
ring here, a reduction of the world to a single logic or plan—for example the driver is
only concerned about getting to his destination, the city is a mere conduit for that end,
and hence ‘speed, readability [and] facility’ trump all other considerations (Lefebvre
1991a: 313). Abstract space is an extension of the strategy of state bureaucratic control,
and operates according to the dictates of the “‘world of commodities”, its “logic” and its
worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state[,] the
vast network of banks, business centres and major productive entities, [and of ] motor-
ways, airports and information lattices’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 53). As has been widely noted,
the commodified space of neo-capitalism is produced with visual comprehension up-
permost in mind; in an average day we are exposed to literally thousands of images ex-
horting us to buy and consume specific brands and lifestyles (see Barnard 1995). These
images stimulate desire, but, because there is no concrete referent, the result is frustrated
enervation. This dominance of the visual obscures the stultifying repetitiveness involved
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 347

in the production of abstract space, wherein we identify life’s rich pageant with the fleet-
ing image: ‘We buy on the basis of images. Sight and seeing, which in the Western tradi-
tion once epitomized intelligibility, have turned into a trap: the means whereby, in social
space, diversity may be stimulated and a travesty of enlightenment and intelligibility
ensconced under the sign of transparency’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 76).

The ‘Logic of Visualization’

As the preceding discussion indicates, what is crucial to grasp is the close connection
Lefebvre posits between a particular form of subjectivity, new technologies of power
and surveillance, and a uniquely modern conception of knowledge. More specifically,
abstract space could only be produced via the reifications of linguistic representation at
considerable remove from our tangible, embodied engagement with the world. It is lan-
guage that makes possible the ‘ever-growing hegemony of vision, of the visible and the
legible (of the written, and of writing)’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 140). What, then, is the pre-
cise role of the visual in the formation of abstract space, according to Lefebvre? Ever the
Marxist, albeit a highly unorthodox one, he makes it clear that the modern production
of space, as per the imperatives of capital accumulation and the reproduction of exist-
ing social relations, is not straightforwardly reducible to some sort of underlying scopic
logic. The decisive factors are never simply ‘codes’ or ideologies in isolation, which is the
conceit of an idealist textualism like semiotics, but rather ‘modes of production [under-
stood] as generalities covering specific societies with their particular histories and insti-
tutions’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 47). This helps to explain why he identifies not one, but three
central factors with respect to the emergence of abstract space: the visual, geometric and
phallic. Tellingly, Lefebvre refers to each of these elements as ‘formants’, a musical term
that refers to the acoustic resonance of the human voice.

1. The geometric—this is a purely mental space represented by Euclidean geometry,

Descartes’s mathematics, or a priori Kantian categories of time/space, all of which
are divorced from the experiential world. The reduction of three-dimensional
realities to two-dimensional plans and schemata results in an impoverishment
and homogenization that clearly lends itself to the instrumentalized needs of
technocrats, architects and urban planners. This abstract and infinite space,
Descartes’s res extensa, finds its representational form in ‘blank sheets of paper,
drawing-boards, plans, sections, elevations, scale models, geometrical projec-
tions, and the like’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 200; see also Elden 2004a: 187–8).
2. The optical or visual—in modernity, the ‘logic of visualization’ (a term Lefebvre
borrows from German art historian Erwin Panofsky) prefigured in Medieval ca-
thedrals now dominates all social practice. It is marked by a fusion between the
power of the written word and what Guy Debord popularly referred to as the
‘spectacle’ (although Lefebvre used the term before him, in the first volume of
Critique of Everyday Life). There are two key components of this scopic regime:
the metaphoric (the linguistic or visual images produced via textual inscription
348 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

supplant what is written about), and metonymy (the gaze of power transforms
discrete, often hidden things into a unified, visible totality, as in the metonymic
sequence ‘driver-car-roadways’).
3. The phallic—abstract space cannot be completely empty, so it is filled with
something that symbolizes male power and virility and that holds sway over the
generative feminine principle. In stressing the perpendicular, it proclaims ‘phal-
locracy as the orientation of space, as the goal of the process’ (Lefebvre 1991a:
287; see also Blum and Nast 1996; Stewart 1995).

Kirsten Ross has plausibly suggested that, in positing the triad geometrical-visual-
phallic, Lefebvre is implicitly addressing what he takes to be the shortcomings of Debord’s
theory of the spectacle, which works on a purely optical basis; thus, the ‘logic of visual-
ization’ as Lefebvre understands it is more complex than mere ‘spectacularization’ (see
Ross 1999). What is apparent is that Lefebvre’s ‘formants’ are intimately intertwined
and mutually reinforcing: to conceive of the world geometrically relies exclusively on
sight; the gigantic skyscraper only awes and intimidates if it is manifestly visible and
dominates the urban skyline; and the supposed virility of the masculine principle works
through the auspices of a ‘penetrative’ gaze. The cumulative effect is to alienate and reify,
to negate the manifold qualities and potentialities of the human body and its mode of
engagement with the material world, and to justify the relentless exploitation of natural
space as per the dictates of capitalist accumulation. Such a visual logic has myriad delete-
rious effects, not only in terms of the formation of abstract space, but vis-à-vis the body
itself. Chief amongst these is ‘scotomization’, an obscure term borrowed originally from
nineteenth-century ophthalmology (referring to blind-spots), and later imported into
French psychoanalysis, where it came to mean a kind of mental lacunae whereby we
are seemingly unaware of the presence of others and indeed our own body. As Kirsten
Simonsen puts it, in Lefebvre’s usage scotomization ‘signal[s] a historical process of
abstraction of the body through an overlapping of the visual and the linguistic’ (Simonsen
2005: 2). Another area where the violence of abstraction leaves its mark concerns the frag-
mentation and commodification of the body—especially the female body, of course, in
the fetishistic, immature sexuality expressed in advertising or pornography. Just as space
is fragmented, so the body is torn apart; abstract space becomes the place where ‘nature is
replaced by cold abstraction and by the absence of pleasure’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 309).
Lefebvre suggests that the hegemonic visuality characteristic of modern abstract
space can be traced ultimately to certain artistic techniques worked out in the Renais-
sance (Lefebvre 1991a: 79, 361). This thesis finds considerable support in Robert D.
­Romanyshyn’s fascinating essay ‘The Despotic Eye’. Here, Romanyshyn argues that the
system of linear perspective and the ‘vanishing point’ (punto di fuga), as developed by
such Renaissance artists as Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, is rooted in
two key assumptions: first, that the world is ‘infinite and homogeneous’; and second,
that the further one removes oneself from multisensorial contact with the world, except
through the abstracted gaze, the better one can understand and capture external reality
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 349

pictorially. Fifteenth-century Renaissance art, then, ‘installs in place of the body a de-
tached eye, a disincarnated eye, as the vehicle of relation’ (Romanyshyn 1984: 89). It
is worth nothing that the linear perspective was most efficaciously reproduced on the
painted or imprinted surface of the artwork through the use of a velo. This was a wooden
frame with cross-cutting lines through which the artist looked onto the landscape or
portrait, which allowed the outside world to be divided up into mathematically precise
horizontal and vertical vectors. It is not that this device mediates between the artist and
the world so much as it becomes the world itself as presented to the viewer, because to be
effective, the eye of the artist had to fixate exclusively on the thin screen stretched tightly
across the frame. (Interestingly, Alberti experimented with the camera obscura as well, and
was rumoured to have invented it.) In this way, the world is reduced to a set of numerical
values and the purely spatial relationships between imaged objects. It privileges a mon-
ocular, decorporealized and static mode of vision, in which dispassionate contemplation
supplants a fully embodied, affectual engagement with the world. Hence, the Italian
artist Lucantonio degli Uberti might well have been able to surveil imperiously the en-
tire Florentine landscape at a glance in his famous 1482 woodcut Map with a Chain—
significantly, the artist himself is clearly visible in the lower right-hand corner, peering at
the city from a hill-top through the lens of his velo—but he can never know first-hand
its tangible sounds, smells, tastes and rhythms (Romanyshyn 1984: 98). However primi-
tive a device it might seem at first glance, the role of the velo in Renaissance painting
would seem to conform neatly to Lefebvre’s supposition that the modern domination
of space necessitates the mediation of a ‘visionary’ technology, one that ‘introduces a
new form into a pre-existing space—generally a rectilinear or rectangular form such as
a meshwork or chequerwork’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 165; also Kirsch 1995). One might fur-
ther speculate that the literal enframing of the world made possible by the Renaissance
velo evokes Heidegger’s more metaphorical notion of Gestell. The latter refers to his argu-
ment in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ that the essence of modern technology
is to contain or ‘enframe’ the world in an all-encompassing sense. The modern world has
value and significance only through its ‘gathering together’ as a visible ‘presence’ through
the aperture of specific technologies. In Gestell or enframing, the world is disclosed in-
strumentally ‘in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the real
as standing-reserve’, which negates the possibility of dwelling in the world aesthetically
(in the original Greek sense of aisthesis) (Heidegger 1977a: 302).
For Lefebvre, then, there is no ‘neutral’ gaze that brushes lightly over the surface of
things without leaving a trace; how we see has a considerable impact on the manner in
which we engage with, cognitively structure and shape in the world in practical ways.
This critique of the ‘logic of visualization’ clearly owes a large debt to Nietzsche (see
Merrifield 1995). In one of the few explicit references to his influences, The Production
of Space finds Lefebvre mentioning Nietzsche’s belief that the abstract ideas perfected
in the modern era and their legal-rational instantiation impose themselves violently
on the fleshy reality of human bodies and their desires. In his earlier, ‘Enlightenment’
phase, usually identified with Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche gives a favourable cast
350 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

to at least some ocular images and metaphors. But, in the bulk of his written work, Ni-
etzsche identifies the visual register as the primary vehicle for an abstract, disembod-
ied form of thought, especially through the distanciated images and circumlocutionary
tropes of language. Regardless of the actual complexities of Nietzsche’s presumptive
­anti-ocularcentrism (see Shapiro 1995), Lefebvre’s position here is clear enough:

Nietzsche stresses the visual aspect predominant in the metaphors and metonyms that
constitute abstract thought: idea, vision, clarity, enlightenment and obscurity, the veil,
perspective, the mind’s eye, mental scrutiny, the ‘sun of intelligibility’, and so on. This
is one of Nietzsche’s great discoveries (to use another visual metaphor). He points out
how over the course of history the visual has increasingly taken precedence over ele-
ments of thought and action deriving from the other senses (the faculty of hearing and
the act of listening, for instance, or the hand and the voluntary acts of ‘grasping’, ‘hold-
ing’, and so on). So far has this trend gone that the senses of smell, taste, and touch
have been almost completely annexed and absorbed by sight. (Lefebvre 1991a: 139)

To the ‘holy trinity’ of Marx, Nietzsche and Hegel, which by his own admission are
Lefebvre’s central influences, we could add Heidegger, for, as Stuart Elden convincingly
argues, the latter’s influence on Lefebvre has been woefully underappreciated (Elden
2004b; see also Waite 2008). In this context, we might single out Heidegger’s famous
1938 essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’. Although Lefebvre doesn’t cite this piece di-
rectly, there are clear parallels with his own suppositions regarding the link between vi-
sion, domination and modernity, and we also know he was on intimate terms with the
entire corpus of the controversial German philosopher. In ‘The Age of the World Pic-
ture’, Heidegger suggests that what characterizes modern science is its method of know-
ing the external world solely through an objectified representation of it, as reflected in
the unblinking gaze and abstract cognition of a disembodied, egological subject. It is
not that we grasp the world pictorially so much as it becomes a picture, with nothing else
left over. This operation facilitates the transformation of the natural world into a ‘stand-
ing reserve’, which exists, according to the logic of such a ‘metaphysics of presence’, only
insofar as we have specific, instrumentalized uses for it. ‘In the planetary imperialism
of technologically organized man’, writes Heidegger, ‘the subjectivism of man attains its
acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there
firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., tech-
nological, rule over the earth’ (Heidegger 1977b: 152). As David Michael Levin astutely
points out, however, this attack on representational thinking cannot be equated with a
straightforward equation of vision with nihilism per se on Heidegger’s part. Rather, it is
indicative of the latter’s belief that there exists a close connection, but not necessarily a
simple identity, between seeing and the modern ‘will to power’. As such, it is possible to
imagine an alternative mode of visualization, to foster a ‘gaze that would hold itself open
to the interplay of the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent—an interplay
that is also made visible as the gift of the ontological difference, opening up a field of il-
lumination for the enactment of human vision’ (Levin 1995: 212).
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 351

The Revolt of the (Multisensory) Body

Heidegger’s ‘openness’ to the solicitation of the world, his desire to cock a real and
metaphorical ear towards its often muted rhythms, cadences and vibrations, is arguably
closely aligned with Lefebvre’s way of thinking. But against Heidegger’s nostalgic pasto-
ralism, not to mention his questionable political sympathies, Lefebvre locates the realm
of utopian possibility firmly in the present, in the radically democratic potentialities to
be found in the sphere of contemporary urban life (see Lefebvre 1996, 2003). More
specifically, he believes that any history of space charged with emancipatory tasks must
grasp the internal, constitutive relationship between the scopic regime of modernity
and the increasing abstraction of the world, highlight their strategic interaction, and
understand the crucial role they have in the conceptualization and practical realization
of abstract space. Such an exercise will help us to comprehend how societies have pro-
duced space-time historically, including the manner in which they have been perceived,
conceived and lived, and how their existing valances might be reconfigured. This ‘retro-
spective-prospective’ method might help us to envision an alternative space-time, and
hence of a different (‘impossible-possible’) society. As Neil Maycroft puts it, throughout
his long career Lefebvre was committed fully to ‘romanticism, utopianism and a politi-
cal philosophy of possibility’ (Maycroft 2001: 125).
Again, Lefebvre is adamant that space is not a ‘text’ that can be ‘read’ by visual
means alone. The social world is certainly steeped in communicative exchange and the
superabundant production of signs, but it does not follow that space is a ‘blank page’
inscribed by real or metaphorical ‘writing’, in which unambiguous messages are passed
back and forth between disembodied consciousnesses. Following Bataille and Nietzsche,
Lefebvre argues that if we are sensitive to the full range of human action and experience,
we come to understand there are clear limits to language and the forms of knowledge it
makes possible. He concurs with Goethe’s famous dictum: ‘I cannot grant the word such
sovereign merit’ (cited in Lefebvre 1991a: 134). To mediate on the question of space
provides us with an excellent vindication of this insight: it is not polished, completed
‘text’, but rather a ‘rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory’, a mix of injunctions
and prohibitions but also open possibilities—which he describes, well before Giddens,
as a form of ‘structuration’—all of which is anchored firmly in the prevailing matrix of
spatial and institutional organization and power. Space might well ‘speak’, but it also has
its gaps, silences and occulations: it is produced before it is read. It cannot be ‘decoded’
by linguistic or discursive means only, but must be lived in and through. The type of
body we generate in our tangible encounter with the world is a function of how space is
actually used within the terrain of our lived experience, involving a myriad of gestures,
traces and marks. ‘Prior to knowledge, and beyond it, are the body and the actions of the
body: suffering, desire, pleasure’, says Lefebvre. As such, the disengaged spectator, much
less the sociological positivist or urban planner, cannot hope to grasp more than a ‘pale
shadow’ of this complex, multilayered reality; they forget that space ‘does not arise from
a visible-readable realm, but that it is first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through
physical gestures and movements)’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 135, 137, 200).
352 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

We cannot fully appreciate Lefebvre’s attempt to locate alternative sensory modalities

vis-à-vis the ocularcentric bias of modernity without reference to his more general ac-
count of the body. In Cartesian terms, the body is a mere container for the information
recording machine that is the brain. Obviously, Lefebvre has little time for this concep-
tion, but equally rejects the Deleuzean notion of the body (without organs) as a ‘desiring
machine’. Albeit in very different ways, such images reflect the evisceration and fragmen-
tation of the body that occurs in abstract space; they are ‘ex post facto projections of an
accomplished intellect, against the reductionism to which knowledge is prone’ (Lefebvre
1991a: 201). In repudiating the twin abstractions of the ‘body-machine’ and an empty
and infinite space, both of which dominate Western philosophy, Lefebvre argues for a
space that is ‘always-already’ occupied, always embodied. What occupies space is ‘not
bodies in general, nor corporeality, but a specific body, a body capable of indicating di-
rection by a gesture, of defining rotation by turning round, of demarcating and orienting
space’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 170). Such a body is shaped by the qualities of this space, but
equally creates its own space through the manner in which it deploys its capacities and
vital energies. Preferring organic to mechanistic metaphors, Lefebvre posits a dynamic,
vitalistic body, one that, much like Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque body’, joyfully trans-
gresses proffered boundaries and thresholds, whether physical or symbolic, eroding the
supposedly rigid barriers between knowledge and action, head and genitals, inner and
outer, even human and nonhuman (see Bakhtin 1984; Gardiner 1993). The Lefebvrean
body is not one of quiet repose or equilibrium; rather than imbued with a Weberian as-
ceticism and concerned only for the pallid attractions of one’s bank balance or the after-
life, it is invested with prodigalities of ‘waste, play, struggle, art, festival—in short, Eros’
(Lefebvre 1991a: 177). The key for Lefebvre is to not hierarchize different aspects of our
embodied being-in-the-world, to privilege the head and the eyes, and hence abstract
cognition—which is the default position of Western philosophy at least since Descartes.
Rather, we should affirm the ‘dialectical’ or ‘practico-sensory totality’ of the body, which
occupies a dense space where ‘bodies and objects, sense organs and products all cohabit
in “objectality”’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 62, 164).
For Lefebvre, moreover, the body is the real source of genuine difference in the world:
it is capable of generating novelty out of its seemingly repetitive gestures and actions,
combining materials (things used in the construction of mental or physical things) and
matériels (tools, techniques, instructions for use) in a manner that modifies nature in cre-
atively unpredictable ways. Machines, by contrast, are only capable of a ‘serial’ form of
repetition in which each discrete action is interchangeable and nothing new is ever cre-
ated. Against all the odds, then, the body has its ‘secrets’ and its hiding places, its ‘un-
derground’, even ‘labyrinthine’ qualities (such as those found in the hidden folds and
openings of the female body); it is simultaneously ‘present’ and ‘absent’, existing in poten-
tia, or virtually. Corporeality is therefore imbued with a ‘cryptic opacity’ that can never,
in Lefebvre’s opinion, be fully ‘decoded’ by analytic reason. Indeed, he longs for a ‘revolt
of the body’, and believes there are glimmerings of such an uprising in the marginalized
spaces of daily life. If we play close attention to the less rationalized and commodified
spaces of users in the course of their daily activities, as opposed to the workings of the
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 353

Foucaultian panopticon, we can begin to detect the manner in which space is actively per-
ceived and lived in a direct, embodied way, rather than merely conceived of abstractly. It
is precisely here where meaningful social change has to occur, in a ‘differential’ space-time
that abstract space unwittingly harbours, and that might well prove to be its gravedigger.
‘Space is no longer defined exclusively in optical, geometrical and quantitative fashion’,
he writes. ‘It is becoming—or once again becoming—a flesh-and-blood space, occupied
by the body (by bodies). Judging from certain readily observable symptoms, daily life is
tending to become, or once again become, multi-sensory’ (Lefebvre 2002: 102).
Insofar as the organism can only be grasped in situ, through its location in concrete
space, the full spectrum of the human sensory apparatus is relevant to Lefebvrean think-
ing. Experiential space is grounded in all the senses; when we arrive in a new city or
country, Lefebvre notes, we experience it through smell and taste, through the soles of
our feet, the vibrations that resonate in our body, at least as much as our seeing. What at-
tenuates such a multisensory engagement with the world are the abstractions induced by
modern abstract space, and especially the technological mediation of our relation to that
space. With reference to the burgeoning steam-train networks of nineteenth-century
Europe and North America, for instance, Wolfgang Schivelbusch observes that sight
‘became the only qualities that the railroad traveler was able to observe in the landscape
he traveled through. Smells and sounds, not to mention the synesthetic perceptions that
were part of travel in Goethe’s time simply disappeared’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 5). In an
unusual article, J. Nicholas Entrikin and Vincent Berdoulay focus on certain biographi-
cal details about Lefebvre (his long association with the Pyrenees region of France and
Spain), as well as his popularly written 1965 book on the same area, and present him
as something of a philosophically informed travel writer that might be construed as the
very antithesis of Schivelbusch’s imaginary nineteenth-century railway passenger: ‘The
words used by Lefebvre for speaking about “his land” (pays) demonstrate a deep affec-
tion and a sense of reconnection. In spite of his reticence to talk about nature without
man, he momentarily adopts this unbalanced perspective in order to express his affec-
tion: “These lands. I savor them on my lips and the breath in their smells and perfumes”’
(Entrikin and Berdoulay 2005: 139). Another example of Lefebvre’s appreciation for the
multisensory body can be found in his assertion that, in the monumental space of the
Medieval cathedral, each visitor must ‘become aware of their own footsteps, and listen
to the noises, the singing; they must breathe the incense-laden air, and plunge into a
particular world, that of sin and redemption; they will partake of an ideology; they will
contemplate and decipher the symbols around them; and they will thus, on the basis of
their own bodies, experience a total being in a total space’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 221). Not-
withstanding the fact that, as discussed above, the cathedral anticipated the hegemonic
visuality of modernity, it successfully engages all the senses, and links each person’s inti-
mate gestures (prayers, genuflections) to the wider cosmos, thereby acknowledging the
integrity of the total body. This is quite unlike modern architecture, which is designed
for purely visual contemplation, dominated as it is by the very different monumentality
of the external façade, which narcissistically refers only to its own power and reduces the
individual to the insignificance of a dust-mote.
354 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Numerous passages of The Production of Space are devoted to often minute analyses
of the different senses and how they overlap and work syncretically, and it is instructive
to focus on some of these observations. For instance, Lefebvre suggests here that experi-
ential space-time is grounded in the olfactory at least as much as the visual. Perhaps in
part because it works through direct chemical contact, the sense of smell is the most in-
timate linkage between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, to the point where it blurs the distinction
between them. Although fast disappearing under the modern onslaught against smells,
fair and foul alike, and their substitution by purely visual signs and spectacles, the olfac-
tory persists in marginalized peripheral spaces (the cooking in ethnic neighbourhoods,
in fairgrounds or farmyards), displaying a vestigial connection to the erotic in particu-
lar (Lefebvre 1991a: 197; see also Corbin 1986). Odours are raw and immediate, and
often spontaneously evoke strong and irrepressible emotional reactions; their primal
connection to the reptilian parts of the brain render them difficult to translate into ab-
stract linguistic terms. This is why we lack a fully worked out metaphorical vocabulary
for odours; to describe a smell as ‘fishy’ merely refers us back to the source, whereas
the use of terms like ‘acrid’ or ‘fresh’ are really only categories that can never get beyond
vague generalization. Smells for Lefebvre are therefore directly ‘expressive’, not meta-
phorical; they can be itemized, but not ‘decoded’ semiotically. Taste occupies a sightly
different realm—underdeveloped in the human sensory apparatus, it is difficult to de-
lineate from smell, or the tactility of the tongue and lips. Because taste tends to work
through simple oppositions, such as sour/sweet, it is more amenable to cultural encod-
ing and ­systematization—witness Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked. Yet even here
there are exceptions, according to Lefebvre: in nature, tastes are much more complexly
intertwined, as in the bittersweet of unprocessed chocolate, and it would seem that it is
culture that separates out and contrasts discrete flavours.
But it is hearing that is most central to Lefebvre’s style of thinking. He regards it as
the primary sense of the premodern era, and his works are peppered with innumerable
musical and auditory references and metaphors. Lefebvre’s lengthy study Introduction
to Modernity was even conceived of as a ‘musical’ work composed of twelve ‘preludes’,
designed to be ‘understood in the mind’s ear, to be a cry, a song, a sigh, and not simply
to be read as a theoretical and discursive statement’ (Lefebvre 1995: 4). Lefebvre is not
just speaking metaphorically here. For instance, he points out that hearing is vital to the
lateralization of space and allows us to chart its intimate topography, at least as much as
seeing. Indeed, he notes that if space was completely homogeneous and simultaneously
‘present’, it would be literally ‘imperceptible’, and hence impossible to navigate and ori-
ent oneself in. Within the realm of lived space, there must be a mixture of presence/
absence, visible/invisible, sound/silence, and innumerable gradations in between. These
ideas about the acoustical resonances of life come to fruition in his last work, on the
body and ‘rhythmanalysis’. In nuce, Lefebvre believed that the body was animated by
a ‘bouquet’ of vibrations or rhythms pitched at many different levels (molecular, cellu-
lar, communal, climatic and geographical), in which there was harmonic overlapping
and partial fusion between natural and socially and historically shaped forces, especially
between the linear and the cyclical. In this intersection, profound differences can be
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 355

created: ‘If there is difference and distinction, there is neither separation nor an abyss be-
tween so-called material bodies, living bodies, social bodies and representations, ideolo-
gies, traditions, projects and utopias. They are all composed of (reciprocally influential)
rhythms in interaction’ (Lefebvre 2004: 43).
Whereas the hegemonic visuality Lefebvre associates with modernity has a highly
problematic relationship to time, for reasons already discussed, the senses of smell, touch
and taste retain a more organic, constitutive relation to embodied memory and historic-
ity. Proust’s famous Madeleine cake comes to mind, and it is worth noting that Prous-
tian notions of involuntary, corporeal remembrance had more than a passing influence
over Lefebvre’s ideas about the potentially transformative ‘moment’ and our inherently
affective relation to space (see Elden 2004a: 180). The overarching point, however, is
that the body evinces a ‘kernel’ that resists the systematization of discursive processing
and instrumental reason. In the blending and overlapping of the senses that occurs in
the total body, what Juhani Pallasmaa calls the ‘haptic continuum of the self ’ (Pallasmaa
2005: 11), there is a ‘ “something” which is not truly differential but which is neverthe-
less neither irrelevant nor completely undifferentiated: it is within this primitive space
that the intimate link persists between [the senses]’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 199). When an
abstract opticality dominates, not only do the other senses lose their former richness
and vitality, when they are utilized, they are consigned to the role of mere ‘understudy’
in the service of superordinate visual phenomena: ‘Any non-optical impression—a tac-
tile one, for example, or a muscular (rhythmic) one—is no longer anything more than
a symbolic form of, or a transitional step towards, the visual’ (Lefebvre 1991a: 286).
Vision is essential to the logic of abstract space because it seems to ‘freeze’ the dialectic,
to render dynamic movements as static objects within a well-ordered tableau. But, for
Lefebvre, time and space form a synergetic ‘knot’ that cannot be arbitrarily disentan-
gled. If we are to successfully detach seeing from this illusion of temporal stasis, what
we have to do, in effect, is to learn to ‘hear with our eyes’. An illustration of this can be
located in Bakhtin’s essay on the Bildungsroman in European literature, which contains
a brief discussion of Goethe. Here, Bakhtin argues that vision for Goethe was not a
passive, quasi-mechanical device (a ‘crude primitive sensualism’) for registering precon-
structed objects in the world, or a mere conduit for rarefied thoughts and ideas. Goethe
knew that vision, properly grasped in all its expressive richness, facilitated an embod-
ied connectedness to the world, not an abstracted distanciation from it. Goethe’s world
pulsates rhythmically: even the most apparently immobile and monumental things—
mountains, for instance—are alive, moving, changing. Hence, seeing is always entwined
with a process of ceaseless becoming, with the open-ended vitality and dynamism of the
world; space that ‘appeared to be a stable and immutable background for all movements
and changes became for Goethe a part of emergence, saturated through and through
with time’ (Bakhtin 1986: 30).
There is arguably much Lefebvre would find favour with here, especially the Goethean
insight that space and time are inseparable, and that our sensory apparatus does not
passively and mimetically reproduce the external world. Rather, spaces and the bod-
ies that inhabit them are simultaneously immediate and mediator, subject and object,
356 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

transmitter and recipient, visible and opaque. Self, other and world are imbricated and
interrelate reciprocally in a shared, ‘primordial’ realm of endless exchanges of matter and
energy, flow and coexistence. Analytical reason cannot fully grasp this mobile and ‘open’
synthesis, which is structured in difference and not subject to ultimate closure, because
it can only imagine discrete elements in fixed combination. In a fascinating couple of
paragraphs from The Production of Space, which demonstrate his (rarely acknowledged)
indebtedness to the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see Gardiner, chapter 4), Lefe-
bvre spells out this insight:

Objects touch one another, feel, smell and hear one another. Then they contemplate
one another with eye and gaze. One truly gets the impression that every shape in space,
every spatial plane, constitutes a mirror and produces a mirage effect; that within each
body the rest of the world is reflected, and referred back to, in an ever-renewed to-and-
fro of reciprocal reflection, an interplay of shifting colours, lights and forms. A mere
change of position, or a change in a place’s surroundings, is enough to precipitate an
object’s passage into the light: what was covert becomes overt, what was cryptic be-
comes limpidly clear. A movement of the body may have a similar goal. Here is the
point of intersection of the two sensory fields. [Here we find a] shifting intersection be-
tween that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand,
and all other bodies on the other. Thus we are concerned, once again, with gaps and
tensions, contacts and separations. Yet, through and beyond these various effects of
meaning, space is actually experienced, in its depths, as duplications, echoes and rever-
berations, redundancies and doublings-up which engender—and are engendered by—
the strangest of contrasts: face and arse, eye and flesh, viscera and excrement, lips and
teeth, orifices and phallus, clenched fists and open hands. (Lefebvre 1991a: 183–4)

There is much to unravel in this dense but rewarding passage, but perhaps we can focus
on the following: that the body represents an opening on to the world, and the entry of the
world into the body, but in a manner that goes beyond the implied passivity of a Heideg-
gerian ‘receptiveness’, so as to embrace a more dynamic, mutually constituting model of
spatial bodies. Without being fully aware of it, yet not ‘unconsciously’, the human sub-
ject ‘draws from the heart of the universe movements that correspond to its own move-
ments. The ear, the eyes and the gaze and the hands are in no way passive instruments
that merely gaze and the hands are in no way passive instruments that merely register and
record. What is fashioned, formed and produced is stabilised on . . . the scale of the earth,
of accidents on the earth’s surface and the cycles that unfurl there’ (Lefebvre 2004: 83).
This implies two main things: first, all the senses, including vision, are active and shape
the entire world in myriad ways; and second, that ‘production’ is not just a matter of ‘re-
producing’ objects given in nature, but something that ‘exceeds or transfigures’ the world
through a mutually constitutive and transformative process, creating a ‘surplus’, a new-
ness or ‘maximal’ difference, that did not exist previously. This affirmation of the senses
as dynamic and transformative finds considerable support in the first volume of Critique
of Everyday Life, where Lefebvre suggests that the eye does not simply register the external
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 357

world, but rather can be ‘trained’ through an on-going engagement with the object, as
mediated by specific techniques. This is most clearly seen in painting: here, the realiza-
tion that we invent rather than simply observe through our perceptual opening on to the
world is cast into sharp relief. As Lefebvre suggests, it is in painting where ‘the human eye
has found the appropriate object; the human eye has formed and transformed itself first
through practical and then through aesthetic activity, and by knowledge: it has become
something other than a mere organ; for the painter [it means] truly prefiguring the realm
of freedom, and producing the work of art’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 174).

Conclusion
These brief comments on painting are significant because they raise the distinct possi-
bility of different modalities of vision. Lefebvre, by his own admission, is a deliberately
anti-systematic thinker, and his treatment of sight, as with many of his other topics, is
not without ambiguity and contradictoriness. Admittedly, at times Lefebvre does seem
to subscribe to a straightforward anti-ocularcentrism, such as when he suggests that ‘the
image kills’, or that sight reduces things to ‘an icy coldness’, and at one point implies that
the gaze is innately masculine (Lefebvre 1991a: 97, 286). But the overarching impres-
sion one gets in reading across Lefebvre’s oeuvre is that he believed vision was not inher-
ently domineering or hegemonic, although it certainly can be in specific ­socio-historical
contexts. This leaves open our ability to disengage discrete perceptual fields from exist-
ing systems of power and domination, of exploring alternatives to the ocularcentric bias
of contemporary Western (and ‘Westernizing’) societies, thereby nurturing ‘wider and
more far-reaching ways of seeing’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 189–90). In taking this stance, Lefe-
bvre offers contemporary analyses of visual culture a number of key insights that they
would do well to heed: he counsels us to avoid the extremes of either biological or cul-
tural reductionism; sensitizes us to the role played by the social and technological me-
diation of sight; and, perhaps most important, makes us realize that visual phenomena
cannot be analysed in isolation, but only in relation to the ‘total body’, including the
human affective and gestural registers (see Anderson 2006; Thrift 2008). Indeed, Lefeb-
vre’s call for a multisensorial engagement with space has already been reflected in a num-
ber of attempts to understand the fabric of urban life along such lines, which includes
but goes well beyond purely visual experience (see Cronin 2006; Wunderlich 2008).
Carolyn Lee Kane has written that ‘The cost aesthetic philosophy pays for severing
its connection to the concrete and material world is immeasurable’, wherein the status
of the visual is ‘not even neutral, but fiercely corrosive’ (Kane 2007: 88, 86). Lefeb-
vre’s work on space can be seen as an attempt to undo this millennia-old damage. If
he associates the hegemonic visuality of modernity with ‘false consciousness, quasi-
knowledge and non-participation’, Lefebvre believes there still remains the chance that
we can learn to look on the world ‘with cultivated eyes, and love with senses formed
by the art of living’ (Lefebvre 2002: 90; 1995: 355, emphasis added). This would be a
celebratory, ‘socialized’ type of vision, rather than an individuated and privatized one,
and it would help effect the transition to a genuinely ‘differential’ or heterotopic space,
358 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

rather than the endless reproduction of the same. The true repository of the beauty of
the world, as the ancients understood very well, is not to be found in rarefied ideas or
formal stylistic properties grasped through solitary intellectual contemplation, but in
embodied, communal participation: in the ecstatic dances of Dionysian revelry, the
hoots and belly-laughs that accompany comic theatre, and the sensual pleasures of
the feast (Lefebvre 2005: 135; see also Ehrenreich 2006). This again underscores the
role played by the aesthetic vis-à-vis any such utopian transfiguration of the senses, but
specifically in the original Greek meaning of aisthesis, as touched on above. Lefebvre
firmly believed that a viable model of social change must involve a radical critique of
the alienated conception of art as the nonsocial and essentially representational activity
of the individual genius, as something external and in every way superior to the realm
of the everyday (see Léger 2006). Rather, art must ultimately fulfill and supercede it-
self, along with philosophy; it needs to be fully reintegrated into a revivified everyday
life, where it will become the touchstone of a multifarious existence understood and
lived as an artwork. It seems fitting to conclude this chapter with a quotation from the
second volume of Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, where, in evoking Marx’s famous
passage from The German Ideology, he affirms the original vision of communism as a
world in which ‘everyone would rediscover the spontaneity of natural life and its ini-
tial creative drive, and perceive the world through the eyes of an artist, enjoy the sen-
suous through the eyes of a painter, the ears of a musician and the language of a poet’
(Lefebvre 2002: 37).

FURTHER READING
Gardiner, Michael E. 2000. Critiques of Everyday Life. London and New York: Routledge.
Lefebvre, Henri, 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri, 1991. Critique of Everyday Life, volume 1, Introduction, trans. John Moore.
London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri, 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York and London:
Continuum.

References
Anderson, Ben. 2006. ‘Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect’, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 733–52.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barnard, Malcolm. 1995. ‘Advertising: The Rhetorical Imperative’, in Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual
Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 26–41.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1997. Friendship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Blum, Virginia and Heidi Nast. 1996. ‘Where’s the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alter-
ity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
14: 559–81.
Breton, André. 1990. Communicating Vessels. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
The ‘Dictatorship of the Eye’ 359

Collinge, Chris. 2008. ‘Positions without Negations? Dialectical Reason and the Contingencies
of Space’, Environment and Planning A, 40/11: 2613–22.
Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cronin, Anne M. 2006. ‘Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity
Rhythms’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 615–32.
Dimendberg, Edward. 1998. ‘Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space’, in Andrew Light and Jonathan
M. Smith (eds), The Production of Public Space: Philosophy and Geography II. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 17–47.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2006. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Metro-
politan Books.
Elden, Stuart. 2004a. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London and New
York: Continuum.
Elden, Stuart. 2004b. ‘Between Marx and Heidegger: Politics, Philosophy and Lefebvre’s The
Production of Space’, Antipode, 36/1: 86–105.
Entrikin, J. Nicholas and Vincent Berdoulay. 2005. ‘The Pyrenees as Place: Lefebvre as Guide’,
Progress in Human Geography, 29/2: 129–47.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16/1: 22–27.
Gardiner, Michael. 1993. ‘Ecology and Carnival: Traces of a “Green” Social Theory in the Writ-
ings of M. M. Bakhtin’, Theory and Society, 22/6: 765–812.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977a. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York: HarperCollins.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977b. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. London and
New York: Garland.
Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kane, Carolyn Lee. 2007. ‘Aisthesis and the Myth of Representation’, Minerva: An Internet Jour-
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Kirsch, Scott. 1995. ‘The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 529–55.
Kouvelakis, Stathis. 2008. ‘Henri Lefebvre, Thinker of Urban Modernity’, in Jacques Bidet and
Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 711–27.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991a. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991b. Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. I. London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1995. Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959–May 1961.
London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2002. Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Every-
day. London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York and London:
Continuum.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2005. Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. III: From Modernity to Modernism. London
and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
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Léger, Marc James. 2006. ‘Henri Lefebvre and the Moment of the Aesthetic’, in Andrew Heming-
way (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art from William Morris to the New Left. London and
Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 143–60.
Levin, David Michael. 1988. The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation. Lon-
don and New York: Routledge.
Levin, David Michael. 1995. ‘Decline and Fall: Ocularcentrism in Heidegger’s Reading of the
History of Metaphysics’, in David Michael Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of
­Vision. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 186–217.
Maycroft, Neil. 2001. ‘Henri Lefebvre: Alienation and the Ethics of Bodily Reappropriation’, in
Lawrence Wilde (ed.), Marxism’s Ethical Thinkers. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 116–43.
McDonough, Tom. 2008. ‘Invisible Cities: On Henri Lefebvre’s The Explosion’, Art Forum (May):
315–22.
Merrifield, Andrew. 1995. ‘Lefebvre, Anti-logos and Nietzsche: An Alternative Reading of The
Production of Space’, Antipode, 27/3: 294–303.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2005. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: John Wiley &
Sons.
Romanyshyn, Robert D. 1984. ‘The Despotic Eye: An Illustration of Metabletic Phenomenol-
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Honor of Jan Hendrik Van Den Berg. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 87–125.
Ross, Kirsten. 1999. Review of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, Not Bored, 30. http://
www.notbored.org/space.html.
Sandywell, Barry. 2011. Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms. Farnham:
Ashgate.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: the Industrialization of Time and Space in the
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David Michael Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley and London:
University of California Press, 124–42.
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Lefebvre’, Geografiska Annaler, 87/1: 1–14.
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The Production of Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 609–18.
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­Design, 13/1: 125–39.
 15

Cubist Collage and

Visual Culture:
Representation and Politics
Ian Heywood

Visual Culture Studies and Postmodernity

It has long been a commonplace that the study of visual culture, and of culture in gen-
eral, cannot evade questions of value and politics. Certainly the quasi-discipline of cul-
tural studies, sometimes defined as the general study of signifying practices, which has
exercised considerable influence on the study of visual features of culture in recent years,
rarely claims to offer a detached or neutral study of values and politics as they surface in
and structure cultural practices. Cultural theorists usually insist on their obligation to
‘intervene’ in on-going culturally expressed political processes.
The influence of theories of postmodernism and postmodernity on visual culture stud-
ies is too complex to be fully discussed here. However, in their useful and influential primer,
Cartwright and Sturken (2001) illuminate a connection between postmodernism and the
value stance of visual culture studies. They suggest that in practice visual culture studies has
incorporated key insights and assumptions of postmodernism. In particular, they present
postmodernism as ‘complicating’ the relationship between high and popular culture, thus
making a ‘critical viewpoint on culture from outside or above it’ impossible.1
If there is no ‘outside’ to culture, we are left to examine the possibility of a vantage
point within it. The stakes here are high. If an immanent ‘critical viewpoint on culture’
cannot be rationally articulated and defended then criticism is indistinguishable from
the reflex expression of local tastes. Certainly the postmodern cultural theorist could
not raise his or her particular tastes or values above anyone else’s, nor use them just as
they are as a basis for argument about quality. The vantage point on which criticism re-
lies seems to entail something like a ‘ladder’, usually in the form of discrimination or
taste, either in-born or learned. However, this idea is usually rejected as ‘elitist’. Alterna-
tive ladders have been traditionally supplied by a theory or methodology, a conceptual
362 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

structure or cognitive procedure. Theory or method should lead, if not to elevation, at

least to a cultural location different from other locations in ways relevant to the possibil-
ity of genuine, defensible criticism.
The ideal of a critical stance capable of legitimating itself through theory and method
and evaluating a wide variety of cultural phenomena resembles the position formerly oc-
cupied by high culture, even if the means of attaining it are different.2 Unfortunately,
theory seems to many to be inaccessible, even elitist, as poetry or opera, its distribution
generally reflecting that of economic and social capital. Equally, while methodology has
plausible ‘democratic’ credentials, if it does not lead out of common opinion towards
superior knowledge, it serves only as spin.3
In sum, questions of value, and in particular how particular values are arrived at
and woven into the everyday lives and cultural activities of groups and individuals, are
integral to visual culture studies. This must apply also to any form of cultural study it-
self, that is, the selection of research topics, as well as choice of methods, is inevitably
strongly value-related. This leads unavoidably to difficult questions regarding the possi-
bility and desirability of reasoned argument about choices and values, leading ultimately
to defensible critical discriminations.4 The usual alternative to the notion of in-born
taste, commonly attributed to modernists and snobs, is theory or method, but both can
appear problematic from points of view influenced by postmodernism. It seems that as a
quasi-discipline visual cultural studies needs theory and method, but remains unsettled
about their character and foundation.

Culture and Modernity

The example of Cubist collage enables us to consider a key ‘revolutionary’ moment in
modern visual art and the part played by a complex encounter with the emerging ver-
nacular visual culture of the twentieth century.5 More important, it also requires discus-
sion of the values and politics in play at this point in the appearance of visual modernity,
or stated in a different way, the relationship between the modernization of painting and
the modernization of everyday life. However, enquiry into modernization has to include
questions about the possibility of and context for critical reflection in the form of visual
culture studies itself.
The relationship between art, culture in a broad sense, and modernization has been
an explicit concern for historians, philosophers, critics and social scientists since the nine-
teenth century. The tradition of social theory, an early and important crucible for the
formation of models and images of modernity, emphasized causal relationships between
supra-individual conditions and forces: for example the development of industrial tech-
nology and its application to the production and distribution of goods, the legal frame-
work of property ownership, the internationalization of money and markets, and the
means through which political power is legitimated, distributed and exercised.6 Essen-
tially to do with representations, ideas and beliefs, either embedded in everyday practices
or explicitly expressed in the arts, culture was initially understood as largely reflective or
reactive with respect to other powerful structuring forces. Eventually, however, arguments
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 363

confining culture to the social superstructure began to seem less convincing, and it be-
came common to think of culture as another active, structuring force. For example cul-
tural factors could not only slow or accelerate the pace and depth of modernization but
were seen as an essential, active feature of the self-construction of modernity.
Along with the cultural turn, definitional problems began to emerge: the meaning of
‘culture’ diversified, embracing from high art and criticism, through a huge variety of bur-
geoning popular forms, to a broad, holistic ‘anthropological’ sense of a complete ‘way of
life’. Eventually, however, the emphasis on culture gave rise to a new perspective, which
threatened the coherence of social-structural theories. The key step is the idea that human
experience comes to have shape and meaning only by virtue of ‘signifying practices’. That
is, coherent human experience only exists to the extent that perceptions, thoughts and feel-
ings are stabilized, organized and structured. This is achieved through access to systems or
processes of representing, symbolizing and referring, broadly ‘languages’. This seemed to
suggest to many that signifying practices were more fundamental than their products, and
indeed that the brute presence of their products disguised complex, subtle, fluid interpre-
tational processes—theorized linguistically—on which they depended. Clearly the notion
of products would have to include the special ‘object domains’, the institutions and forces,
critical constituents of social-structural theory itself, suggesting that such theory had in
some ways a secondary or dependent status with regard to predominantly linguistic theo-
ries of interpretation; it should be noted that signifying practices too only become objects
of knowledge through processes of interpretation.
At this point culture can appear as either a particular object domain (with its vari-
ous semi-autonomous, self-differentiating fields of human thought and action) available
for knowledge, or as textuality, a complex idea about how language as text gives rise to
meaning (or differance), but also resists determinacy or identity, and hence all theory and
method organized around the idea of ‘knowledge’. From the point of view of textuality,
theory—in the sense of the conceptual or formal structures necessary for human cogni-
tive activity aimed at convincing representation, solving problems and achieving mas-
tery—is inadmissible. Textual theory is the paradoxical expression of this impossibility.
Now, instead of being merely superstructure, a reflection or effect, culture is every-
thing. Yet cognitive and analytical accounts of structures and forces, including culture
itself, are easy to subvert because in the final analysis, to undermine something said
about objects, specifically to make visible the perspectival projection of the subject, the
process of reification of which they are the result, it is only necessary to say something
else. Thus postmodern visual cultural studies often oscillates between carving out from
within culture a particular object domain for analysis, interpretation and critique, and
invocation of the ‘indecidables’ of textuality, sometimes even attempting both at once.

From Cultural Studies to Culture in Ruins

During its early years cultural studies shared with approaches located in sociology and
history a belief that it is essential to set cultural phenomena in an appropriate social and
historical context. Eventually, however, a broadening in the concept of culture and the
364 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

influence of French theory made this linkage much more problematic. Does Hegel’s
((1820s) 2008: 16) famous insight into the relationship between intellectual endeavour
and history apply here too? Is it possible that cultural studies, along with visual culture
studies as a specific subtopic, emerges as an institutional force within the humanities at
just that historical moment when culture has become a meaningless term? This is the
radical argument of Bill Readings (1996), which we will briefly outline and review in
order further to explore some questions about values and politics in respect of visual
culture and its study.
Our focus here is on the values, politics and changing institutional context of recent
cultural studies, the outlook of which, to repeat, informs a lot of work in visual cul-
ture studies. The initial British phase of ‘cultural studies’, pioneered by Raymond Wil-
liams and E. P. Thompson (and one might add Richard Hoggart), was fundamentally
animated by a critique of cultural exclusion and a demand for participation, echoes
of which still ring in the activist rhetoric of today’s cultural studies. All three writ-
ers brought from their work in history and literature, and in the cases of Hoggart and
Williams a working-class upbringing, care for the particulars of working-class life and
culture, which they saw as unfairly overlooked, castigated or patronized by the English
ruling classes and their spokesmen. This was neither ‘workerism’ nor sentimental rural-
ism, but did reflect dissatisfaction with standard European Marxist suspicion of the ‘real’
working class, and the related, damaging impulse to conceptualize and idealize it as the
‘proletariat’.7
The political vision of British cultural studies maintained that all had the right to
participate fully in their society, effectively taken to be that of the relevant nation state.8
Four obstacles to participation were identified: the underlying economic and political
infrastructure of modern capitalist societies; socially exclusive high culture, often in part
at least an institution of snobbery; the debased, popular, mass culture produced and sold
by a burgeoning capitalist entertainment industry; the abstractions and idealizations of
European Marxist theory and political rhetoric. In Williams’s famous anthropological
view of culture as a ‘whole way of life’, authentic representations and transformations of
experience, whether fashioned in speech, writing, pictures and material forms, song or
dance were rooted in a multifaceted, everyday production of life, not just material sur-
vival but a resourceful, bottom-up making of a liveable existence, a life worth living, in
the face of the turbulence and destruction experienced by millions during the process
of industrial modernization. This culture was authentic and organic because it sprang
from the life praxis of the working class, labour or making of many kinds that in reality
created and sustained the whole of society. The full participation of this excluded or ne-
glected way of life would transform the political, economic and cultural structures and
processes of society as a whole.
Turning to the politics of contemporary cultural studies in the USA, which had
become by the 1990s the leading approach in the humanities, Readings notes with
approval the widespread rejection of arbitrary exclusions and boundaries. However, al-
though laudable, this inclusiveness leads to a decisive weakness: a failure to identify a
class of objects of study and, given the nature of these objects and of human cognitive
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 365

capacities, a distinctive and appropriate method of analysing and investigating them.

An emphasis on process rather than outcome, more specifically the proposal of a general
study of signifying practices, drawing its conceptual structure and systematizing rhetoric
from theories of spoken and written language, have led to what Readings identifies as
cultural studies’ ‘political piety’.
Insistence that ‘everything is culture’, and that language-like signifying practices are
at the root of every identity, is reductive and distorting, particularly when it comes to
primarily visual phenomena. For Readings, it also exposes cultural studies and visual
culture studies to anomic anxiety; the refusal to exclude is also a refusal to identify, and
without an object of study, method is transformed into a means of universal negation,
the dispersing of ‘things’ into the ineffable textuality of which they are an effect. The
prevalence of political piety, the basing of a stance or orientation on what is ultimately
a decision to observe locally acceptable norms, results from the fact that cultural studies
can find nothing in its object or its context capable of anchoring its interventions, except
‘refusal of exclusion’ (Readings 1996: 102).
The cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu has been influential because it seems strong
where cultural studies is weak, that is by defining its object, and devising and deploying
appropriate methods of enquiry, setting it firmly in an explanatory context. Bourdieu’s
sociology of culture claims to be a rigorously social scientific account, in which accurate
knowledge of the social world is based on sound structural theory and rigorous empiri-
cal research.
While Bourdieu’s outlook has been criticized for its relativist view of culture, and
its inability to account for itself and explain social change (Gartman 1991; Alexander
1995), for Readings its principal difficulty comes from its anachronistic attachment to
an idea of culture inseparable from the nation state. That is although Bourdieu is rightly
keen to avoid economic-political reductionism, he clings to a concept of a stratified
­society or ‘social space’ located around a centre of power, wealth and prestige, structural
inequalities articulated in parallel ways by the fields of politics, economics and culture.
While, under certain circumstances, cultural capital can be turned into social capital,
there is in Bourdieu’s theory only one, closed ‘game’ of culture. However, for Read-
ings the nation state ‘which embodied capital and expressed it as a culture that radiated
across the field of the social’ has been superseded by globalized capital, which ‘circulates
around the circumference, behind the backs of those who keep their eyes firmly fixed
on the centre’ (Readings 1996: 111). This represents the ruination of the modern idea
of a national culture as a bulwark against or remedy for the destructive or destabilizing
moral and aesthetic effects of liberal, industrial modernization. The new situation leads
not only to the possibility of multiple, heterogeneous ‘games of culture’, but also pro-
duces a widespread feeling that everyone is somehow culturally excluded, albeit from
an ‘impotent­ centre’. More sombrely, it also underlines the fact that culture no longer
functions socially to bind together or edify, to exclude or command. As ‘anything’, a
­thoroughly instrumentalized culture’s primary purpose is hedonism, although it may
also serve as a means for the formation of flexible, ephemeral, consumption-friendly life-
style identities that have in common only particular tastes.
366 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Cultural studies, incorporating visual cultural studies, establishes a potent presence

in the humanities at just the point when modern ideas of culture had become largely
meaningless, emptied of substantive content. In what Readings calls ‘the university of
culture’, by which he means the leading self-understanding of a university in the nine-
teenth and early-twentieth centuries, canonical artistic (usually literary) and sometimes
philosophical works were seen as an essential ethical and aesthetic or spiritual coun-
terweight to the growing dominance of science, technology and industrial capitalism.9
Through them, comprehensive, critical self-reflection could be nourished and commu-
nicated, a process pivotal to the university of culture, the aim of which was the shap-
ing and expression of a worthy national culture as a whole. However, once culture is
emptied and ‘delegitimized’, that is understood as all signifying practices together with
their outcomes without possibility of discrimination—except perhaps in terms of their
relative power—it loses determinacy, and with it the possibility of being either an object
of knowledge or critique, a means of edification, or a politically potent expression of or-
ganic community on the one hand or national identity on the other.10
Readings may be overstating the case for the total dominance of global capital, the
complete dependence of a coherent, critical idea of culture on the existence of the nation
state, and the disastrous plight of culture and the humanities in postmodernity. Never-
theless, many of his observations about cultural studies as a quasi-discipline are worth
taking seriously, opening up a broader range of questions about values and politics than
are encouraged by prevailing assumptions and political pieties. Putting the underlying
issue in a preliminary way, it will be suggested that what an avant-garde art practice
like Cubism shares with the study of culture in the late-modern period is an acute self-
consciousness of constitutive powers. This degree of self-consciousness leads towards an
awareness that mastery of signifying capacities manifests itself in the representations or
constructions of the contemporary historical world characteristic of that practice, here
with special emphasis on visual appearances. However, by the same token it makes prob-
lematic the capacity to root representations and values in this world in such a way that
they escape arbitrariness, repetition and self-parody. Below we will look at Cubist collage
in light of its particular struggle for authenticity and significance.

Cubism: Making a Start

Cubism and Cubist collage long ago ceased to present a fundamental challenge to ac-
cepted ideas about visual art or a shocking, wholly novel interaction between avant-
garde art and vernacular visual and material culture. Cubism has become not only an
accepted part of the modernist mainstream, but is widely seen to have exerted an im-
portant influence on what that mainstream eventually became. Yet, even if no longer
controversial, a lot of Cubism, and the collages in particular, still seem awkward, austere,
recondite, perhaps too much of their own times to mean much in ours. Despite this,
for some of us at least, many of these works are strikingly and strangely beautiful, and
demand to be understood.
Cubism was always at risk from collapsing into a style, something that Picasso wor-
ried about constantly. The peculiar intensity of the pieces that resist self-pastiche seems
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 367

to have something to do with the tensions they embrace, and whose explosive force they
can barely contain; for example the appearance of both sophistication and rawness, and
an insistence on representation, yet of a kind which is defiantly puzzling. In 1893, try-
ing to get at what it meant to be modern, Hugo von Hofmannstall offered, as a matter
of simple fact, ‘the analysis of life and the flight from life’, the detailed, almost obsessive
‘anatomy’ of inner life, but also a ‘somnambulistic surrender’ (somnambule Hingabe) to
the revelations, seductions and harmonies of sensation.11 This seems to capture another
tension integral to Cubism.
We begin, then, from a specific experience of some Cubist works, which involves
recognition of and submission to their distinctive, intense physical and visual presence,
specifically their obdurate materiality, and their resistance to meaning, their calculated
illegibility. However, this immediately needs to be set against the ways in which these
works belong to and explicitly reference everyday life, an ordinary life world of people
and things, historically remote and mysterious, yet also familiar. It is this connection
to recognizable, intelligible life world features that provides for the possibility of meta-
phoric and symbolic transformations, and our capacity to know when norms, expecta-
tions and assumptions are observed, elaborated or transgressed.
The collages produced by Braque and Picasso between 1912 and 1914 are not
overtly political works. They do not directly represent political or historical events (at
least visually), nor do they exhort the beholder to think or act in specific ways, or ex-
press political or moral judgements. Yet they are, or seem to be, pictures of modern
life, and hence may display an outlook or evaluation relevant to the nature and quality­
of contemporary individual and collective life. Cubist collage introduced into two-
dimensional visual art not only references to vernacular, mass culture—for example let-
tering that mimicked advertising and brand logos and typography, brief excerpts from
the lyrics of popular songs, techniques and materials used by commercial painters and
decorators—but also real fragments of this new visual milieu, for example pieces of
oilcloth, wallpaper and newspaper cuttings. If there is a broadly political, evaluative or
rhetorical dimension to Cubist collage its natural place would be at the interface with
popular visual culture.
It will be argued below that Cubism dramatically reconfigured the relationship be-
tween purity and danger (Douglas (1996) 2002) in the sphere of visual art, specifi-
cally by dicing with the logic of picture making via an engagement with vernacular
visual culture. Collage strives to develop new ways in which the art image may actively
confront modern life, not by shunning its visible surfaces but incorporating them. It
works to establish its integrity not only by defying given tastes and conventional leg-
ibility, but also by forcefully establishing pictorial coherence out of dramatically het-
erogeneous elements, at the risky margins between image and object, and original and
derived meanings. Braque and Picasso’s ferocious energy and formidable self-confidence
notwithstanding, the result of their struggle for and with Cubism even now does not
suggest something resolved once and for all, but a precarious, often ungainly, anxious
accommodation of heterogeneous elements, held together by intensity of vision and
strength of will. It is never far from failure and chaos, the failure and chaos inherent in
the process of modernization itself.12
368 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Frames, Framing and Authenticity

We need now to supply some details of Cubist collage’s formal and substantive innova-
tions and the tensions they set up. In Picasso’s Glass and Bottle of Bass (1914) the support
is cardboard, on which has been pasted various bits of cut-out paper. A simple still life
arrangement of a bottle and glass is to be seen in a rough oval of cut paper in the cen-
tre. The work is without a conventional frame, but around the edges strips of wallpaper
motif represent or allude to a frame. Picasso has gone out of his way to make the illu-
sion apparent; the frame is not a regular square, but a strip of paper wonkily applied to
the rectangular edges of the image, and with a bit missing in the top right-hand corner,
which Picasso draws in, adding a shadow. Inside this faux frame, operating almost as a
ground, is a piece of stuck-on wallpaper. In the lower left-hand corner is a blue number
sticker of the kind used by Picasso’s dealer, Kahnweiler, and in the lower centre of the
wallpaper frame a small, glued paper nameplate, on which, in uneven printed capitals,
is the artist’s name. The central still life motif, which gives the work its title, looked at in
one way has no frame, but in another is framed by the wallpaper mount and the edging
strips (see Figure 15.1).13
In her perceptive account of Cubist and Futurist collage, Christine Poggi (1992:
61–73) notes that frames establish a boundary between the ‘illusory inside’ and the ‘real

Figure 15.1 Pablo Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Bass, Spring 1914, charcoal, pencil, India ink, white
gouache, newspaper, and woodblock printed papers pasted on wood pulp board, 51.6 x 67.7 cm, Pri-
vate Collection. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2010. Photograph: Bob Kolbrener.
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 369

outside’, but also mark the edges of an image that is an internally coherent aesthetic
event. In these collages frames or frame motifs are parts of the work itself, thus comple-
menting other ‘real’ materials, fragments of the ordinary world of everyday things, like
wallpaper, oilcloth, newspaper clippings, musical scores and so forth out of which much
Cubist work is made.14 The materials used for the painted and drawn features—canvass,
wood, pencil, charcoal, pigments—had become, by the start of the twentieth century,
mundane and relatively cheap, but by the same token it was well understood that the
skills and imagination of the artist were required to invest them with significance, lon-
gevity and value. Picasso seems to go out of his way to underscore their humble materi-
ality by handling and presenting them roughly, with scant observance of the rituals and
etiquette required for transfiguration by art. Yet of course, to achieve the transfiguration
of not only ordinary materials but also profane fragments of inferior art, and in such a
seemingly casual way, would testify loudly to this artist’s unprecedented powers, one in-
dication, perhaps, of Picasso’s Nietzschean ambitions (see Clark 1999: 173–4).
The appearance of the frame, and allusions to frames and framing, within the pic-
ture suggest that the frame must form part of the logic of pictorial coherence instead of
marking its boundary. Poggi reports an observation by Picasso’s dealer Kahnweiler, to
the effect that Cubism adheres to the basic task of painting, which is ‘to represent three
dimensions and colour on a flat surface, and to comprehend them in the unity of that
surface’. However, this was achieved with ‘no pleasant “composition” but uncompromis-
ing organically articulated structure’. For Kahnweiler the achievement of Cubism was
reconciling fidelity to the representational goal of painting with a new kind of pictorial
unity, a principle that makes these works ‘finished and autonomous organisms’ (cited
by Poggi: 60).
Looking again at Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) we confront at one level a pic-
ture of everyday objects arranged on a table. There is a glass, a bottle, perhaps a plate,
and a newspaper (the JOU from Journal), none of which are rendered to create an illu-
sion, although we can see partial outlines, edges, modelling of form and shadows. The
support is stretched canvas, to which has been applied oil paint, but also a large, irregu-
lar piece of commercially produced oilcloth with the preprinted image of facsimile chair
caning. The chair caning oilcloth is machine-made, although it suggests the illusion of
actual cane forming the seat or back of a chair; recognition of the skill involved in both
real chair caning and its trompe l’oeil imitation is contrasted with the apparent clumsi-
ness with which the piece is cut out and stuck onto the surface.
The painting comes along with its own ‘frame’, a piece of bristly rope, alluding to
natural materials used for mundane tasks, but also at this point in the history of indus-
trial technology, machine-made. There is another implied contrast here, between the
‘sacredness’ of the oil painting and a ‘profane’ material commodity, the rope suggesting
a cheap memento of a seaside holiday. Does the rope also function as a frame, which
conventionally separates the painted world of illusion from the real world around it, or
is it part of the picture, linking in some way with the prefabricated oilcloth, and push-
ing the work as a whole away from being a pure, representational painting and towards
the independent, sculptural object?15
370 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

The key idea behind Kahnweiler’s claim for Cubism’s contribution to a development
in the general principle of pictorial coherence is that of a visibly necessary structure per-
ceptibly arising from the demands of the image itself, not imposed and articulated by
contingencies of taste or the rationalized purposes of others. Such a work does not need
a frame, a corset that secures order from outside, and indeed the frame can be pulled
into the picture, operating as one of its constitutive elements. Bits and pieces of frames
become—along with other materials and devices, some two-dimensional, some with
real volume, and others fragments of an urban visual culture—pictorial components
from which new images can be made. The composition of these elements reasserts the
traditional principle of pictorial coherence, but with an important new emphasis. Fram-
ing elements within the picture and the absence of an actual frame, together with ‘alien’,
prefabricated, mundane surfaces and objects, radicalize the question of overall pictorial
coherence, but in no sense negate it completely. The structure of the picture, the per-
ceptible, intentional relationship between its now very heterogeneous elements, must
appear to arise from within the work itself, not be imposed on it according to externally
conceived rules of taste or commodity design, ensuring that the work is immediately
pleasing and comprehensible. This gesture marks an important continuity with Sym-
bolist poetics. The work is understood to need its own ‘freedom’, an evident capacity to
self-structure, and the artist’s obligation to the work consists in enabling it to achieve
and exercise this autonomy.
Referring to the genuinely experimental work leading up to the high Cubism of the
Cadaqués period, T. J. Clark astutely observes that:

Somewhere woven into this practical reasoning—in a way that the best early commen-
tators on Cubism did glimpse, I think—is a peculiar new version of the old modernist
saw about truth to the world in painting depending on truth to what painting consists
of. What is peculiar (what marks off Picasso’s version of modernism from that of the
Fauves and the Nabis, say) is once again the degree of insistence on both sides of the
equation. (Clark 1999: 204)

We might then see Cubism presenting to the viewer, as something primarily dis-
closed by sight, a truth about our relationship with objects, or more broadly, the embod-
ied, material, finite life we share with objects and others. If the object, in this case the
painting-as-object, is fully to enter the human world it must, paradoxically, partially off-
set its contemporary, merely ‘objective’ being. The manoeuvres examined above, includ-
ing the playful use of frames, are attempts to promote the object not to a kind of subject
status, but to set it and the viewer back into the profound commonality of embodied
life.16 The uncompromising rawness, the almost brutal materialism with which these
compositions are assembled, the stubborn insistence on representation and its material
machinery, together with a logic visible in the image as a whole, provide a presence that
conveys a sense of a living complexity and integrity. It is also perhaps a practical critique
of the abstraction of modern life, reflected not only in the ‘anatomizing’ or rationaliza-
tion engulfing it, but also in its organized and newly mobilized visible surfaces.
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 371

Collage and the Politics of Form: Newspapers,

Wallpaper and Symbolism

At the end of the nineteenth century the object world of everyday life was becoming
increasingly colonized by artefacts whose visual appearance had been designed and fab-
ricated to serve particular purposes, to give pleasure or information, or to influence at-
titudes and behaviour. In order to have an adequate grasp of the relationship between
Cubist collage and this emerging visual culture we need to understand the history of
some of the items chosen for inclusion. Two of the most prominent were wallpaper and
newspaper, which have a related history in France, strongly shaped by industrialization,
printing and photographic technologies, and techniques of mass marketing.
Poggi (141-154) reminds us that before 1830 newspapers circulated to a largely
urban elite. In 1836 La Presse appeared, the first cheap, large circulation daily. It was
half the price of previous papers, derived income from advertising, and attracted new
readers with such innovations as the roman-feuilleton or serial novel, in which writers
like Alexander Dumas and Eugène Sue pioneered the composition of dramatic episodes
adjusted to available word length, cliff-hanger endings, and stories of intrigue, violence,
sentimentality, sensation and shocking revelations of urban low life, with crime and
prostitution prominent. Further expansion of the newspaper market was fuelled by bet-
ter and faster regional and national transport, rising wages and the spread of literacy. Le
Petit Journal of 1863 was the first newspaper cheap enough to be affordable by virtually
everyone.
The dramatic arrival of the mass circulation newspaper shook up the cultural land-
scape of reading and writing. Literacy and access to news were no longer markers of a
simple division between the educated gentry and the unlettered working classes. A new
distinction began to appear between readers of newspapers and readers of literature,
particularly poetry. Symbolist poets aimed to develop a kind of writing that would re-
sist commercial rationalization and the commodity form, which they believed reduced
the relationship between writer and reader to that of an exchange of tokens, tired, over-
familiar signs of a spiritually debased reality on sale for cash. They were acutely aware of
the marginalization of writers and artists in a society increasingly regimented and disfig-
ured by money, newspapers and posters exemplifying the commoditization of language,
its poetic value as symbol replaced by its exchange value (see Poggi 1992: 143).
Up until the arrival of industrial technology, fabric or tapestry wall decoration were
enormously expensive. Developments in block-printing during the early-nineteenth
century increased supply and brought down the price of paper wall decoration, but
it was only the introduction of steam-powered, raised surface printing cylinders that
brought wallpaper within reach of the middle class. A preference developed for small, re-
peated pattern motifs that could be matched up on standard width rolls, but also for the
close imitation of different surfaces and materials (faux bois, fabric, marble etc), which
seem to function to give pleasure to the eye rather than delude it.
Wallpaper was eventually seen to offer a ground for further decorative objects (cur-
tains, pictures, plaques, furniture), and that if used in this way the framing of these
372 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

additional decorative objects was important, insulating and setting them off from their
surroundings. A whole section of wall could be a single display surface, framed by deco-
rative borders; frames could nest within frames. Traditional craftsmen and many critics
of modern culture decried what they saw as the supplanting of real artistic skill and sen-
sibility by fake materials, insensitive mass production and ersatz tastes. Yet we can see
Cubist collages enthusiastically taking up, exploring and elaborating, and commenting
wryly on many of these features.17
The wallpaper in Picasso’s collages is for the most part cheap and ordinary, often in a
poor state, suggesting that he had only fragments at his disposal. It was also applied in
quite rudimentary ways. Shapes were roughly cut out and simply glued to the base layer.
The overall appearance seems temporary, ephemeral, almost throwaway. Taken together
with Picasso’s introduction of newspaper, this is for Poggi further evidence of a ‘critique’
of painting. Their use deprived the work of art of the value, legitimacy and longevity
connected to craft skills, and the authenticity and meaning derived from the spontane-
ous, autographic mark. The irony conveyed by the words J’aime Eva when scrawled on a
biscuit and glued to the canvas (Guitar: L’aime Eva 1912), and the kitschy allusion to a
popular love song in Ma Jolie (1914), underscore a departure from the very idea that
artists should invest their work with feelings and meanings that are authentic, unusual,
articulate or fresh. While acknowledging a certain convergence with Mallarmé, who
also emphasized the impersonality of pure poetry, Poggi argues that Picasso did not
aspire to purity. Rather, the collages herald the ‘obsolescence of contemporary critical
hierarchies and theories of representation in an age when artefacts had become com-
modities’ (153).
Arguments linking form and politics often end up undermining the practice of visual
art as such. For example Poggi mentions Paul Cottingham’s (2004) Bourdieu-inspired
assessment of Cubism. Maintaining that if art has any importance or meaning whatso-
ever it is because of its political effects, Cottingham sees in Cubism only a visual ‘dis-
course’ containing political messages coded as form, often tricky to decipher because
addressed to the highly wrought but self-serving tastes of elite groups. So, for example
modernism’s vaunted formal innovations, of which Cubism is said to be an example,
while lacking overt social or political reference, can be shown to belong to the machina-
tions of cultural distinction, the signs by which gradations of cultural value are inscribed
on stratifications of social class. Such work is said to be ‘elitist’ precisely because of its
lack of reference, or even ordinary intelligibility.
Poggi rightly rejects this reductive levelling of both the historical record and the aes-
thetic challenge of Cubist collage, rightly giving full weight to its ‘ironic refusals and
negations’ with respect to both vernacular visual culture and the traditions and con-
ventions of visual art, historical and contemporary (see Poggi 1992: 128–9). Yet if the
main point is ‘political effects’ then Cottingham’s point is stronger. Intrinsic, even quasi-
political complexity does not necessarily give an item of culture the capacity to effect
substantial social and political change. If avant-garde artworks are unlikely to influence
popular political opinion, then all that remains appears to be their possible effects on
the interpretation and judgement of cultural forms, yet another kind of ‘elite’ preoccu-
pation, characteristic of the art world or academe.
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 373

In sum, since the coming of modernism, many artists and intellectuals that what ul-
timately makes a work of art important is its ‘critique’ of a previous form of practice. In
many cases, however, it has proved difficult or impossible to prevent this limited, local
criticism sliding into a negation of the entire art form in question, thus normalizing
what I have referred to elsewhere as hypochondriacal reflection and the erasure of the
distinction between art and visual culture. The alternative is to look more closely at what
we might still want to call Cubism’s politics.

Collage and Politics

To recap, we have seen above how Cubism’s struggle for authenticity in painting was
waged not only in the face of a visually mobilized urban culture but also in the context
of the danger of arbitrariness, aimlessness and style, eminently practical problems for
avant-garde artists consequent upon a growing awareness of the autonomous signify-
ing powers lodged in the modernized practice of visual art. However, we also want to
pursue the question of the wider social and historical significance of modern painting,
where ‘significance’ refers to a visible, intended feature of the work, something ‘meant’
by the artists concerned. It is clear that with Cubist collage its broadly political or social
significance resides neither in the depiction of conventional political events, nor in the
supposed disruption of political processes by cultural transgression. However, this does
not make Cubist collage inherently complicit with a given political order. The issue is
not so much the politics of form as ‘coded statements’ but the political significance of
the self-enactment of the work visible in its form.
Patricia Leighten (1989) provides a straightforward historical and political account
of Picasso’s development prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, bringing to light other
important aspects of the use of newspaper cuttings.18 She emphasizes their deliberate,
purposeful character, many culled from Le Journal, a mass circulation Republican daily,
which covered political events, as well as prurient or gory human-interest stories.19 Pi-
casso cut carefully round the edges of columns, never up the centre, preserving whole
passages of text so that the reader can make out their meaning. This content is largely to
do with political news, in particular what we now see as events leading up to the Great
War, for example the three Balkan Wars, which revealed Europe’s political instability,
and the diplomatic and military rivalry between the great powers, France, Britain, Rus-
sia and Germany. There are also stories about industrial unrest, strikes, strike breaking
and demonstrations, as well as news from the Bourse, stock market prices, the data of
speculation, boom and bust.20 Finally, and increasingly, the cuttings contain sensational-
ist ‘human interest’ stories, often with bizarre, macabre, absurd overtones, the material
of black humour, perhaps appealing to Picasso’s sardonic eye.21
She emphasizes the collages’ café references, revealed by the still life ingredients and
other allusions, an important aspect of Braque and Picasso’s social milieu. ‘With their
settings of bottles, glasses, café tables, and newspapers, these works not only depict the
physical setting of artistic bohemia, where political arguments were part of the daily
fare, but also suggest the contents of such arguments by importing the news itself into
that heady atmosphere’ (130). In particular, the political contents pertain to events that
374 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

Picasso’s avant-garde ‘anarcho-symbolist’ circle would have discussed in cafés and apart-
ments in an intensifying atmosphere of war preparation and appeals to patriotism on
the one hand, and strident left-wing protest against militarism, capitalism and national-
ism on the other.22
For Leighten the inclusion of text was a way of ‘pulling Cubism back from the
brink of total abstraction . . . And no more democratic way could be found for the
project of subverting the high art of oil painting than that of introducing such easily
readable articles on such universally engaging subjects’ (Leighten 1986: 125).23 But
she also remarks that the effect of the clippings was to introduce ‘anxieties’ that ‘seem
to threaten the fragile pleasures of a civilized peace: wine and music in a wallpapered
room’ (126).
How successful is Leighten in relating the aesthetics of Cubism to either its overt
content (café life, portraits of friends, still life) or to what she supposes to have been
Braque’s and Picasso’s politics? Rejecting any simple divorce of form and content—with
form being ‘technical elements’ and content ‘those elements which make statements’—
she traces the precedence of form in the interpretation of Cubism in modernist theory
and practice following the First World War, and then sets this against what she sees as a
more plausible emphasis on content.24
For the purposes of this chapter, form and content are taken to be discernibly differ-
ent aspects of the work of art, which it is often useful to identify and discuss separately,
while at the same time recognizing that they may be related in complex ways, and even
‘fuse’ in the final presence of the work. The problem is to understand both in their inde-
pendence and integrity, the connections between them, and the ‘third dimension’ of the
work their relationship can create. This task often gets lost once form is reduced to the ar-
bitrary machinery of language-like coded statements. The encounter with art is dramati-
cally simplified when it is taken to be axiomatic that there is nothing else really going on
in most visual works, no other significance or meaning, than the concealed statements
demanded by some purported dominant culture, that is rhetoric confirming its distinc-
tiveness, legitimacy and predominance. Once the constitutive practices of an art form
are treated in this way, the whole art form stands condemned, with well-known practical
consequences. The post-visual, post-avant-garde artist seems to risk serious injury by saw-
ing off the branch on which he or she sits, only to rise again as a disciple of Andy Warhol,
the last artist and first high priest of celebrity culture. My point is that while it is very
useful to understand Braque’s and Picasso’s political and aesthetic antipathy to many as-
pects of contemporary painting and bourgeois culture in general, it is a serious mistake to
interpret Cubist collage as an attack on painting or visual art tout court. For Braque and
Picasso, while the bourgeoisie might buy paintings, they did not own painting. It may
be true that Picasso enjoyed ‘cannibalizing’ the history of art for his own purposes (see
Richardson 2009: 77), yet he also wanted his achievement to be judged against its highest
standards and so needed the possibility of a tradition and a canon.25
Some critics contemporary with Cubism accused it of being anti-rational and anti-
art, purely destructive and dehumanizing. A defence in terms of the politics of form
has generally conceded destructiveness, but then sought to legitimate it by revealing
the discursive meanings concealed by the work’s visible features. There is certainly a
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 375

critical or even destructive side to Picasso’s output before the outbreak of war, evident in
his manifest desire to shock the bourgeoisie (recalling the anarchist ‘propaganda of the
deed’), break the rules observed by lesser artists, and experiment rigorously with forms
and conventions, testing them to the point of destruction. There was also his relentlessly
sardonic wit.26 However, if the positive element disappears from acts of creative destruc-
tion all that remains is the work of the negative, in this case the purported attack on
painting and ultimately all art. While Cubism’s transgressions and negations are obvi-
ous, the complementary question of its constructive side is posed less often. What, for
example, of the anarchist and avant-garde’s fervent desire to reconstruct the conscious-
ness and society of the future, to ‘reorder the universe’ in Guillaume Apollinaire’s words?
Along with the destructiveness of Cubism went complete conviction in the validity of
art, which for many avant-gardists entailed belief—at times, somewhat desperate or
­anguished—in its capacity to change the way people thought, accelerating and strength-
ening the movement of history towards social revolution.
From Ambrogio Lorenzetti up until Matisse and Cubism itself visual artists had tried
to represent quite directly what a good human life might look like. Even the young Pi-
casso contributed to this long tradition of the utopian imagination with what Leighten
calls his ‘pastoralism’, images of peasants living in harmony with one another, the land
and nature (see Richardson 2009: 42–3). For Picasso and other radical Spanish artists
this was not a conservative celebration of the good old days, but a picturing of the last
surviving expression of free, cooperative life and labour, and of the spirit and principles
of the new age that their politics would bring about. A good example is L’edat durada
(The Age of Gold), a drawing completed in Paris in 1902 (see Figure 15.2).27

Figure 15.2 Pablo Picasso L’etat durada (The Age of Gold), 1902, pen and ink, Museu Picasso, Bar-
celona. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2010. Photograph: Museu Picasso.
376 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

It is important to note the centrality of cooperative, collective labour to anarchist po-

litical philosophy. Leighten also reminds us that Picasso’s most politically critical subject
matter in the first decade of the century concerns the depiction of poor, destitute indi-
viduals and small family groups in urban settings, in particular the semi-industrialized
suburbs, the afueras, banlieu or ‘zones’ that had sprung up around Madrid, Barcelona
and Paris. Picasso does not seem to have been able to imagine political scenes in an
urban setting except by representing the victims of industrialization, poverty, displace-
ment and exploitation.
While it would be quite wrong to see Picasso’s entire creative output as dominated
by conventional political ideas and motives, it seems equally mistaken to deny alto-
gether the seriousness and continuity of the Cubists’ anarcho-symbolist poetics. If so,
the next question is how such an outlook might have informed Cubist innovations
in form and content? Certainly there are no obvious signs of pastoralism in the col-
lages. Has the pastoral been replaced by another image, one more modern and urban
in character? The obvious difficulty here is not so much that Picasso tries to devise
and present a new likeness of some yearned for human flourishing, this time set in the
modern city, which we may or may not find convincing, but that he does not pres-
ent a conventional picture at all. If there is such an image in Cubist collage it’s one
we struggle to see, given our interpretive habits and expectations. However, in order
to orient thought, fire the imagination and strengthen resolve in ways conducive to
political activity this new image of a good human life would first have to be recogniz-
able as such.
It is important to insist that these are pictures of something. In Leighten’s words,
‘Picasso precisely wanted to pursue a formal radicalism without abandoning allusion
and subject matter’ (1989: 84). Cubism was surely meant to be a full response to the
contemporary experience of Braque, Picasso and his circle, including the utopianism
embedded in their political outlook. As John Richardson suggests, Picasso at this time
seems to have thought of his aims as similar to Baudelaire’s ‘painter of modern life’, an
artist capable of conveying not only its depravity and ugliness but also its dynamism and
heroism (Richardson 2009: 11–27). The challenge remains that of seeing the collages’
true subjects, not just the look and feel of contemporary experience, but also the human
good, improbably conveyed by highly deliberate arrangements of bits and pieces culled
from the material and visual fabric of everyday Parisian life, the enactment of the collage
form. Put slightly differently, why do these formal innovations in which intrusions of
urban visual culture feature so prominently matter?

Collage and Images of Modernity

The visually, materially and semantically charged objects of French urban culture were
fast becoming prominent, active, communicative features of social life, importuning the
viewer in different ways. This mobilization of the visual occurs in the familiar context
of the rapid changes and developments in urban life particularly associated with aggres-
sive modernization.28 Accounts of the ‘creative destructiveness’ of modernization have
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 377

been prominent in social theory since the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is this
tradition of enquiry—stretching from Karl Marx and Max Weber to Ulrich Beck and
Zygmund Bauman—that will be applied here.
Perhaps the best account of cultural responses to the peculiar dynamism of moder-
nity is that of Marshall Berman (1983). Attempting to sketch the whole context of mod-
ernism in all its forms, he writes:

The maelstrom of modern life has been fed by many sources: great discoveries in the
physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it; the indus-
trialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, cre-
ates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of
life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic
upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats, hurtling them
halfway across the world into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; sys-
tems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding
together the most diverse people and societies, increasingly powerful national states,
bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their powers;
mass social movements of people and peoples, challenging their political and eco-
nomic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally, bearing and driving
all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, dramatically fluctuating
capitalist world market. (16)

The social, political and historical environment of modernity is thus a direct, power-
ful challenge to both traditional or premodern cultural forms and whatever tempo-
rary, fragile cultural stability can be improvised and pieced together by individuals and
groups in the grip of modernization.
More recently, in Anthony Giddens’s (1990, 1991) efforts to renew the tradition of
classical social theory, modernity’s ‘extreme dynamism’, a matter not only of the pace of
change but also its scope and depth, is due to three factors: the separation and reorgani-
zation of time and space, institutional reflexivity, and disembedding mechanisms (or ab-
stract systems).29 The notion of disembedding, the ‘“lifting out” of social relations from
local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of space-time’
(Giddens 1990: 21) refers to social theory’s familiar theme of modernity’s continuing
assault on traditional forms of life. For Giddens, disembedding is a necessary prelude to
rational restructuring, or at least restructuring in accord with technical knowledge and
expertise, which he calls ‘social reflexivity’. For the individual what we might term mod-
ernized or enlightened reembedding consists of a willingness pragmatically to change
one’s identity, by which we mean something like a self-conception or ego ideal, accord-
ing to changing circumstances.30
The disembedding of everyday life provokes symbolic, local, routine efforts to reem­
bed, to re-establish its intelligibility, coherence, reliability and normative legitimacy.31
Behind the obvious reasons for improving the conditions of life for individuals
and groups, for example mitigating hardship or increasing social equity—through
378 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

philanthropy, economic cooperatives, voluntary welfare and educational associations,

trade unions, church and chapel groups, leisure and sports clubs, as well as individual
actions often in the context of the family—was the constant, urgent need for symbolic
restructuring, an effort to confront the threat of meaninglessness that sprang from the
historical nihilism of capitalism itself.32
The reembedding enmeshed in everyday social practices in part takes shape through,
and is made manifest in, visual and material culture. As a response to profound so-
cial and cultural turbulence, it may include institutional attempts to resuscitate social
and cultural traditions, but more important here are quotidian, creative cultural acts
that seek to reconfigure everyday life so that it becomes sufficiently intelligible, reliable,
benign and normatively defensible as to answer fundamental existential questions, an
activity critical to homo symbolicus. Within this complex, multitudinous field of local
restructurings, from the decoration and furnishing of the home, the adding of ‘personal
touches’ to workshops and offices, the preparing and serving food and drink, to clothing
and gardening, the visual is typically part of a multisensory awareness of things and set-
tings, inflected by mood and memory (Seremetakis 1994; Attfield 2000; Vannini 2009).
Perhaps because of the capacity of visual perception to range readily from the scanning
of generalities to close inspection of detail, even when another sense seems to predomi-
nate, specifically visual aspects are often of great importance.
The idea with which we conclude is that Cubist collage may be understood as a
particular endeavour within painting—paradoxically involving both self-modernizing
and reembedding—against the background of the paradoxical effects of global instabil-
ity, rationalization, and ordinary, local, everyday acts of symbolic reconstruction.33 Of
course, this is not to ascribe to Braque and Picasso these precise socio-theoretical inten-
tions, but rather to outline a context that helps make sense of some of the more puzzling
features of Cubist collage. Needless to say, the reembedding undertaken by the mod-
ernist avant-garde was not about reproducing a tradition by imitating its appearance,
although there are important, deeper continuities with some aspects of the historically
extended practical and critical tradition of painting. Modernization here means both a
heightened awareness of the signifying powers of painting practice but also a free self-
relation. As we have seen above, collage structure, the perceptible relationship between
very heterogeneous elements, must appear to arise from within the work itself, not be
imposed on it according to externally conceived rules of taste or commodity design, or
ultimately, absurdly even, those conventions and expectations established in the course
of this developing ‘experiment’. The artist’s obligation to the work is to help it achieve
this ‘freedom’, an evident capacity not only to give itself a rule, to become itself , but
also to depart from that rule.
In sum, Cubist collage displays not only a kind of self-directed, radical disembedding
with respect to certain kinds of traditional art, specifically unadventurous, submissive
art that sets out to please and flatter, but also a fierce engagement with how the visible
and material features of the new urban environment, a setting in which complex disem-
bedding and reembedding processes were being played out, may be picked up, modified
and reused in new ways, but nevertheless in accord with the fundamental character of
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 379

painting practice. This is avant-garde, self-modernizing art’s version of reembedding, in

the final analysis the ideal of a chosen self-relation. Cubism sought to re-establish the in-
tegrity of painting by engaging fully with destruction and reconstruction, and by enact-
ing destruction and reconstruction in its own terms. In the context of highly traditional
subject matter and an austere formal structure derived from still life, Cubism sought to
discover how its methods and results could be anchored in ‘the truth to what painting
consists of ’, a visible necessity specific to painting, while simultaneously engaging with
what traditionalists took to be the most unsympathetic, even dangerous, ‘impure’ ele-
ments of everyday visual experience, those spawned by the new urban visual culture.
Success in this task would unambiguously demonstrate also, of course, an artist’s unri-
valled creative powers.
In what sense is any of this political? It is true that much of Cubist collage represents
a shift to what has been called the ‘politics of form’, but it is inadequate to see this as a
self-deluding and self-serving capitulation to elite tastes. It is facile to reduce a serious­
struggle to make visual and material forms matter to ‘statements’. What needs to be
recognized,­in its complexities and enigmas, is Cubist collage as a particular engagement—
enacted with humble, profane materials through extravagantly embodied gestures—
with the general social and historical phenomenon of modernization and reembedding,
specifically a reembedding that was paradoxically ruled by the need visibly to establish,
or at any rate assert, the integrity of painting itself.

Conclusion
Georg Simmel’s famous essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ begins:

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to pre-
serve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming
social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.
(Simmel 1997: 174–5)

He goes on to say that the person ‘resists being levelled down and worn out by a social-
technological mechanism’ (175). Let us suppose that this is true not only of the person
but also for the art object. That is, if the object is to resist levelling down or chaotic
disorganization it must achieve authenticity, it must have a perceivable structure or
character which has been freely arrived at, and its appearance must assert the character
it struggles to become.34 Symbolist poetics gave Cubism a clue to understanding this
requirement and carrying it out practically. The experiments with frames, materials,
and profane visual signs and general detritus of contemporary visual culture, and the
profound risks taken with representation are, then, best understood as ways in which
Braque and Picasso asserted, and then tested, the possible integrity of the art object.
In a historical period characterized by an intentionally activated visual and sensory
environment, amplified and diversified by industrial and commercial techniques and
new communicative technology, the encounter between visual art and visual culture
380 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

may seem of marginal importance. The prominence of visual artefacts in the modern
period has led some theorists to claim that the visual has become the dominant cultural
form, and with visual art sidelined as a minority, elite preoccupation, the obvious reach,
power and glamour of popular, mass cultural forms seemed to establish their unchal-
lengeable preeminence. The particular interpretation given by visual cultural studies
suggests that at the root of cultural artefacts and processes is a covert distribution and
legitimating of quasi-political power, and that underlying and disguised by the visual
is language, in the shape of arbitrary, coded signs which make meaning and therefore
author the world. It is easy to believe that understood properly language rivals number
as a human technology, the power of both derived from their capacity for abstraction.
Against this, however, should be set the need fully to understand the consequences
of changes in the traditional cultural hierarchies, including the significance of visual art,
brought about by modernity, and the fact that within two- and three-dimensional art
visual sensibility and visual thinking have undertaken exploration and refinement of un-
rivalled depth. It has been suggested above that both are of critical importance to visual
culture studies.
The employment of frames and allusions to framing in Cubist collage, and the in-
troduction of materials and surfaces that were the products of the new visual, aural and
tactile urban environment, might suggest that Braque and Picasso were trying to make
painting practice appear ridiculous, an intuition that the peculiar hyper-visibility of the
modern world defied the capacity of painting to represent it. A more plausible sugges-
tion is that they set themselves the enormously difficult task of freely taking apart paint-
ing practice, but then demonstrating its vigour and integrity by making successful work
out of its most rudimentary conventions and unlikely or profane ingredients. After re-
ducing itself to the elementary components of painting method, where these are to be
clearly distinguished from familiar picture-making techniques, it then displays strength
and potency by reinventing pictorial coherence in entirely concrete, visible terms out
of the anonymous, ephemeral, profane bits and pieces of a urban environment, not so
much by imitation but by physically absorbing and transforming them.
The recreation of pictorial coherence out of the most unpromising materials gets
close to their achievement, but does not explain why these arduous, uncertain, risky
experiments were necessary. The connection between access to the truth about mod-
ern life, more specifically about its mode of visibility, and what Clark calls ‘truth to
what painting consists of ’ is critical here, but takes us beyond art and into theory or
philosophy.
The chapter juxtaposes Cubist practice with wider social and cultural processes, spe-
cifically the destructive and creative dynamic of capitalist modernity, itself a long-term
preoccupation for social theory. In some ways Cubism is a paradigmatic example of
modern disembedding, seeking first to destroy local, historical, contingent or deriva-
tive forms of painting, and then reconstruct it, piece by piece, according to a principle
of visible necessity, the traditional criterion of pictorial coherence made concrete under
very different circumstances and in a new form. By doing so, Cubist images and artists
sought to demonstrate their ingenuity and powers, their independence and integrity.
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 381

This is not to suggest, however, that Cubist practice does or could present itself as a les-
son for everyday reembedding. There is an uncompromising singularity and simplicity
about the aims and responsibilities of the artist that does not apply to everyday life. In
confining its ambitions to making a visual and material image that extends and intensi-
fies the visually mediated experience of modern life, Cubism ­belongs decisively to art.

Further Reading
Antliff, Mark and Patricia Leighten, eds. 2008. A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism,
1906–1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For illuminating discussions of some of the theoretical and aesthetic background

­issues see:
Phillipson, Michael. 2001. ‘From Tradition to Hypertradition: Art’s Mutation under the Decline
of Modernity’, in Nigel Whiteley (ed.), Detraditionalisation and Art. London: University of
Middlesex Press, 107–27.
‘What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)’. In Robert Pippin. 2005b. The Per-
sistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes
1. Cartwright and Sturken (2001: 239). In fact, defenders of high culture are usually prepared
to concede that the ‘entertainment’, ‘kitsch’ or thoroughly ‘conceptual’ commodities of the
culture industries they condemn are indeed cultural artefacts, just not very good ones.
2. Thus, clarifying what they mean by postmodernism, Cartwright and Sturken (2001) offer a
contrast with modernism:

Whereas modernity was based on the idea that the truth can be discovered by accessing
the right channels of knowledge, the postmodernist is distinguished by the idea that
there is not one but many truths. (251)

However, postmodernism aims

to put all assumptions under scrutiny in order to reveal the values that underlie all sys-
tems of thought, and thus to question the ideologies within them that seem natural.
(252)

Put this way, postmodernism offers ‘knowledge’ of ideologies by way of more intensive ‘scru-
tiny’, which it is difficult not to interpret as implying privileged access to something like
appropriate theories and methods. At this point postmodernism sounds not very different
from modernism, with its idea of the ‘right channels of knowledge’.
3. Sophisticated postmodernists like Lyotard (1984, but see also Readings below) have sought
strenuously to find a way of articulating the new situation critically and politically, in par-
ticular with respect to the discourse of justice.
4. Of course, none of this is new. For a particularly instructive account of how Max Weber
sought to square an unflinching aspiration to knowledge of ‘actuality’ with the unavoidability
382 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

of ‘values’ which could not be ‘scientifically’ legitimated, including the value of science itself,
see Scaff (1989).
5. Modernist art movements are rarely a major topic for visual culture studies. For example a
search of the Journal of Visual Culture produces only three passing references to Cubism.
6. For important recent attempts to develop this kind of explanatory social theory, see Beck
(1992); Giddens (1990).
7. The proletariat, an indispensible artefact of Marxist theory, was conceptualized as the op-
pressed class brought to correspond with its destined role and self-consciousness within the
historical process of class struggle by means of the insights of historical materialism and the
political leadership of the Party. As anointed agent of class struggle, the proletariat would
eventually achieve a modern humanist utopia, transcending class divisions and the state
along the way.
8. Emphasis on national culture is sometimes offset by the Left’s internationalist outlook.
9. Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Schiller through to T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow.
10. Readings argues that what supersedes the university of culture is the ‘university of excel-
lence’. The ideal of excellence, which outcrops widely in the jargon of late-modern organi-
zations, including the universities, purports to be an inclusive, objective measure of quality.
‘Excellence’ expresses how the university now understands itself, and as an ‘integrating prin-
ciple, excellence has the singular advantage of being entirely meaningless, or to put it more
precisely, non-referential’ (1996: 22).
11. Passage quoted by James McFarlane in Bradbury and McFarlane (1976: 71).
12. In other words, part of Cubism’s social and cultural context is the fragility of everyday life
under modern conditions.
13. Another good example of an innovative use of frame and framing is Glass, Die and Newspa-
per (1914), which includes a real frame, but painted the same dark green as the ground, and
overlapped physically along the top edge by the folded metal from a tin can that makes up
the glass, and the paper which forms a roughly rendered newspaper at the right.
14. See also Poggi’s illuminating discussion (66-68).
15. See also Rudenstine (1988: 809-820).
16. Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of Cézanne, who remained of immense significance to Picasso:

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and
most of the time we see them through the human actions which put them to use. We
become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably. Cézanne’s
painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon
which man has installed himself. (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993: 66)

17. Compare Poggi (124-163).

18. The relevant chapter is called ‘The Insurrectionary Painter’, a rather odd title as it is largely
about the collages. It suggests, however, that Leighten shares Poggi’s view that the ‘negative’
aspects of the collages are an ‘insurrection’ against painting.
19. Picasso never used material from anarchist or radical newspapers.
20. Between 1912 and 1913 Picasso produced around 80 collages, 52 with material about the
Balkan Wars and the economic and political state of Europe. Tabloid stories constitute
around a quarter of the clippings used between 1912–1914. After 1912 Picasso also in-
cluded more ‘personal’ content (health matters, theatre listings, tonic wine advertisements).
Cubist Collage and Visual Culture 383

21. Leighten argues far less convincingly that sensationalist stories should be seen ‘politically’, as
evidence of Picasso’s opinion of the madness and depravity of bourgeois society.
22. Unlike virtually all his friends and fellow avant-gardists, even those who were not French
nationals and under no obligation to join up, Picasso did not succumb to war fever in 1914.
23. If one bears in mind Picasso’s career as a whole, his character and artistic ambitions, surely
‘total abstraction’ was never really on the cards. It is worth noting that in the autumn and
winter of 1912 Picasso did virtually nothing but collages, but by 1914 he had returned over-
whelmingly to painting (see Leighten 1989: 128–9). If Leighten is correct about the impor-
tance of news content between 1912–1913, it is surprising that there is no sign of what must
have been heated debates and difficult changes of view to the pacifist and antinationalist ide-
ology of his circle leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914.
24. It should also be emphasized that with the most interesting early-modernist artists this con-
nection does not simply consist in the fact that the latent content of form was some politi-
cal ‘statement’ or other. She rightly observes that in the aesthetic ideas of many of the artists
concerned there was explicit connection between form and content—examples being the
Symbolists and Neo-Impressionists like Camille Pissarro—but not one that came down to
‘statements’.
25. The recent exhibition Picasso: Challenging the Past (National Gallery, London, 2009) was il-
luminating on this point. Also Cowling et al. (2010).
26. Richardson thinks that Leighten makes too much of Braque’s and Picasso’s ‘dormant social
conscience’. The combat preoccupying Picasso was the controversy stirred up by Cubism,
and the challenge issued by his papier collé to Braque and Matisse, the only living artists he
regarded as his peers. See Richardson (2009: 250–2.)
27. See Leighton (42-43). The title she gives is Pastoral Scene.
28. The locus classicus is Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social condi-

tions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated be-
fore they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind. (Marx and Engels (1848) 1969: 16)

For some important recent revisions, elaborations and extensions of social theory’s idea of
modernity see also Beck (1992), Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994), Bauman (2000).
29. For modernity and space-time see Giddens (1991: 16–18) and for expertise (18–21).
30. See Giddens 1992. The experience of disembedding, the disruption of the taken-for-granted
continuity of everyday life, carries a real threat of meaninglessness and anomie.

On the other side of what might appear to be quite trivial aspects of day-to-day action
and discourse, chaos lurks. And this chaos is not just disorganisation, but a loss of the
sense of the very reality of things and of other persons. (Giddens 1991: 36)

The need to reembed—an attempt to reframe the conditions for minimum ‘ontological se-
curity’ (see Giddens 1991: 35–69)—confronts all, but most dramatically faces those directly
384 Aesthetics, Politics and Visual Culture

subject to the turbulence of industrial and later postindustrial modernization. The collective
groupings encouraged by industrialization blunted the edge of this threat both psychologi-
cally and socially. In late-modernity, however, while individuals are released from ‘ascribed
identity’, they are by the same token far more exposed to profound anxieties. Hence the
need for ‘expertise’ (counselling, psychotherapy, life coaching etc).
31. There is no space here to discuss local, routine practices of everyday life in the context of de
Certeau’s well-known distinction between strategy and tactics. However, it’s worth recalling
his remark that local tactics may be all that the powerless have available (1984: 38).
32. See also classic social histories of working-class life, which are also chronicles of spontane-
ous reembedding: E. P. Thompson (1963, 1967) and Rose (2002). Ethnomethodology ap-
proaches this level of everyday practice as consisting of ‘haecceities of familiar society’, the
‘worldly and real Work of making Things . . . Things of immortal, ordinary society’ (Garfin-
kel 2002: 67).
33. Giddens’s ‘social reflexivity’ is essentially a development of the concept of rationalization
introduced into social theory by Max Weber (1978, 1985). While Giddens (like Beck) em-
phasizes that the ‘re-entry of knowledge’ may have unintended consequences, the remedy
seems to be yet more knowledge.
34. See also Pippin (2005a), in which he discusses Michael Fried’s historical narrative of eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century French painting as a continuing struggle against ‘theatrical-
ity’, falseness to the very practice of painting. Theatricality is not understood as a problem
confined to painting but as a widespread, profound modern phenomenon. Pippin’s claim is
that ‘the problem of genuine and false “modes of being” of the art work itself ’, as worked in
painting, can contribute to a

more general understanding of meaning-responsive beings at work in a social world

in historical time. Paintings thereby might be said to teach us how to appreciate their
‘ontological status’ and the historical fate of such embodied self-understanding. (Pip-
pin: 578)

However, while Pippin would want to separate this ‘ontological’ dimension of painting from
‘working out problems in perception, mimesis, iconography, formal organization, and the
like’ (578), I have tried to insist on their connection.

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 Editorial Introduction

The essays in this part of the Handbook deal with recent thinking, debate and research
in important, substantive areas of modern visual culture. A number of these research
areas are both well established in their own right but also known and discussed as top-
ics in visual culture studies—fashion, photography, television, and film—while others,
like the perceptual basis of material culture, practices of landscape architecture and the
recent digitization of consumption, will seem to some readers less familiar.
Many of the classic social theorists of cultural change—including Georg Simmel,
Max Weber, and Thorstein Veblen among these—have considered the phenomenon of
modern fashion as an exemplary sphere both of visual culture and of modern social life.
The very idea of fashion’s obsolescence and its association with the volatility of style and
life-style makes it a central topic for visual studies. In more contemporary terms, fashion
is perhaps the engine of change in a consumer culture or what has been called postmod-
ern culture.
Malcolm Barnard is thus prescient in underlining the ways in which questions of
identity—social, gender, ethnic and so on—have been absolutely central to theories of
fashion as a particularly important area of visual culture. This is especially evident in
the manifold ways in which clothing styles or dress functions to form and communicate
the meaning of appearances and personal identity. While the term ‘fashion’ embraces a
range of phenomena where taste or style are at issue, Barnard narrows his focus to the
significance of what people wear largely in the context of everyday life, drawing on re-
cent forms of fashion studies, which includes the history, sociology, anthropology, cul-
tural study of fashion, as well as design history, psychoanalysis, gender and queer studies.
He provides a useful outline of the history of fashion studies, the approaches prevailing
over the last two decades, and finally a summary of its current preoccupations.
In his brief history of fashion theory and fashion culture Barnard notes the early in-
fluence of art history on thought about dress and fashion with its characteristic emphasis
390 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

upon taste, beauty and provenance. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
however, anthropologists began to take an interest in dress, especially in its nonfunc-
tional characteristics as decoration, personal adornment and ritual. Sociologists like
Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel began to pay more attention to the role of fashion
and ‘conspicuous consumption’ as mechanisms to establish social standing and status
distinctions. Status distinctions indexed by cultural markers like dress became as signifi-
cant as class distinctions marked by ownership and authority relations. The early days of
fashion studies still showed the influence of sociology and anthropology. More recently,
however, the impact of cultural studies has been increasingly prominent, both as a label
for a liberal, multidisciplinary outlook and as a quasi-discipline in its own right.
Perspectives that concentrate on the object have been linked to the outlook of pre-
dominantly female academics and curators, who argue that the material details of fabric
and dress are vital to understanding their social and cultural meanings. Other approaches
have sketched a social history of clothing styles, to which prominent historians like Fer-
nand Braudel and Anne Hollander have contributed. Hollander explores how the mean-
ings of clothed and unclothed bodies are expressed and mediated by both visual art and
the cultural values of artists and spectators. Others, like Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter
Stallybrass, have stressed that modern expectations and assumptions can be misleading
in the interpretation of Renaissance dress codes.
Turning to the question of identity, the contention that dress contributes to the so-
cial construction of identity has become a commonplace in cultural studies. Identity
can be expressed in terms of class position, and Barnard describes several relevant stud-
ies by Adrian Forty, Angela Partington and Diana Crane. There is also an enormous
literature on fashion and gendered identities, from which Barnard singles out works
by Adolf Loos, Lisa Tickner, Lee Wright, Elizabeth Wilson and Jennifer Craik. Other
accounts by Shaun Cole and Katrina Rolley link dress codes with masculine and gay
identities. All of these phenomena continue to attract much interest among theorists
and researchers.
One influential theory of fashion and social subcultures can be found in Dick Heb-
dige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, with its themes of resistance and incorporation.
David Muggleton has recently provided an up-date to this study of subcultural styles by
introducing ideas from postmodernism, while Emil Wilbekin has explored related issues
in the context of a black presence in fashion and cultural life-styles. Barnard observes
that age-related identities are somewhat under-represented in fashion studies, the excep-
tions being works by Alison Lurie, Cheryl Buckley and Lee Wright.
Turning next to theoretical and methodological issues, Barnard outlines the im-
portance of semiological approaches to fashion, and the varied ways in which dress
codes can be interpreted as ‘language’ or at least ‘language like’, with rather differ-
ing contributions from Roland Barthes, Alison Lurie, Ruth P. Rubinstein and Colin
Campbell.
The specifically visual aspects of fashion are unexpectedly neglected in fashion stud-
ies. While work has recently appeared on the cultural and social significance of fashion
photographers like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, Barnard argues that this whole
Editorial Introduction 391

area, particularly the relationship between ‘high end’ fashion, its dissemination and pho-
tography, is in need of greater analytical and critical attention. Something similar could
be said of the complex relationships between fashion and the body, although as Barnard
notes there are important differences between the relative intractability of the body and
the facility with which clothes may be chosen or rejected. He outlines related arguments
about whether tattoos for example should be treated as fashion.
Concern with globalization is often related to anxieties about the role of fashion
in stoking up wasteful, unsustainable overconsumption and more generally environ-
mentalist politics. In this context, Barnard mentions recent studies by Margaret May-
nard, Colin Gale and Jasbir Kaur, and Sandy Black (for example the work Eco-Chic).
The work of Kate Fletcher and the campaigning groups like ‘Adbusters’ seek to raise
awareness of the sustainability and ethical problems relating to the production and
use of clothing. Margaret Maynard’s Dress and Globalisation (2004) represents an im-
portant development in more sociologically reflexive accounts of fashion as a global
phenomenon.
Barnard warns against facile assumptions about the homogenizing effects of global-
ization in fashion. While companies like Gap and Nike may be everywhere, their prod-
ucts are not necessarily uniform or homogeneous. The overpowering of the periphery by
the centre cannot be simply assumed. As Margaret Maynard argues, important different
local uses and stylistic contexts for global products spring up continually and should not
be ignored in either theory or research. Jose Tuenissen and Ted Polhemus have contrib-
uted to what Barnard calls the ‘nonbinary account of globalization’.
In concluding, Barnard provides suggestions as to likely future avenues of research
for fashion studies, proposing the topics of globalization, business and marketing, and
‘green’ and sustainability issues. Methodologically, Barnard advocates empirical, ethno-
graphic research into the relationship between fashion and subcultures, combined with
more conceptually and hermeneutically sophisticated interpretations of the complex
links and mediations between visual presence and constructed meanings.
Like Barnard, Tim Dant is concerned with how we see ‘things’, particularly ‘ma-
terial objects’, as the stuff of material culture. Ways of seeing—practices of looking—
are embedded firmly within the everyday life-contexts of human beings. The ob-
jective of his chapter is to emphasize how the ‘biomechanics of vision’ needs to be
supplemented by an account of the contribution of society and culture to seeing un-
derstood as the phenomenological ‘apprehending’ of everyday things. To this end he
challenges the ‘semiological’ approach that has become widely influential in visual
culture studies, a perspective that insists on understanding seeing as the ‘reading’
of discrete signs. For Dant, seeing things is not reducible to a ‘system of language’,
but rather is a ‘dynamic, embodied process, where things disclosed by the senses
exist only in networks of other things with which our cultural experience has ac-
quainted us. Dant commends a productive philosophical resource for understand-
ing what happens in concrete perception in the tradition of phenomenology, from
William James, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Alfred Schutz, Don
Ihde and Paul Verbeek.
392 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Dant usefully contrasts this phenomenological approach with the kind of semiotics
readings that are current in the literature of visual culture studies. These kinds of linguis-
tic models would, for example frame dress codes as ways of formulating sociological and
ideological ‘statements’. Dant notes, however, that in his later writing, the semiologist
Roland Barthes moved away from treating things as language to the analysis of things as
concrete sensory formations, moving in other words from structuralism to an early form
of poststructuralism.
Barthes’s application of linguistic and structuralist modes of thought to cultural
­phenomena—for example his Mythologies—has been enormously influential. Ulti-
mately, however, the linguistic model does not stand up to scrutiny. There are both
common sense and logical differences between meaning in language and meaning in our
encounters with material culture. He notes that the anthropological approach thinks of
material culture as ‘co-constitutive of social groups along with other cultural processes
that include language, economy, religion and consumption’. How something comes to
be ‘seen’ depends on a dialectical interplay of social and cultural forces (rituals, social re-
lations, discourse and so on). The complexity of seeing has led theorists to pay more at-
tention to specifically visual techniques such as drawings, photographs, sound recording
and films in sense-making activities. Dant suggests that anthropology both ‘naturalizes’
the seeing of its subjects, and routinely makes problematic its own practices of seeing.
The latter reflexivity points towards a more emphatic concern with the ‘mundane’ pro-
cess of seeing things.
Dant analyses aspects of everyday seeing, comparing these complex performances
with the accounts provided by different theories of visual perception. The notion of an
‘array’ or compositional whole is useful as it suggests the ability of perception to shift
from the ‘outline’ of a discrete item to a holistic view in which it is possible to look for
contextual clues of various kinds. Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree (1973) provides
an example of a dramatic shift from a straightforward quotidian interpretation of the
sight of a glass of water on a shelf to having to confront the possibility of an extraordi-
nary interpretation.
From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, seeing
things is not the result of a synthesis of relatively discrete parts but a single ‘apprehen-
sion’ of a body that sees, hears, smells, touches and moves through space. The kinaes-
thetic ‘coherence of the body’, and the ways in which we live our needs and interests, are
the ultimate root of both the coherence and rich complexity of things seen.
Turning to the theme of ‘apperception’, identified in different ways by Edmund
Husserl, William James, Alfred Schutz and others, Dant emphasizes the intertwining of
‘thematic relevance’, the ways in which memories, ‘stocks of knowledge’ and our current
profile of interests and concerns shape perceptual acts. For the social phenomenolgist
Alfred Schutz, perception also includes a sense of ‘reach’ or differential zones of actual or
possible attainment with respect to an object or state.
Schutz’s idea of ‘appresentation’ refers to the ways in which something not directly
present in immediate perception may—through horizontal awareness or empathy—be
indirectly presented. Following ideas from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology,
Editorial Introduction 393

empathy and a conviction that the other’s perception of the world is roughly like our
own make possible not only a philosophical theory of the objective world but also a
shared cultural world, specifically a world of shared and meaningful artefacts. From
sharedness, rooted in sedimented layers of apperceptions, arise the possibilities of in-
tersubjectivity and the phenomenon of ‘co-presence’, a belief that we are looking at the
‘same thing’. These kinaesthetic reciprocities also enables the ego to imagine how an-
other ego might react to the sight of a particular thing. Husserl makes clear that appre-
sentation is not a step-by-step cognitive process but ‘happens in a glance’, and he calls
the connection between the self ’s perception and that of the other ‘pairing’, something
which depends to a large extent on a common stock of knowledge or ‘co-perception’.
By creatively extending Husserl’s ideas about apperception and appresentation Schutz
created tools to explain mediated cultural experience, a ‘communicative common envi-
ronment’ of meaningful artefacts, including predominantly ‘visual’ ones. Schutz’s dis-
tinctive notion of the ‘symbol’ is that it forms part of a pairing with a realm of meaning
beyond the everyday, for example in such ‘provinces of meaning’ as science and religious
belief.
Dant concludes by noting important revisions to phenomenological theory by Ihde
and Verbeek, suggesting a more active role for things in their relationships with people.
Dant defends a position that points beyond the work of Merleau-Ponty and Schutz by
stressing the role of holistic embodiment and an enhanced sensitivity to ‘mediated and
symbolic sub-universes’ in their relationship with the orienting reality of everyday life.
While critics have argued that early phenomenology paid insufficient attention to dif-
ferences in power, Dant suggests that phenomenology has the advantage of explicitly
addressing the question of a shared world in which such differences exist, and in which
they might be challenged. Taken together, the descriptive accounts of the meaning and
perception of things provided by the phenomenological tradition are more plausible and
richer than those of semiotics and other language-based approaches.
If phenomenology tries to defamiliarize everyday experience and to uncover its com-
plex meaning ‘genesis’, so technologies like photography and film may also function as
‘bracketing’ techniques. For example a black-and-white landscape photograph by the
artist Willie Doherty, on which captions have been superimposed, might call into ques-
tion the ways in which we usually make sense of photographs. For Fiona Summers this
image highlights how the interpretation of photographs, rather than being obvious or
unproblematic, is always undertaken from a point of view with particular perceptual
and ideological dimensions. The appearance of digital photographic technology not-
withstanding, work on photography within visual culture studies, by for example Susan
Sontag, Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin, John Tagg and Stuart Hall, has thus continually
emphasized the artefactuality and conventionality of the photographic image, and, more
especially, its social or political meanings and uses.
Summers points out that the introduction of digital photography has not seriously
threatened the ‘mimetic’ aura of photography generally. The conventions of analogue
photography remain in force, despite the superseding powers of digital coding; in-
deed these conventions might be self-consciously used to introduce ‘imperfections’ or
394 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

‘graininess’ to the digital image to enhance its documentary connotations. Conversely,

‘perfect’ digital imagery has come to be associated with notions of hyper-reality. The role
of ubiquitous photography as a medium for the production of circulation of visual im-
ages has shaped the culture of modern life. Ranging from public displays (advertising
displays, journalism, photo-sharing Web sites) through to intimate family snaps, we find
a complex set of relationships and connections between photography and everyday life.
As Vivian Sobchack and others have pointed out, ‘the way in which we see and make
sense of ourselves as subjects is fundamentally transformed by photographic visuality’.
Through photographs we present ourselves to others and ourselves in a variety of differ-
ent ways, all of which may be reviewed in terms of the veracity or desirability of what is
shown. Much of visual culture studies is about the role of photography in recognition
and misrecognition, the power of the gaze, and the influence of photography on visual
presentations of self. Unlike film, photographs arrest movement and freeze time, pro-
ducing an ‘object of vision’, and thus lending an uncanny aura of veracity to the image.
Yet as Roland Barthes points out, there can be no coincidence between a photograph
and the ‘real self ’.
With family photography, the image captures the active presentation of ‘being a fam-
ily’, of bringing out and strengthening real and/or imagined ties. Digital technology and
image-sharing Web sites have continued the traditions of family analogue photography.
Danish ethnographer Jonas Larsen argues that as family structures become more com-
plex and fluid, family photography may evolve to emphasize longevity and consistency.
He further points out that holiday, leisure and cultural locations, together with cameras,
draw people together into enactments of ‘familyness’.
Turning to the new phenomenon of digital sharing, Summers reports the view of
Jose van Dijk that the digital camera is being used not just to record important events in
the context of everyday life but much more casually, often as a means or enhancement
of mundane social interaction. Communal photographic exchange via Web sites like
Flickr does not so much displace the contribution to memory as to provide new patterns
and opportunities for its distribution. Novel aesthetic and ‘interest’ communities may
be the result.
The ‘rhizomatic’ effects of the causal, multiple ‘labelling’ of images on Flickr has pro-
duced what Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis call ‘folksonomy’, a shifting, flexible,
collaborative organization of content. In the context of Flickr, labelling is important in
that it creates finite collections of images among multiplicity of images too vast to be
seen. These collections are typically viewed in sequence, thus departing from the largely
static imagery familiar to earlier writers on photography. Digital technology also erodes
the ‘aura’ of analogue images, replacing it with a sense of ‘disposability and immediacy’.
Summers argues, however, that the placing of photographs in online archives lends them
importance and permanence.
Turning to the documentary uses of photography, Summers suggests that despite
widespread scepticism about the veracity of such images the recording or memorializ-
ing functions of photography continue to matter immensely. As an example, she turns
to Alison’s Young’s work on photography and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Editorial Introduction 395

Centre in 2001, which shows how personal photographs of absent people and the build-
ings operated in sites of mourning. Summers suggests that photographic imagery still
attracts a conflation of seeing with knowing, perhaps as a response to an event that was
difficult to comprehend. David Campany interprets the plate photographs of Ground
Zero by Joel Meyerowitz as almost an attempt to ‘rescue’ memory, and the memorial
functions of photography itself, from a welter of images and information.
This point connects to the use of photography in the context of archiving and mu-
seums. Susan Sontag had already noted that photographs of particular events are often
taken to encapsulate an entire historical event or even period, and that museums of vari-
ous kinds are heavily reliant on photography. As an example, Summers cites Darren New-
bury’s work on the role of photography in two South African museums, showing how
particular documentary images associated with violent episodes in the struggle against
apartheid have shaped postapartheid national memory. However, Newbury’s work also
raises questions about the power of the photographic cliché ‘congealing’ around a prob-
lem, sometimes obstructing more complex and constructive insights.
Rachel Hughes has drawn attention to the use of photographs to represent nations or
historical episodes in the particular case of Cambodia’s S-21 prison during the genocide
of the 1970s. Portraits of incoming prisoners have been used worldwide to document
and encapsulate Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, largely as a result of the cataloguing and conser-
vation work of the American Photo Archive Group. Yet even in the case of grotesque
atrocities, the preservation and distribution of the material images does not eliminate
questions about the formation and uses of historical memory.
In conclusion, Summers argues that the advent of digital technologies has not re-
duced the importance of photography, but ‘activated and built on photography’s ability
to mutate . . . in order to become crucial to the networked societies in which it is ar-
gued we (as global citizens) live, work and connect’. She notes the continued power of
individual images to elicit a range of powerful feeling, articulated in public and private
settings. Digital technology has done nothing to change the capacity of photographs to
be both transient and enduring. As Walter Benjamin observed, the camera can record
what might have been seen, causing us to look at the photograph not only for what was
‘there’ but unobserved, but also for what was ‘yet to come’. Amid the complexity, pro-
fusion and chaos of a digital visual culture, photography still offers this hope of ‘seeing
better’ or even seeing at all.
With the appearance of new media technologies like permanently streamed digital
photography and film (especially through social networking sites and multimedia plat-
forms), a whole new range of issues becomes researchable. Here the configuration of
topics not only includes traditional issues of the content and structure of the medium
but also its social production, dissemination and appropriation in social and cultural
terms. Kristyn Gorton explores television as one such global visual medium, emphasiz-
ing not just ‘what appears on screen’ but also the more intangible practices that occur
around and through this global medium.
The new era for television, sometimes called ‘TV 3’, dating from around the mid-
1990s, is one in which digital-satellite broadcasting bypasses national boundaries and
396 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

confronts a global environment, with radical consequences for older national institu-
tional and organizational structures. Television has become part of the background of
people’s lives, but this does not necessarily mean that its influence on ideas and outlooks
is continuous and emphatic. There are times when viewers actively engage with the vi-
sual message, and others when they allow the flow of meanings to wash over them as a
kind of ubiquitous background to their normal activities and lives.
Plurality of screen technologies and convergence between the Internet, television and
film have led to new patterns of viewing, raising the larger question of whether television
is more or less central to modern life. Anna McCarthy is concerned with the public pres-
ence of television, what human acts it reinforces or interprets. For example is ‘waiting’
integral to its structure, and what feeling and needs does ‘passing the time’ address? The
availability and placing of screens in public spaces like bars and restaurants are impor-
tant to understanding what viewing practices are taking place.
John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham argue that signs of the com-
ing globalized media future began to appear in the 1970s, accompanied by trade
liberalization, increased international competition and the declining power of the
national state. Satellite broadcasting, they say, acted as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for media
deregulation. Burgeoning private programming led not only to more dependence on
American imports but also new ‘geolinguistic regions’, often based around common
languages, for example the popularity of South American ‘telenovellas’ in Spain and
Southern Europe.
Reviewing the development of the debate, initiated in the 1960s by Herbert Schiller
about media and cultural ‘imperialism’, Gorton suggests that there has been a recent re-
surgence of interest within global television studies, despite two decades of critique and
revision. However, the ways immigrant groups and travellers actually use globalized con-
tent for their own, often unexpected, purposes has been increasingly researched. Ameri-
can cultural products cannot be assumed to make their consumers think like Americans.
For example Lisa Parks has studied the use of satellite dishes by Aboriginal Australians,
discovering that the selection and viewing of programmes are strategically restructured
to give them shape and relevance for an indigenous audience.
In thinking about media globalization, the idea of ‘flow’ has become more impor-
tant, a more plausible alternative to the older notion of a radiating centre dominating
a periphery. Reviewing Raymond Williams’s early work with the notion of flow, Lynn
Spigel draws attention to the way it highlights a continuity of form and emotional tone
in American television running across different programmes and advertisements. Albert
Moran suggests that ‘flow’ is the unity of ‘carriage and content’, a more accurate way of
thinking about global television than separating medium from message.
Different researchers have noted the power of television executives to decide what
programmes to purchase for large national and international communities, and hence
to influence production. Edward S. Herman and Robert McChesney focus on the emer-
gence of transnational media corporations, while Michael Curtin argues that the growth
of ‘media capitals’ like Bombay, Cairo and Hong Kong, dominating production, fi-
nance and distribution, is more important to the new global configuration than national
Editorial Introduction 397

constraints. In some ways this makes branded content more important in attracting and
retaining audiences than control of distribution. This means that consolidated media
corporations must focus more on a broadening of emotionally compelling content
within an overall brand image.
Toby Miller has suggested that in a neo-liberal globalized world questions of belong-
ing become more urgent and more difficult. For Gorton, this raises the question of how
audiences become emotionally engaged with what they watch. Henry Jenkins identifies
a new ‘convergence culture’ in which content flows across different media, accompanied
by migratory audiences in search of their desired entertainment experiences. Coining
the term ‘affective economics’, he argues that production and distribution increasingly
cater for specialist tastes via different media platforms, evidence of the exploitation of
the emotional involvement of audiences with particular programmes.
Other researchers, influenced by the ‘theory of reflexive modernization’ of Anthony
Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernscheim, have investigated television cul-
ture in the light of a ‘new individualism’, which stresses ‘choosing, changing and trans-
forming’. Lauren Berlant describes the arrival of an ‘intimate public sphere’, saturating
television with scenes and techniques of intimacy, from the ‘confessional’ to therapy and
self-help. Rachel Moseley argues that ‘makeover’, talent shows and ‘reality television’
generally have eroded the distinction between public and private. Researchers like Anita
Biressi, Heather Nunn and Charlotte Brunsdon demonstrate how reality programmes
supplement a ‘didactic’ element with a crucial moment of ‘revelation’, bearing on a dis-
play of the protagonist succeeding or failing in his or her transformational efforts. Many
such programmes stress the obligation of choice and change, the designing and execu-
tion of a life.
The emphasis on ‘choice’ affects both what is watched and how it is watched. David
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that, because of the structure of financing, tele-
vision is even more oriented to the immediate gratification of audiences than film, re-
lentlessly pursuing as a consequence proven formulae for positive emotional response.
Derek Johnson has studied the ‘interactive’ involvement of enthusiastic viewers in pro-
gramme design, arguing that producers enjoy ‘free labour’ but also keep firm control
over what gets made.
Gorton notes the ambivalence in audiences who are both reflexively critical but also
emotionally engaged; ‘critical knowledge’ does not inevitably negate ‘viewing pleasures’.
As Helen Piper has pointed out, much reality and life-style programming both invites
empathic identification with participants, but also elicits judgement. For Gorton, such
judgement is another expression of ‘choosing, changing and transforming’ with respect
to a social role or identity.
Finally, Gorton summarizes recent television research focussed around debates over
‘carriage’ and ‘content’. The ‘culture of production’ is as important as the ‘production of
culture’. In particular, new research has changed our understanding of ‘how television is
made and received in one culture and understood in another’ or the flows between mak-
ers, sellers, buyers and watchers of television. In a complex, plural marketplace the ca-
pacity of programmes, under certain viewing conditions, to evoke emotions has become
398 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

critical to the formation and retention of audiences, hence the importance of ‘content
streaming’ and ‘aesthetics’ to further research. Gorton concludes by arguing that the
‘liveliness and immediacy’ of television imagery, often watched in intimate, domestic
settings, provides many people with a sense of the world in which they live and influ-
ences life-styles and identities, and as such research into television will remain important
to the study of contemporary visual culture.
Andrew Spicer explores a related area of contemporary visual culture. He begins by
noting that the appearance of new visual media and global forms of digitalization have
threatened a crisis for film studies as a disciplinary research area within visual culture
studies, heralding a new era of ‘post-cinema’, or a ‘cinema of interactions’ in which films
are still made and watched, but in new forms and more actively in a variety of locations.
Hollywood—the Hollywood industrial system—no longer prevails over an integrated
system of production, distribution and exhibition.
In a similar vein, researchers like Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams endorse a ‘re-
invention’ of film studies, revising it fundamentally in the light of this new postmodern,
globalized environment. For David Rodowick, digital technology means that film is no
longer the ‘pre-eminent modern medium’. For other film theorists, this new situation pro-
vides additional opportunities for revising the history of film as one episode in a longer,
more diverse history of audiovisual ‘moving images’. Focusing selectively on key accounts
of the perceived ‘crisis’, Andrew Spicer sets out to explore debates about the ‘nature of film
itself ’, film’s relationship with other practices of looking, and finally with visual culture.
Recent film history has examined film’s contribution to the social and cultural
changes associated with the rise of modernity. New visual technology, restless move-
ment and urban spectacle were combined by early cinema, and regarded as quintessen-
tially modern. Indeed the appearance of regulated ‘industrialized time’ and capitalist
work practices formed the background to the cinema’s capacity to capture and organize
the ephemeral and the quotidian.
Studies by Tom Gunning, Vanessa Schwartz and Ben Singer locate early cinema
amidst the emerging ‘society of the spectacle’ and a newly mobilized sensory environ-
ment of ‘shocks, fragmentation and superabundance of sensation.’ Miriam Hansen
points out both the specificity of classical Hollywood film, and its success as the first
‘global sensory vernacular’, an aesthetic counterpoint to the experience of mass indus-
trial society. Anne Friedberg sets cinema in the context of a ‘mobilized virtual gaze’, a
characteristic perceptual form of modernity and ultimately of postmodernity.
Replacing an earlier unqualified enthusiasm for new media, recent studies have
stressed the complex interplay between analogue and digital technologies. Both main-
stream and experimental films have been made using digital formats, for reasons of both
cost and aesthetic potential, with the latter often focussed on post-production editing.
While the Hollywood blockbusters, characterized by expensive action sequences and
special effects, are still globally important, other forms of cinema have arisen, hence the
interest of film studies in a new, decentred multinational system for film. Hamid Naficy
notes the rise to prominence of ‘accented cinema’, produced by displaced or diasporic
communities and circulated across national boundaries.
Editorial Introduction 399

The ways in which movies are seen and appropriated have also changed. Cinema
going remains popular, but is just one way of viewing, displaced by a variety of screen
formats and forms in which a film might exist, from DVD to the Internet. ‘Home cin-
ema’ may well become a predominant form of film consumption, catering for new ways
of being a fan or a connoisseur. Some observers argue that the interactive potential of
digital technology is leading to the empowerment of audiences, or at least to a greater
market voice.
Laura Mulvey has suggested that the ease with which moving images may now be
frozen restores to film the ‘weighty presence of passing time’ that André Bazin and Ro-
land Barthes associated with the epistemology of the photograph.
Turning to the aesthetic impact of digital film technology, Spicer discusses Lev
Manovich’s analysis of the changing ontology of the moving image. Situated at the con-
fluence of computing and media technologies, digital film should be understood as an
‘expressive, graphic medium’, akin to painting, or ‘a particular case of animation that
uses live-action footage as one of its many elements’. Analogue film’s technique of mon-
tage and cut has been replaced by digitalized composition and morphing.
Spicer suggests that the surface detail made possible by digitalization and the com-
bination of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and live action have been exploited to
blur the difference between ‘immediacy’ and ‘hyper-mediacy’, the ‘real’ and spectacle in
an aesthetics of ‘surface play and immersive spectacle rather than intelligibility’.
More radical experiments with digital aesthetics are conducted by avant-garde prac-
tices bringing together different cultural locations: filmmaking, music, video, street art,
club events and video installations in galleries. Digital technologies lend themselves to
eclectic hybridization and the forging of new connections. Among the better-known di-
rectors creating new work across different platforms are David Lynch and Peter Green-
away, but Spicer also points to the success of ‘The Matrix’ franchise, not so much a film
genre as an ‘evolving cultural entity’, an instance of ‘metacinema’. What this demon-
strates, according to Spicer, is that while a particular form of cinema may be over, in its
new, multiple forms film ‘continues to be a crucial component of art and popular cul-
ture in the digital age’.
Digital visual images may be as important to the visual experience of postmoder-
nity as analogue cinema was to the representation of modernity. However, do changes
in moving image technology and practices of viewing amount to the end of film as a
coherent cultural form, offering to the spectator distinctive features and qualities, as
David Rodowick has suggested? As digital images seem more remote and are less de-
pendent on the prior existence of material, temporal things, they may discourage the
‘sensuous exploration of the physical world and the material structure of everyday life’
that were important to photography and film. However the ‘crisis’ of film is mirrored
by related crises elsewhere in the wider culture; indeed the very term ‘digital’ often
seem a designation of ‘crisis and transition’. Arguments about the integrity of film
studies or its submergence in a new visual culture studies giving precedence to digital
visuality are another expression of current uncertainties. For Spicer, the opening of
film studies to a broader, more inclusive historical, technical and aesthetic context is
400 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

important for research into film specifically, but also to the quality of a dynamic, in-
terdisciplinary visual culture.
In conclusion, Spicer argues that film and film studies are experiencing a ‘threshold
moment’, with researchers having to confront and question fundamental presupposi-
tions. Some of the most useful work is examining in empirical and experiential detail
how new technologies operate and what practices of viewing they stimulate. In light
of the declining centrality of the Hollywood system, we should also expect new stud-
ies of transnational or global cinema, as well as work on film as one component of
complex, multiple and rapidly changing forms and networks made possible by digital
media.
Connecting directly with the practice and theory of landscape architecture, as well
as more broadly addressing the social and aesthetic impact of the built environment,
Kathryn Moore argues for a need to change prevailing approaches to perception itself,
particularly with respect to traditional assumptions about the role of visual perception
in social life.
In the context of design practice, Moore suggests that there has been a growing
awareness that the natural and built environment has a profound effect upon economic
growth and upon many aspects of the quality of life. This recognition is also evidenced
in the policies of governments internationally, with Moore citing as examples enlight-
ened housing and landscape projects in the Netherlands, the Midlands area of the UK
and Costa Rica. It also informs projects that cut across the conventional divide between
the artistic and ecological, as well as democratic political initiatives furthering the idea
of ‘landscape rights’. Here the traditional separation of environment, architecture, aes-
thetics and human experience has become blurred.
Moore argues that by neglecting landscape, landscape architecture and architectural
practice overlook an important dimension of modern life, its experiential value or ‘lived’
quality. In coming to terms with these complexities visual culture studies can learn from
the emergent holistic strategies addressing the challenges of ‘industrialization, urbaniza-
tion, energy, demographic shifts and changing patterns of work and habitation, as well
as climate change, the depletion of natural resources, de/forestation, problems relating
to food production, biodiversity, heritage, a host of issues relating to the quality of life
and other aspects of land use change and development’.
Blocking such changes, in Moore’s view, reflects weaknesses in the philosophical basis
of design practice, and more particularly a misunderstanding of the centrality of percep-
tion and lived experience in architectural praxis. The individual and collective factors
involved in the making of good design have been subject to a misleading dichotomy,
between ineffable subjectivity on the one hand and techno-scientific problem solving
on the other. Moore’s critique from the point of view of design practice raises questions
about ideas of perception prevailing in visual studies. Moore thus recommends a ‘prag-
matic, holistic approach to consciousness and perception’.
Moore argues that sense perception, or the kind of organized awareness and reflec-
tion that takes place at least partly through the medium of seeing and looking, has been
subject to contradictory assessments. In some accounts it is seen as primitive, instinctive
Editorial Introduction 401

and unpredictable when compared with, say, the cool rationalism of verbal thinking.
Often this view is connected to the idea of sensory specialization, which Moore argues
is obviously fallacious when it comes to unified character of everyday perception. As the
American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observes, to think of ‘sensory inputs’ as
‘synthesized’ is already to have made a fundamental mistake. For Moore, the isolation
of the senses encourages not only an overestimation of the ‘sovereign’ powers of vision,
but eventually also ‘ocularphobia’, in which vision is accused of a wide variety of cogni-
tive and ethical failures.
The underlying problem of the aesthetic, according to Moore, is the inevitable fail-
ure of the aspiration to ‘see’ beauty directly and without presuppositions, and the conse-
quent descent of critical judgement into forms of subjective preference. This has many
harmful implications for art and design pedagogy, which Moore describes.
Following the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty and others, Moore argues
that mistakes, problems and disputes about the visual and so-called visual thinking can
be simply removed by refusing to divide consciousness into different modes or concep-
tual spheres: ‘all thinking, whether in the arts or sciences is therefore interpretative and
metaphorical’, and hence ‘linguistic’. Presumably, however, the notion of ‘language’ at
work here would privilege neither oral speech nor written text along the lines of received
understandings of language. Moore suggests that refusing to separate awareness of the
world into insular spheres of consciousness solves many intractable problems and helps
secure a more robust, common-sense realism.
Moore outlines some of the consequences of rethinking perception, discussing in
particular truth, visual skills, aesthetics and objectivity. Turning to the design process,
she reviews the implications for theory and the generation of form (a key design skill)
and the basis of design discourse.
In conclusion, Moore emphasizes how theorists can learn from practice, specifically
a practice that avoids compartmentalizing its different aspects. The ambition of design
practice should be to bring to bear all aspects of the social and cultural context for land-
scape and architecture. However, the resources offered by current discourse may well be
deficient. Certainly Moore thinks that the language available for talking about public
spaces needs a more ‘differentiated vocabulary’. Abandoning current ideas about percep-
tion will improve design teaching and practice, enabling designers to ‘connect special
strategies to real places’ through the development and application of new ideas.
The research theme that Martin Hand sets out to explore rests on the view that we
live in an increasingly visualized culture, not simply because of the ubiquity and power
of images and imaging technology but because of the use of images and visual artefacts
in the production and mobilization of commodities. Consumer culture is thus thor-
oughly pervaded by social relations of design, marketing and branding.
With the coming of modern consumer culture there is an increasingly more em-
phatic connection between visual culture and the consumption of commodities. In very
general terms, ‘consumerism’ has replaced ‘productionism’ in the logic of contemporary
capitalism, and as a consequence, social-cultural life has been ‘aestheticised’. Not sur-
prisingly most work focussing on consumption in visual culture has been preoccupied
402 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

by advertising, and this relates to what Hand sees as the central question of all social-sci-
entific studies of consumer culture: the capacity of consumers to act as agents. He sug-
gests that studies of consumer culture and visual culture have much to offer one another,
although both confront new theoretical and methodological challenges emerging from
processes of global digitalization.
The idea that contemporary culture is a ‘consumer culture’ has become a common-
place of modern sociology. Application of semiotics encouraged the idea that the con-
sumption of things was secondary to the consumption of images built into products
by sophisticated designers, marketeers and advertisers, and that such consumption pat-
terns had become indispensable to the formation and projection of identities. The re-
sult of this sociological and cultural turn was that the empirical study of consumption
has tended to be predominantly culturalist. More recent consumer theory is the re-
sult of three shifts. First, commodities are now visualized in new ways. This is particu-
larly evident in the exponential growth of the advertising industry. Second, changes in
marketing and branding have to some extent undermined the priority of the visual.
Third, digitalization has affected consumption profoundly, for some even threatening
the ‘death’ of advertising.
Hand argues that analyses of ‘visual consumption’ and approaches to consumption
generally within visual studies have overemphasized the importance of the visual and
the symbolic, to the detriment of a more nuanced account in which visuality is treated
as one element among other material and sensory features and practices. As with Dant’s
argument about the challenges faced by material culture, Hand suggests that we need
new ways of thinking in dealing with the materiality of everyday life.
To this end he turns to well-known critiques of consumer culture, typically decrying
its supposed visual emphasis through which anxious, avaricious consumers are created,
and a shallow culture of images frustrates the promise of a society based on authen-
tic human values. For Hand, research in visual consumption remains dominated by a
monolithic idea of the technologically or economically determined disappearance of
‘reality’ into ‘spectacle’.
Researchers have recognized the changing social significance of the commodity-sign.
While the capacity of consumers to interpret the class and status connotations of com-
modities seems to have become more important, the bewildering array of choices and
messages makes competence problematic, resulting in what Zygmunt Bauman has called
a world of ‘flawed consumers’.
The advent of digitalization, particularly the digital photograph and the proliferation
of ‘virtual’ images whose relationship with their objects is uncertain, is taken to widen
the gap between viewer and the world. A key idea here is the notion that goods have a
predominantly ‘visual face’, the presentation of which has been primarily photographic.
Hence, photography has been the most important visualizing tool employed by adver-
tisers and marketeers. It has also been argued that the image of a commodity now often
precedes its production, with brand management seeking to orchestrate product identi-
ties and meanings.
Hand reviews changes in advertising research, with more recent accounts stressing the
active consumer, the possibility of different consumption practices, and the inescapable
Editorial Introduction 403

problems of choice and possible error, with consequences for the construction and presen-
tation of consuming selves. While much visual advertising invokes an active, rational agent
as its addressee, critics suggest that the range of choices on offer is narrow and predeter-
mined according to corporate interests. While there are well-known theoretical and meth-
odological difficulties in proving the direct power of advertising over consumer behaviour,
nevertheless Hand concludes that advertising shapes the ‘visual terrain of consumption by
encouraging consumers to identify with particular images of lifestyle’.
The history of advertising formats provided by William Leiss, Stephen Klein and
Sut Jhally usefully charts the development of advertising in relation to socioeconomic
change. While early advertisers stressed the self-evident value of the product or its pro-
gressive, modern characteristics, ‘totemic’ or ‘narcissistic’ life-style connotations pervade
later commodity images. The late-twentieth century saw the rise of global branding
where product-imagery and personalized life-style formulae combine to constitute the
more differentiated (or perhaps fragmented) ‘postmodern consumer’. Advertisers reflec-
tively acknowledge and incorporate what consumers ‘know’, their cultural and aesthetic
competencies in the context of a highly fluid and rapidly changing field that branding
tries to ‘manage’. As Celia Lury has pointed out, brands become not only ‘practices’ but
also ‘new media objects’, replacing products and consumers. In this context visual ap-
pearances become one dimension of an array of sensory and textual features, including
material qualities and characteristics, to create identities, presence and the experiential
effects of life-style and ‘authenticity’.
Hand turns next to the relationship between visual aspects of consumption and digi-
talization. Much research concerned with the impact of digital technology appears to
accept that contemporary society has become pervasively cultural and ‘visual’. Modern
and postmodern life has been thoroughly aestheticized. The image has become not only
the means but also the end of consumption. With economic globalization the com-
mercial penetration of an increasingly visual culture has been accelerated and deepened
through the new digital technologies. However, while some theorists stress the ‘demate-
rialized’ image, others propose the appearance of ‘lively’ and interactive media formats.
Global digitalization facilitates the ‘voluntaristic production of visual culture by con-
sumers’, with blogging Web sites, YouTube and user-generated photographic archives
like Flickr being prominent platforms. Researchers have drawn attention to the erosion
of the boundary between amateur and professional image-making, the development of
‘user-friendly’ creative software, and the potential of digital equipment for a growing
‘craft’ orientation among ordinary, nonspecialist image practitioners.
These changes produce contradictory phenomena. On the one hand the new geo-
ecology of proliferating, mutating images makes it difficult to know ‘who’ produces, distrib-
utes or owns an image. On the other hand image rights have become critical for maintain-
ing older producer-consumer relations and profit margins. Digital imaging as an instance of
mobile and convergent media combine with other digitalized data flows and raise profound
theoretical, practical, ethical and commercial problems, prompting a radical questioning of
visual culture as a ‘field of representation’. Hand also notes the paradox of increasing con-
sumer participation on the one hand alongside the commercial use of software that sorts,
classifies and codes behaviour into different life-style categories on the other.
404 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Hand concludes his survey by arguing that theory and research in the field of vi-
sual culture has hitherto elided the diversity and specificity of consumption practices.
Faced with the inadequacy of these models we need more realistic accounts of actual
consumption patterns, especially ‘a more nuanced consideration of the ways in which
images are acquired, interpreted, used, and increasingly co-created by situated consum-
ers, in relation to historically and socioeconomically defined contexts’. In moving away
from traditional models of representation and commoditization, and towards emergent
forms of co-production or ‘prosumption’, theory is simply responding to the changing
practices of consumers, or what Hand refers to as the ‘rematerialization of culture in
digital terms’.
 16

Looking Sharp: Fashion

Studies
Malcolm Barnard

Fashion and clothing construct, reproduce and challenge all kinds of identity and they
do so visually and immediately. The meanings of the visual here, the meanings of what
people are wearing, are quickly learned and readily understood by all members of all cul-
tures: learning and understanding those meanings may even be said to be the conditions
for membership of those cultures. So, for example within seconds of seeing or meeting
someone we make a series of judgements concerning identity and culture, about who
they are and whether we will have anything in common with them, on the basis of what
they are wearing. Rarely, if ever, do we wonder what people mean by the things they
wear or dismiss garments as meaningless: meaning and identity are constructed, negoti-
ated and understood constantly in visual fashion. The centrality of fashion and clothing
to the concerns of this collection (the concern with visuality, meaning, identity, soci-
ety and culture), should not need emphasizing. Social and cultural identity and social
and cultural status, including those identities and statuses that are to do with gender,
class, sexuality and ethnicity, are constructed, negotiated and challenged visually, in
and through what we wear. Similarly, our sense of self, and our understandings of our
own bodies, are also produced and tested visually by the things with which we adorn,
decorate, display, hide and protect our bodies—fashion and clothing. In raising con-
cerns such as these, fashion is at once an extremely ancient, a completely modern and
a thoroughly postmodern phenomenon. What people wear has always constructed and
indicated social and cultural status and what people wear is now part of a postmodern
and globalizing economy in which the relation of identity to consumption is readily or
functionally understood by almost everyone, even if not everyone is ready to critically
analyse and explain that relation.
This chapter will include everyday clothing, or dress, as well as fashion in its account
of fashion studies. It is possible to argue, as Adam Smith argued in the eighteenth century,
406 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

that the term ‘fashion’ includes everything to which the concept of taste is relevant or
may be applied and that it therefore includes music, poetry, architecture and furniture
(Smith 2006: 194). It is also possible to argue, with Baudrillard in the twentieth cen-
tury, that fashion includes all consumer goods and our own bodies, as well as the things
that we wear (Baudrillard 1993: 87). Following Fernand Braudel (Braudel 1981: 328),
Lars Svendsen goes so far as to wonder whether philosophy and even thought itself are
ruled by the cycles of fashion and one does not have to be very cynical to begin to agree
with him when he suggests that academics have their ‘in’ subjects and their ‘sexy’ ap-
proaches (Svendsen 2006: 15). And it would be possible to concentrate on what some
people think of as ‘high fashion’, expensive or exclusive items of clothing that are pro-
duced by high-status, high-profile and famously named designers. Such a version of
fashion would include, but not be exhausted by, haute couture production and the pro-
duction centred around places such as Savile Row in London or the Garment District in
Manhattan, New York. However, this chapter will side with those who argue (Hollander
1994: 11; Barnard 2007: 3) that fashion also and most interestingly includes ‘what peo-
ple wear’; fashion is also what everyone wears to go about their everyday lives at work, at
leisure and at rest. A concern for the everyday and for what everyone does every day is it-
self a significant product of the processes that led to the establishment of fashion studies
in the first place and that concern is hardly to be ignored. Finally, we should consider the
argument that it is impossible to buy clothes (or any other products), for everyday use
that are not fashion in the sense of being fashionable: this is because everything in the
shops is new and of its time and to that extent everything is fashionable. Consequently,
this chapter will use fashion to refer to the garments and other things that people all over
the world wear every day and it will include catwalk and haute couture creations as well
as the items on every High Street and in every mall and catalogue.
This chapter will call the collection of disciplines and approaches that make up the
study of fashion ‘fashion studies’ and we shall see that that collection of disciplines and
approaches will include fashion history, the sociology of fashion, anthropology, cultural
studies, history, art history, design history, psychology, psychoanalysis, gender studies
and queer studies.
There will be three main sections to this chapter. The first will identify and explain
the origins of scholarly and other interests in what we wear and it will chart the early
history and development of those interests. Early descriptions and explanations of fash-
ion were coloured by the interests of other forms of visual analysis: art history and visual
anthropology, in particular, informed nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts
of what people wore. The second section will be the main section and it will account
for the approaches and perspectives that have been most prevalent over the last ten to
twenty years. Art historical preoccupations with visual style and anthropological inter-
ests in non-Western cultures developed via cultural studies and feminism into a series of
concerns with identity and meaning. The role of the visual, fashion, in constructing and
negotiating meaning and identity became central to fashion studies while, oddly, the vi-
sual itself was pushed to the sideline. The third section will consider some of the interests
that have occupied fashion studies more recently and which look set to continue to hold
Looking Sharp 407

our attention. This section will indicate how the specifically visual in fashion has become
subordinate to another set of themes and concerns. These concerns are predominantly
to do with the environment and globalization but they also include the unapologetically
economic: the business and commercial sides of the fashion and clothing industries are
increasingly the object of fashion studies.

History and Origins

This section will give some indication of the history and origins of modern interests in
fashion by charting the contributions of art history, sociology and anthropology to the
analysis of what people wear.
The art historian Rudoph Wittkower was in no doubt that art history is the ‘mother
discipline’ of all other fields of study (Weinshenker 2008) and we may be less than sur-
prised to find that early fashion studies do indeed owe much to certain strands of art
history. Those strands are concerned with connoisseurship and style and they are both
the product and the reproduction of a popular conception of fashion as ‘art’. It is clear
that one of the many pseudonyms for fashion is style and it is natural that fashion stud-
ies should look to art history for an account of style and for the concerns of art history
to permeate early fashion studies in this way. The relation to connoisseurship derives
from the need of fashion historians to be able to date items of clothing. Often their only
source would be the paintings the clothes appeared in and the experts in dating paint-
ings were, of course, art historians (see Breward 1995: 1–3). There is also the relation
to beauty and the attempt to define or explain it that unites early fashion studies and
art history. Writing about both art and fashion in 1859, Charles Baudelaire argues that
there is a double aspect to beauty. There is an ‘eternal invariable element’ and there is a
‘relative circumstantial element’. The latter is ephemeral and fashion, but without it the
former eternal element is impossible to appreciate (Baudelaire 1995: 3).
Charles Baudelaire provides a commentary on the French version of Dandyism in
his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, suggesting that it is aristocratic, cold and
founded on a ‘personal originality’ to make a ‘cult of the self ’ (Baudelaire 1995: 27).
Fashion itself is described as ‘a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the sur-
face of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac’ (1995: 33). His account can
be compared with that of Thomas Carlyle, who describes the Dandy (see Figure 16.1) as
someone who ‘lives to dress’ and who dresses in order that the public ‘recognise his exis-
tence’ (Carlyle 1987: 207). Baudelaire’s account of fashion may be compared with that
of H. G. Wells, who has one of his characters say that fashion is ‘the foam on the ocean
of vulgarity’ (Wells 1895: 17).
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropology took an early interest in what
people wore, describing the dress of non-Western cultures in the search for answers to
the questions surrounding why people wear clothes. Around the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, the functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky was arguing that
protection from the elements was the reason for clothing in humans (see Rouse 1989:
2–3). The anthropologists Ernest Crawley and Hilaire Hiler, writing in the 1920s and
408 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Figure 16.1 Irena Sedlecká, Beau Brummell, 2002, bronze, Jermyn Street, London. Photograph:
Mike Smith.

1930s, also studied what they called ‘primitive’ cultures in order to understand why
they wore what they wore in terms of decoration and adornment (see Laver 1969: 1–4).
These interests are reproduced today in Justine Cordwell and Ronald Schwartz’s (1979)
edited collection The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, in
which they comprehensively enumerate and describe the various functions of fashion
and dress. These writings lead to Judith Barnes and Joanne Eicher’s (1993) collection
Dress and Gender, which takes an anthropological interest in the ways that different,
non-Western cultures organize and communicate gender roles by means of what is worn.
And Ted Polhemus and Lynn Proctor’s work, in their (1978) Fashion and Anti-Fashion:
An Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment, provides a slight change in disciplinary ap-
proach in that it tries to provide anthropological explanations of what Western people
wear as fashion.
The sociologist Rene Koenig actually takes something of a psychoanalytic approach
in parts of his (1973) The Restless Image, explaining the impulses driving fashion as sco-
pophilia and exhibitionism (1973: 81–3). Thorstein Veblen’s (2007) The Theory of the
Leisure Class, written in 1899, is the classic source for the sociological idea that fashion,
in the form of conspicuous consumption (1992: 60), is used by the highest social classes
Looking Sharp 409

to indicate that they have no need to work and that they can afford to wear items that
actually render them incapable of productive labour (1992: 118). This theory has been
enormously influential and much subsequent writing may be seen as either a develop-
ment or a diversion from it. Indeed, Quentin Bell’s On Human Finery, written in 1939,
opens with a large quote from Veblen and the assertion that it is ‘the most valuable con-
tribution yet made to the philosophy of clothes’ (Bell 1976: 15). Writing a few years
after Veblen in 1904, Georg Simmel differs slightly in his account when he says that,
while fashion is the preserve of the upper classes, the lower classes are left to copy those
fashions: having done this, the upper classes must find some novel way of distinguish-
ing themselves in what they wear and as Simmel says, ‘the game goes merrily on’ (Levine
1971: 299). The so-called trickle-down theory of fashion is also found in Polhemus
(1994) and McCracken (1985).

Main Perspectives and Approaches

Many of the early concerns of fashion studies were informed by a curious mix of ‘old
school’ art history and anthropology. More recently, many of the main perspectives and
approaches have come from cultural studies, which itself may be viewed as a form of
anthropology, and art history has in turn changed to take on many of the concerns of
cultural studies.
It is largely agreed that the study of fashion and clothing is or should be interdis-
ciplinary. The historian Fernand Braudel, the art historian Lisa Tickner and Elizabeth
Wilson, who adopts a wide-ranging cultural studies type approach to fashion, are all
agreed that there is a range of disciplines in terms of which fashion and clothing may
be studied. Braudel tends towards the economic in the following quote but insists that
‘the study of costume is less anecdotal than it would appear. It touches on every issue:
raw materials, production processes, manufacturing costs, cultural stability, fashion and
social hierarchy’ (Braudel 1981: 311). To the economics of production and manufacture
he adds important social, cultural and political themes. In her groundbreaking 1977
essay on women and trousers, which deals with gender as well as social and cultural
history, Tickner lists many disciplines without which fashion studies would be incom-
plete. She says that fashion studies is a ‘rich and multidisciplinary subject and a point
at which history, economics, anthropology, sociology and psychology could be said to
meet’ (Tickner 1977: 56). And, although it would be easy to argue that she adopts and
makes use of many more approaches than she lists, Wilson says that aesthetics, social
theory and politics are some of the approaches we must adopt when studying fashion
and clothing (Wilson (1985) 2003: 11).
The history of fashion studies begins in the 1960s, when cultural studies and femi-
nism collided and began to transform the humanities and social sciences. Of course, peo-
ple had noticed fashion and clothing before then and they had written about them before
then (see McNeil 2008; Purdy 2004, for example), but the serious, analytical and, most
important, critical study of fashion and clothing really only took off in a sustained and
institutionally sanctioned manner in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This new approach
410 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

to fashion studies as such can be outlined under the topic headings it developed: object-
based studies, history and fashion, identity, semiology and meaning, the visual aspects of
fashion, consumption and production, and the body.

Object-based Studies
There are probably two ways of approaching object-based studies of clothing and fash-
ion. The first is through a methodological and almost ideological commitment to ‘the
object’, where ‘the object’ is conceived as a legitimate and even unfairly neglected aspect
of such studies. Such an approach is perhaps best represented by the work of Lou Taylor
in dress and costume history. The second is where an object is concentrated upon, but
with no commitment to it as a methodologically privileged item. Such approaches are
seen in the work of Valerie Steele (2001) and David Kunzle (2006) on the corset, and in
that of Daniel Miller on the Little Black Dress (Miller 2004).
In her (1998) reassessment of object-based dress history, for example Taylor notes
the ‘hostility’ of the male curators of the museum which went on to become the Victo-
ria and Albert Museum towards collections of dress and suggests that such ‘prejudice’
became enshrined within the museum’s collecting policies in the nineteenth century
(1998: 337–8). She describes a division between (predominantly male) academics and
museum curators on the one hand and (largely female) devotees of object-based research
on the other (1998: 339). Taylor notes the way in which the economists Ben Fine and
Ellen Leopold (1993) ‘dismiss’ the work of a series of women dress historians who rely
on the detailed description of dress and clothing. She defends the historians’ approach
by arguing that the cultural, social and economic readings of Fine and Leopold are only
made possible on the basis of the ‘information’ gained through the ‘meticulous study’
of these details (Taylor 1998: 348). The argument has to be, of course, that the descrip-
tions and the ‘information’ are always-already culturally loaded; they are themselves the
products of social, economic and cultural positions and not some neutral and objective
descriptions or ‘information’. It is not so much a gendered hostility and prejudice that
disposes many against object-based studies as the idea that the empiricist belief in objec-
tive observations and descriptions of facts has no answer to the argument that facts and
observations are the products of theories and as such not objective descriptions.
For what it is worth, Steele (1998) presents her own version of object-based studies
in the same edition of Fashion Theory and, although she adds a positivist belief in the
difference between facts and hypotheses, she makes essentially the same move as Tay-
lor makes by presupposing that neutral and objective observations are possible, and the
basis for theoretical explanations.

History
Chronological versions of fashion and dress history, where the only tale being told takes
the form of a time-line, are not as prevalent as might be feared. James Laver’s (1969)
Costume and Fashion: A Concise History, is probably as near as one will get. He begins
Looking Sharp 411

his ostensibly descriptive history of what people wear with the loin-cloth worn by the
Venus of Lespugue, a figurine dating from around 2800 bc and ends it with Donna
Karan’s 1994 sportswear collection. Cultural identities along with political positions
and values are regularly to be found in this account. The Teddy Boys of the 1950s pre-
cede Hippies, who appeared in the 1960s, and who are in turn succeeded by Punks in
the 1970s. They are not united in a conscious account of fashion and class, for example,
but the politics and cultural values of these groups are inevitably hinted at: the Teddy
Boys’ style is explained in terms of the new affluence of working-class men and their
increasingly confident visual presence (1969: 260); Hippies are said to ‘reject’ Western
consumerism (268) and Punks are anarchic and shocking (270). Any idea that what is
being presented as a commonsense history of dress and fashion here is not a constructed
bourgeois consensus is completely avoided.
It may strike some as odd that Fernand Braudel, who was quoted above in support
of interdisciplinarity, appears in the same section as Laver. Braudel was a member of the
French Annales School of history writing, which deals with very long periods of time
and the persistence of deep structures over those long periods, rather than the relatively
short periods, changes and differences dealt with by other historical approaches. How-
ever, there is an entire chapter in volume 1 of Braudel’s major work Civilisation and
Capitalism that is devoted to the conditions for the possibility of fashion and to the ways
that it changes. Braudel says, for example that in stable societies and among the poor,
there is and can be no fashion (1981: 312–3). Tellingly, perhaps, Braudel spends some
time himself charting the social and economic conditions for the possibility of fashion
and describing some societies in which fashion either does not exist or in which what
people wear changes infinitesimally and very slowly before turning to Europe. ‘We can
now’, he says, ‘approach the Europe of the rich and of changing fashions without risk of
losing ourselves in its caprices’ (1981: 315); only then can fashion in the Europe of be-
tween around 1350 and the end of the eighteenth century be analysed and explained.
Anne Hollander’s approach in her (1993) Seeing through Clothes, like those of Laver
and Braudel, is also to cover a long period of time. She begins with the clothed statues
of ancient Greece and Rome and ends with advertisements, photographs and shop win-
dows from the 1970s. Her approach, however, is not chronological. Rather the relation
between visual representation (in sculpture, painting and photography, for example),
the body and the clothes the body wears is analysed into different categories: the rep-
resentation of the clothed and unclothed body in statues and sculpture is covered as
‘drapery’, before ‘nudity’ is distinguished from ‘undress’ and theatrical ‘costume’ is dis-
tinguished from ‘dress’. Finally, the various forms of mirroring and mirrored representa-
tion are covered.
In her account of the effects of changing cultural values on the representation of
women’s legs in paintings, Hollander points out that Rembrandt’s women, who have
never learned how to display their bare legs elegantly in seventeenth-century Dutch
public life, are unselfconscious and inelegant. Goya’s naked Maja of 1800, however,
knows exactly how to display her legs to best erotic effect, having worn lightweight
and narrow skirts in public life. And the women in William Bailey’s twentieth-century
412 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

paintings, who are most accustomed to wearing trousers, borrow a ‘“natural” sprawl’
from men, with ‘knees at angles and noticeable feet’ (Hollander 1993: 91–3). Where
Steele and Taylor deny the role of cultural values and ‘perspectives’ on the perception
and understanding of dress and fashion, Hollander explicitly identifies the different cul-
tures, along with their values and practices, and explains how the latter mediate the for-
mer. The meanings of the bodies of the clothed and unclothed people appearing in the
sculptures, paintings and photographs that Hollander describes are explained as being
produced by the cultural values and locations of artists and spectators.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass consciously move these hermeneutic con-
cerns to centre stage when they consider the history of Renaissance dress and fashion.
They say that, in order to ‘understand the significance of clothes in the Renaissance, we
need to undo our own social categories’ (2000: 2). The beliefs and values that modern
readers hold, simply as a result of being modern readers, from a different cultural time
and place, are here conceived as a problem, an obstacle in the way of understanding
what fashion meant to fifteenth-century Europeans. One of the ideas that modern read-
ers may have trouble with is the idea, found in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2, that fash-
ion may be worn ‘deeply’. When Hal sees and understands his brothers’ sadness at the
death of their father, they point out that he assumes or takes on that sorrow as though
it were a garment: ‘I will deeply put the fashion on, / And weare it in my heart’, he says.
This is, as Jones and Stallybrass put it, ‘challenging’ to a modern audience who will be
used to thinking about fashion as a superficial, surface effect: to a fifteenth-century audi-
ence it will indicate the idea that clothes ‘permeate the wearer’ making them what they
are (Jones and Stallybrass 2000). In this case, even the meaning of the word ‘fashion’,
with its Old Testament undertones of God’s hands ‘fashioning’ mankind, is different for
modern readers from what it is for Renaissance readers. There is, then, a wide range of
historical approaches to the study of fashion and dress, from the naively empiricist to the
reflexively sophisticated hermeneutic.

Identity
The ways in which what people wear construct and communicate identity through the
things that they wear are absolutely central to a lot of work in fashion studies. As Diana
Crane says, ‘fashion . . . performs a major role in the social construction of identity’
(Crane 2000: 1). Fred Davis (1992) complicates the ways in which fashion and dress
relate to identity by exploring the ways in which cultural, gender and class identities are
in fact ambivalences; he argues that it is these ambivalences that drive fashion. A com-
prehensive introduction to most aspects of fashion, dress and identity can be found in
Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins et al.’s (1995) Dress and Identity. This huge collection covers
fashion and identity from the perspectives of the individual and the psychological, the
social and cultural as well as from those of time and place. The present section will sur-
vey the main categories: class, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and age.
Given that many people argue that fashion is only possible in the sorts of societies
that have social classes and social hierarchies, it is not surprising that class is an important
Looking Sharp 413

part of fashion studies (see Baudrillard 1993: 89; Barnard (1996) 2003: 102ff). Adrian
Forty explains fashionable change in terms of class in his Objects of Desire. He describes
how the higher social classes in the late-eighteenth century would wear printed cottons,
because at this time machine production and colour technologies were costly and time-
consuming and printed cottons were expensive to produce. The higher classes could
therefore use them, in good Veblenian style, to distinguish themselves from the lower
orders. As the industrial revolution progressed, however, print and colour technologies
got cheaper and quicker and the lower orders found that they too could afford printed
cottons. The higher classes therefore went back to wearing plain cottons, loftily dismiss-
ing printed cottons as ‘vulgar’ and ‘common’ (Forty 1986: 73–5).
In her essay on working-class affluence and the New Look, Angela Partington de-
scribes the ways in which women of her own mother’s generation and social class adapted
and adopted Christian Dior’s New Look of 1947. These women would use less mate-
rial and less expensive materials, they would tone down the sexiness of the look and
they would incorporate elements of the earlier shirt-waister dresses, but they created for
themselves an unofficial and class-specific version of the New Look that satisfied their
needs (Partington 1992). Diana Crane’s (2000) Fashion and Its Social Agendas explains
the origins of class as something to be signalled by what people wear in the industrial
revolution, when new social classes were created and what they wore became significant.
Crane distances herself from Veblen and Simmel’s ‘top-down’ theories of fashion and
complicates the account by adding gender to the mix; she also suggests that modernity
and globalization involve a move from class to consumer fashions.
There is an enormous literature on gender and fashion. Adolf Loos’s (1998) explana-
tions of men’s and women’s fashion, written around the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth century, are definitely gendered. In ‘Men’s Fashion’,
he says that changes in men’s fashions are driven by the desire for aristocratic elegance,
and comes close to echoing Veblen’s account, in which the lower orders strive to emulate
their social betters by wearing what they are wearing. In his essay ‘Women’s Fashion’,
however, he takes an almost Rudofskian approach. Rudofsky is well known for explain-
ing the changes in what women wear in terms of biology and natural selection, argu-
ing that they are a product of a biological need to attract and keep a sexual partner (see
Rouse 1989: 11).
Lisa Tickner takes an interdisciplinary approach to gender and dress in her (1977)
essay ‘Women and Trousers’. In this essay Tickner is interested in what different cultural
and gender groups of people think about women wearing trousers and to that extent she
is writing a cultural history of the garment. However, she is also interested in women’s
social roles in the twentieth century and the ways in which women’s work and leisure
habits changed: to that extent she is writing a social history of the garment. Lee Wright’s
(1989) essay on stiletto heels concentrates on the meanings that the shoes had for the
women who wore them and for the army of disapproving male ‘experts’ who saw fit to
comment on the heels. To the young, independent women wearing them, they meant
dissatisfaction with existing gender roles, glamour and rebellion (1989: 14). To the male
‘experts’ they represented a different sort of challenge; pavements and aircraft floors had
414 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

to be reinforced against the damage the heels were doing and medical doctors warned of
the damage wearing them would do to tender female bones.
Chapter 6 of Elizabeth Wilson’s ((1985) 2003) Adorned in Dreams is devoted to
gender and identity. She surveys the history of fashion from around the seventeenth
century, when gender was not so strongly marked as it is today, to modern times and
argues that fashion is obsessed with gender and with drawing and redrawing the shift-
ing boundaries of gender in what people wear. While subtitled ‘Cultural Studies in
Fashion’, Jennifer Craik’s (1994) The Face of Fashion is mostly about gender. Feminin-
ity is central to most of the chapters, and especially those on fashioning women and
fashion models, but masculinity is also covered. It is made very clear that fashion,
modelling and fashion photography are powerful ways in which women are made
feminine and men are made masculine. Tim Edwards’s (1997) Men in the Mirror is
concerned with the construction of masculinity in fashion and dress. He looks at the
ways in which masculinities, including the so-called New Man of the 1980s, are con-
structed, consumed and reproduced in and through men’s magazines, advertising, and
men’s experiences of shopping. Anne Hollander’s (1994) Sex and Suits is also actually
mostly about gender. Within what has become known as ‘queer studies’, Shaun Cole’s
(2000) Don We Now Our Gay Apparel is probably the best source for a cultural histori-
cal account of gay men’s dress. This book explains various effeminate and masculine
gay male stereotypes as well as gay men’s relations to subcultures such as hippies, bik-
ers and punks. The use of dress in gay women’s relationships is introduced by Katrina
Rolley’s (1992) essay ‘Love, Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole’. The use of mascu-
line dress to signify lesbian identity and the development of ‘butch/femme’ identities
through clothing are covered.
The most influential text dealing with subculture and fashion is undoubtedly Dick
Hebdige’s (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which defines and exemplifies a pow-
erful cultural studies approach to youth culture. Hebdige explains the origins of youth
subcultures like the skinheads of the 1970s in terms of their borrowing the styles, dances
and music of Jamaican and African traditions introduced to Britain in the 1970s and
in terms of an aping of supposedly working-class white values of the time. He also uses
terms such as ‘hegemony’ and ‘bricolage’, borrowed from Marxist cultural studies and
French semiology respectively, to begin to explain the meaning of white youth subcul-
tures as resistance and communication. The title of David Muggleton’s (2000) Inside
Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style gives it away as a conscious theoretical re-
take and updating on Hebdige’s work. The themes of resistance and incorporation are
explicitly present here, as a critique of ‘hegemony’ but they have been joined by (or they
are now viewed through the prism of ) the postmodern. Consequently, there is now a
concern for postmodern subcultures and for the self. The work of Baudrillard and Fred-
eric Jameson has explored the disjunction between style, meaning and identity and there
are now postmodern codes, differences and consumptions.
The cultural critic Emil Wilbekin analyses black hip-hop styles and the relation of
different black communities to the higher end of fashion production in his article in
(1999) Vibe History of Hip-Hop. More recently, he has noted the appearance of black
Looking Sharp 415

models and people in fashion places where they are not often observed: in a piece on Be-
yoncé’s cover shoot for American Vogue in April 2009, he reminds us that Italian Vogue
devoted a whole issue to black women in 2008 and he recalls that Michelle Obama ap-
peared on the cover of the March 2009 American Vogue (accessed at http://giant.black
planet.com/style/beyonce-in-vogue/ April 2009). Wilbekin’s approach is from a black
history perspective, charting the place and roles of black people where they have been
underrepresented since Beverley Johnson’s first appearance on Vogue’s cover in 1974.
There are some interesting essays, from the likes of Susan Bordo and Neil Bernstein on
subjects such as Gangsta and Cool-Cat style in Mary Lynn Damhorst et al.’s (1999) The
Meanings of Dress. Edna Nahshon’s (2008) Jews and Shoes is an edited collection of es-
says that discuss shoes in terms of religious and cultural identity and look at the different
meanings that footwear has and has had for Jews.
The construction and reproduction of appropriate age-related identities is curiously
neglected in fashion studies, although there is a range of social-psychological approaches
collected in Chapters 8 and 9 of Mary Lynn Damhorst et al.’s (1999) The Meanings of
Dress. Alison Lurie devotes a chapter to the subject and points out that it was only to-
wards the end of the eighteenth century, with the work of Rousseau, that Europeans
began to see children as being very different from adults; before then, they had been seen
and treated as undersized adults and dressed accordingly. She surveys various ‘looks’: the
Kate Greenaway look, the Lord Fauntleroy look and the Sailor look, for example and
explains the phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ (Lurie 1992). Lee Wright explores an in-
teresting take on adults wearing clothes that are ‘too small’, discussing them in relation
to the idea of being young and of ‘conjuring up’ the child’s experience of growing out of
things and to the adult’s experience of power (Wright 1992). Children’s clothes are dis-
cussed in terms of gender in Cheryl Buckley’s (1996) essay. She looks at the catalogues
and advertisements and argues that while the very young are shown alone, the slightly
older are shown in company, happily replicating the gender-appropriate poses and roles
of adults. Nevertheless, she says that the patterns and the sizes of patterns used in clothes
for the very young are distinctly gendered, with the smaller and floral prints being used
in girls’ clothes and describes her own attempts as a parent to challenge and resist domi-
nant gender identities.

Semiology and Meaning

Semiological and meaning-based approaches sometimes get criticized for reducing fash-
ion and dress to meaning, but such criticisms inevitably propose a meaning themselves,
be it the body or some other experience of what is worn, and meaning is once again what
stands in need of explanation. There is a range of approaches to the explanation of mean-
ing of dress and fashion and a lot of them, including social-psychological approaches to
nonverbal communication, are surveyed and exemplified in Mary Lynn Damhorst et al.’s
The Meanings of Dress. This is a massive collection of essays and papers from a range
of perspectives. Alison Lurie (1992) takes the view that clothing is literally a language.
On this account, items of clothing are one’s vocabulary and one has a large or a small
416 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

vocabulary (1992: 4–6). Lurie also thinks that items of clothing, like words, are mean-
ingful in, or by, themselves independently of what people think of them. Meaning re-
sides in, or is a property of, the object itself on her account.
Ruth P. Rubinstein (1995) offers a slightly more sophisticated account of meaning.
Like Lurie, she thinks that clothing is a language and that there is a vocabulary of both.
Unlike Lurie she thinks that social context generates the meaning of clothing: one needs
to know the social and cultural codes in order to decode the meaning of the clothing
(1995: 7). The French semiologist Roland Barthes is also misled somewhat by the idea
that fashion is like a language. In his astonishing (1990) The Fashion System, he attempts
to provide a rigorously semiological and scientific account of how meaning in fashion is
created in fashion journalism. Colin Campbell (1997) takes rigorous, and correct, phil-
osophical issue with the whole idea that fashion might be a series of messages that are
sent and received. My own essay (2007a) also argues against the sender/receiver model
and tries to reinstate a version of Barthes’s connotation to bring culture back into the
explanation of meaning in fashion.

The Visual
Bizarrely, the visual has remained relatively neglected in fashion studies, while being held
responsible in the popular press and public opinion for creating an entire generation of
young women suffering from anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. There are too
many picture books, coffee-table books and uncritical celebrations of designers and their
beautiful productions to list, of course, but the critical analysis of the visual in fashion,
whether through drawings and illustration or photography remains curiously underrepre-
sented. Carol Di Grappa edited a fascinating and utterly forgotten book on fashion pho-
tography entitled Fashion: Theory, in which fashion photographers such as David Bailey,
Chris von Wangenheim and Arthur Elgort wrote about the relations between the techni-
cal and the aesthetic in their works (Di Grappa 1980). The essays and images collected
here begin the task of analysing the ways in which the visual, what fashion looks like and
how it works on bodies, is mediated through different kinds of photographic practices.
E. Sue Atkinson presented what she called a ‘short survey’ of fashion photography
in her 1981 essay for the British Journal of Photography. In this essay she notes the illus-
trative function of fashion photography around the beginning of the twentieth century
before moving on to begin an explanation of the rhetorical function of fashion pho-
tography as it manifests itself in advertising from the 1930s through to the 1960s and
1970s. The work of people such as Cecil Beaton in Vogue, Baron de Meyer in Vogue and
Harper’s and Edward Steichen for J. Walter Thompson and Condé Nast in the 1930s is
explained with reference to the culture and technology of their times. Bert Stern’s de-
velopment of the all-American outdoors girl for American Vogue in the 1950s and the
ways in which David Bailey promoted a slightly different kind of girl for Vogue in the
1960s are discussed in terms of gender and culture. The different gender identities of
the American and British versions of femininity are explained by saying that they are the
products of different cultural values.
Looking Sharp 417

A decade or so later Rosetta Brookes (1992) and Teal Triggs (1992) contributed es-
says on fashion photography to Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson’s collection of essays,
Chic Thrills. Brookes wonders whether Guy Bourdin’s and Helmut Newton’s ‘strange’
settings of accidents and suicides represent the ‘intrusion of a “real world” into fashion
photography’ or are ‘distanced’ by it (Brookes 1992: 19). She also notes that, if Bour-
din and Newton know they are manipulating stereotypes of femininity, then Deborah
Turbeville’s work communicates the ‘strangeness’ of the female image and its failure to
reduce to the identity of the ‘image presented by the model’ or the ‘image presented
by the picture’ (Brookes 1992: 23). Rebecca Arnold’s essay, ‘Heroin Chic’ appeared
in the September 1999 edition of Fashion Theory. Bourdin, Lang and Newton reappear in
this essay, which describes and analyses the development of a photographic and fashion
aesthetic, the ‘heroin chic’ of the title, through the 1980s and 1990s. Also published
in 1999, Paul Jobling’s Fashion Spreads also looks at fashion photography since 1980.
Kate Moss, who was one of the models associated with the ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic,
­reappears in Jobling’s book when he compares the treatment of her and of the girl in the
‘Alex Eats’ series of images produced by Anthony Gordon in the late 1980s. The book
uses Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, including those developed by Julia Kristeva, as
well as methods and concepts from gender studies.
In 2002 Berg published a special edition of its journal, Fashion Theory, on fashion
and photography. In the guest editor’s introduction, Carol Tulloch reminds us that there
is not much theoretical work written on the subject of fashion photography and says
that the collection is intended to be part of a much larger and developing body of work
pitted against the minority who still believe that fashion photography is about ‘selling
the accoutrements of dress through pretty pictures’ (Tulloch 2002: 1–2).

Consumption/Production
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the appearance and development of fashion
studies is itself at least partly a product of intellectual interest moving from production
to consumption in the 1970s (see Styles 1998: 387). It is also not unreasonable to see
a connection between a shift in analytical and critical interest from production to con-
sumption in gender terms. Breward, for example, makes just such a connection when
he suggests that design history’s roots in ‘masculine’ and production-oriented industrial
design and architecture led to the marginalization of ‘feminine’ areas of interest such as
dress, fashion and consumption (Breward 1998: 303).

The Body
The body is at once the most and the least obvious thing to think about when thinking
about fashion and what people wear. On the one hand, it is true but trivial to say that
fashion is worn on the body and that adorning, colouring, shaping and adapting the
body are what fashion does. As Baudrillard says, fashion includes our bodies along with
all consumed commodities and what is worn (1993: 87). The idea that the fashionable
418 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

things we wear enable and constrain our movements and poses and that those bodily
phenomena are therefore fashionable is a familiar one. On the other hand, the body it-
self is not at all a fashionable item: one does not choose it and one does not change it
every season. It is not immediately clear that the tattooing, cicatrization, scarring, sur-
gery, piercings and the many other body modifications that are undergone in the name
of this season’s ideas of beauty and fashion are in fact fashion. Once undertaken, many of
these practices and processes are either difficult or impossible to reverse or un-perform.
In the book Streetstyle, Ted Polhemus suggests that tattoos are not fashion (1994: 13).
Rather, he says, they are style and style is ‘inherently conservative and traditional’; this
is why tribal styles often take permanent forms such as tattoos and scarification. Report-
ing from what some would consider the wilder shores of fashion, hinted at in the work
of Foucault on the body and sexuality, Paul Sweetman argues that, while some see tat-
tooing and piercing as ‘little more than a fashionable trend’ and others see them as anti-
fashion, they are in fact postmodern body-projects, ‘corporeal expressions of the self ’ in
which a ‘coherent and viable sense of self-identity’ is constructed and communicated
(Sweetman 1999: 2–3). Joanne Entwistle’s (2000) The Fashioned Body is a Foucauldian
and sociological account of the body and fashion. After surveying a huge range of ac-
counts of fashion, she concentrates on how fashion and dress relate to power, gender and
class identity before looking at fashion and sexuality.

Conclusion: New Agendas/Further Research

This section will offer a few hostages to fortune by describing some of the more recent
agendas of fashion studies, and then indicate which are most likely to hold the inter-
est of fashion studies in the future. It will start by suggesting that globalization will be-
come an increasingly significant area in fashion studies in the future. The prevalence
of business and marketing-related studies, initiated some thirty or so years ago by the
likes of Gordon Wills and David Midgley in their (1973) Fashion Marketing, also looks
as though it will develop and be welcomed in some quarters in the future. And, on
slightly safer if metaphorically more threatened ground, green issues and sustainability
will surely come to dominate the critical and analytic agendas of fashion studies. More
methodologically, I would like to see Caroline Evans’s (1997: 185) suggestion that the
nature and role of fashion and clothing in contemporary subcultures be studied in more
serious and empirical ways get taken up and developed. As she says, the way that Brit-
ish academic life is organized at present means that it is cheaper and easier to produce
theoretical accounts of what cultures and subcultures are doing than it is to produce
‘ethnography’. Consequently, more ‘armchair’ analysis and explanation than primary re-
search and ‘field work’ gets done. What fashion studies may need and what it may pro-
vide in the future is a marriage of more conceptually and hermeneutically sophisticated
accounts of what contemporary cultural and subcultural groups are doing visually with
what they wear. If the theoretically and methodologically uncomplicated concerns of
‘object studies’ were to meet the insensitive and abstracted concerns of more semiologi-
cal cultural studies, then fashion studies would undoubtedly benefit.
Looking Sharp 419

There is increasing interest in the idea of fashion as a business and as a marketing op-
portunity. Critical interest in fashion and textiles as industries with an interest in mar-
keting and image has been stoked for a while, since Angela McRobbie’s (1998) British
Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? but there are more ‘how to do it’ books
around. Michele Granger’s (2007) Fashion: The Industry and Its Careers and Leslie Davis
Burns and Nancy O’Bryant’s (2007) The Business of Fashion are just two of the publica-
tions put out by Fairchild Books in recent years that provide a student’s guide to fashion
as an industry or as a global business. This sort of book tends towards the descriptive and
the explanatory: providing definitions of marketing phrases such as ‘supply chain man-
agement’ and explaining what qualifications are required for certain positions within the
industry. Recent publications, such as Jennifer Craik’s (2008) Fashion: The Key Concepts,
continue to uphold a more critical and analytical interest, including chapters on fashion
as a business and as a cultural industry.
Up until around 2007, when what journalists started to call the ‘credit crunch’ began
to steal newspaper headlines and colonized the op-ed pages, sustainability was becom-
ing the most fashionable issue in fashion and fashion studies. At the time of writing, it
remains to be seen what the ultimate effects of the economic crisis will be on fashion
and whether it will negate or accelerate any progress that had been made in terms of
sustainability and a green agenda. As early as 1971, Victor Papanek (1971) was arguing
against the way in which fashion (in the broader sense noted above in the introduction)
entails the endless production of expensive and unsustainable novelty in all consumer
goods, from motorcars and refrigerators to furniture and stiletto heels.
The final chapter of Margaret Maynard’s (2004) Dress and Globalisation turns to ‘re-
sponsible’ design. ‘Corporate’ responses to green challenges are outlined and the contri-
bution of new, ‘smart’ clothing is assessed. Given Maynard’s arguments, noted below, it
is not surprising to see her deal with the problem of second-hand Western clothing turn-
ing up in less developed areas such as India and Africa (2004: 150), although she does
not deal with it in the detail found in Black (2008). Colin Gale and Jasbir Kaur’s (2002)
The Textile Book includes a useful chapter on ecology. They place ecological concerns in
historical, political, social and theoretical contexts before scrutinizing the roles of gov-
ernments, global corporations and other agencies and organizations in the debates and
actions taking place around these concerns. Sandy Black’s (2008) Eco-Chic: The Fashion
Paradox outlines a number of ‘paradoxes’, or problems, generated by recent speculation
on the combined futures of fashion and the earth. It may appear to be a good thing for
Western and non-Western environments that wealthy Western consumers ‘recycle’ cloth-
ing by sending it to underdeveloped countries in Africa, but local textiles and fashion
industries inevitably suffer because there is no local production. Kate Fletcher’s (2008)
book Sustainable Fashion and Textiles is supported by a Web site and a sustainability blog
(go to http://www.katefletcher.com/index.shtml). The book covers the production (cul-
tivation and growing of cotton and wool, for example), and consumption (the use and
refuse of clothing) of fashion before discussing more speculative proposals concerning
local production, sharing and ‘slow’ clothing. She is concerned to alert us to the many
problems involved in materials such as cotton, polyester and wool. Cotton production
420 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Figure 16.2 Adbusters, Blackspot Sneaker, 2009 (http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/blackspot).

uses many chemicals as pesticides and fertilizers, for example which contaminate water
and leave animals and humans with health problems. The anticonsumerist group be-
hind the Adbusters Web site has recently launched a couple of anti-global anti-branded
sneakers, the ‘Blackspot’ and the ‘unswoosher’ (available from http://www.adbusters.org/
campaigns/blackspot in April 2009) (see Figure 16.2). They have, of course, also been
accused of selling out and of un-green activities by their opponents.
If it has become a commonplace to say that globalization is the sense that, wherever
one goes in the world, one is always in the same place (Arnason 1990: 220; Giddens
1990: 77), then it is tempting to suggest that globalization in fashion and clothing is
the sense that, wherever one goes in the world, everyone is wearing the same things.
This temptation should be resisted, however, because while it is clear that there may
be a Nike and a Gap store in every city (Klein 2000), people are not in fact wearing
the same things wherever one goes. There is evidence that what some analysts call the
­centre-margin model of globalization, where the values and styles of the central and
dominant culture overpower themselves into the markets and life-styles of peripheral
and subordinate cultures is not sufficient to the task of explaining what globalization is
and does. Arjun Appadurai, for example argues that a global cultural economy must be
understood as a ‘complex, overlapping and disjunctive order’ (1990: 296), where simple
economic or cultural binaries do not work. It may also and even be the case that the
weaknesses of the centre-margin models are more clearly and obviously seen in relation
to consumption in general and fashion and dress in particular than in other areas.
Looking Sharp 421

This insight is one of many arrived at by Margaret Maynard in her (2004) Dress and
Globalisation, in which she unites economics and politics in her account of the cul-
tural construction and communication of meaning through what people wear. Maynard
adopts a version of the ‘single place’ definition of globalization, saying it is the experi-
ence of being part of a ‘single, interwoven macro-culture’, and allies it to an aspect of
du Gay et al.’s account (1997), where it is also described as the processes by means of
which commodities ‘move across the world’ (Maynard 2004: 3). Maynard argues that
what is common to many cultures in a globalized world is the self-awareness and self-
consciousness of consumers, who know very well how best to ‘express their identity’
(2004: 1). What requires explanation, on this account, is how it is that members of dif-
ferent cultures will wear a mix of locally available dress and globally available dress. Her
examples of this include the crowd of Muslim ‘pilgrims’ in Bangladesh, who are wearing
a ­complicated mixture of ‘western style jeans . . . and baseball caps, but also customary
knee-length shirvani coats and tupa (caps) and wrapped lungi, or perhaps dhoti’ (2004: 1)
as well as young Australians wearing Rastafarian dreadlocks and jeans (2004: 131). In
all of these cases the problem concerns politics, economics and the negotiation of mean-
ing, how it is that local cultural identities are constructed and reproduced in the face of
powerful global brands and identities and economics.
In their discussion of the cultural place of textiles, Colin Gale and Jasbir Kaur locate
globalization under the heading of ‘lifestyle’ and include references to industry bodies.
Also following the ‘single place’ definition, they suggest that ‘consumer trends, aspira-
tions and products are becoming increasingly similar around the world’ (Gale and Kaur
2002: 17). Also driving what they present as an increasing uniformity in demand for tex-
tiles is a decrease in free time, and a need for smart/casual, versatile and good value cloth-
ing. Hermes Lab and the Associazione Tessile Italiana, as well as the Woolmark Company
and Tradepartners UK, have all noticed these trends and taken appropriate action (2002:
18). This approach links industry bodies to an account of life-style and consumption.
Jose Teunissen (2005) is also concerned with a nonsimple and nonbinary account
of globalization in fashion. She points out that fashion is based on communication and
that it has always been international (2005: 9); it is not difficult to understand how it be-
comes global very quickly. She also explores a number of examples of the different rela-
tions that are possible between the global, the local and the exotic. In India, for example
Ritu Kumar designs for modern Indian women who want to dress in Western style but
who do not want to abandon the traditional sari or salwaar kameez (2005: 11). Other
examples are taken from Japan and Africa. In the collection of essays edited by Brand
and Teunissen (2005), Ted Polhemus provides another variant of the nonbinary account
of globalization. He points out that talk of ‘the west’ is inaccurate and he says that the
idea of the west, or ‘us’ as some monolithic and unified identity is mistaken. Even within
the European Union, fashionable differences and the resulting regional identities con-
tinue to exist and even thrive, despite the significant cultural, economic and political
merging that the EU represents (Polhemus 2005: 83).
Gosewijn van Beek’s essay in the Brand and Teunissen (2005) collection is a fasci-
nating mixture of early anthropology, ethnography, photography, collecting policy and
422 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

of the ways in which they relate to what people wear, the local and globalization. The
essay concentrates on the Asmat people of Southern Papua and investigates the ways
in which the Western t-shirts and dresses that they wear construct them as citizens of
a global world: it is also one of the few essays that refers critically to ‘our reaction’ (the
reaction of Western audiences) to seeing what Western anthropologists once called
tribal cultures dressed in this way, as one of disappointment and shame (van Beek
2005: 140).

Further Reading
Barnard, Malcolm, ed. 2007. Fashion Theory. London: Routledge.
Bruzzi, Stella and Pamela Church-Gibson, eds. 2000. Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and
Analysis. London: Routledge.
Laver, James. 1969. Costume and Fashion: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson.
Svendsen, Lars. 2006. Fashion: A Philosophy. London: Reaktion Books.
Wilson, Elizabeth. (1985) 2003. Adorned in Dreams: Women and Modernity. London: I. B.
Tauris.

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(ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage, 207–36.
Arnold, R. 1999. ‘Heroin Chic’, Fashion Theory, 3/3: 279–96.
Atkinson, E. Sue. 1981. ‘Advertising and Fashion Photography: A Short Survey’, British Journal
of Photography (20 March): 300–13.
Barnard, Malcolm. (1996) 2003. Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge.
Barnard, Malcolm. 2007a. ‘Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture’, in Malcolm
Barnard (ed.), Fashion Theory. London: Routledge, 170–81.
Barnard, Malcolm, ed. 2007b. Fashion Theory. London: Routledge.
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 17

Seeing Things:
Apprehending
Material Culture
Tim Dant

Most humans largely take for granted their capacity to see things—apart from those
who have a sight impairment, human beings see things just about all the time they are
awake without noticing or thinking about it. Making sense of what we see is seldom a
problem because it is part of the flow of action that may become more or less intense
but is virtually continuous as we move from one thing to another in everyday life. Even
in those most inactive periods of our waking life we are often using our visual capacity
to look at things as we read or look at pictures, sometimes moving pictures displayed
on a screen. Through these media we continue to look at ‘things’, identifying, recogniz-
ing and making sense of them, much as we do in the immediate life-world. Most of the
problems with seeing the world around us arise with the seeing apparatus of our bodies;
eyes become tired, their acuity fades with age in a number of ways and for some, the ap-
paratus of sight is irreparably damaged either before birth or at some time later in life.
The visual capacity that humans take for granted in everyday life is a major field of aca-
demic interest and concern but I want to focus here on one particular aspect, the way
we see ‘things’—by which I mean material objects, the stuff of material culture. And in a
perverse way I want to undo much of the scholarly and scientific work on vision because
I think the concern with the biomechanics of vision—no doubt enormously valuable
for some purposes—tends to overlook the role of culture and society in contributing to
how we see things. How the eyes work—the saccades or the rapid unconscious move-
ments that human eyes make, the role of the retina, the fovea and the resolution of what
is seen—are all fascinating because they are part of a process that we all take for granted
in everyday life. But I want to develop a less biomechanical version of how we appre-
hend things visually which takes central highly focussed (foveal) sight in its context of
broader, less focussed peripheral vision.
Seeing Things 427

As well as challenging a biomechanical account of sight, I also want to counter a cul-

tural approach to seeing that treats it as ‘semiological’ by understanding what is in our
visual field as a combination of signs that together make a particular sense. Again, this
has been an enormously fruitful line of investigation in visual culture and one that I want
to deviate from in what may seem a rather pedantic way. The semiological approach has
tended to translate the way we see things into a process of ‘reading’ discrete signs, a pro-
cess that even has its own ‘grammar’ and lends itself to a systematic analysis of a process
that parallels that of linguistic analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). I want to argue
that seeing things is not reducible to anything like a system of language. Our visual per-
ception is a dynamic, embodied process that occurs in the moment in which what is
made present to the senses is recognized in its specific but complex relation to things that
are familiar from within our cultural experience. The process is best understood by ref-
erence to the phenomenological tradition from William James, via the gestalt psycholo-
gists, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty to the social phenomenology of Schutz, Ihde and Verbeek.
Instead of the conceptual tools of signifiers and signifieds, the phenomenological ap-
proach uses the concepts of ‘apperception’ and ‘appresentation’ to explain how the thing
that is present in front of us is related to other things that we have experience of either
directly or vicariously. The prefix ‘ap-’ means ‘formed from’ or ‘derived from’ and points
to the biographical and cultural origins of how we see things. To ‘apprehend’ can mean to
arrest someone for a crime but it also means to understand or perceive with connotations
of ‘taking hold’ of something in the sense of grasping, discerning, making out, realizing,
comprehending or recognizing it, and that is the sense I wish to evoke here.

The Metaphor of Language

A popular approach to the material world is to think of it as making sense in the same
way as language makes sense. This method identifies visible components in the material
world that are the equivalents of words so that, when combined, they make a particular
sense. A classic example is the ‘reading’ of a clothing ensemble, such as that of punk or
‘power dressing’, as a statement by the wearer about his or her values and situation in
society (Hebdige 1979; Davis 1992; Polhemus 1994). The individual clothing items are
treated as ‘signs’ that are ‘structured’ like a language in that their form reveals a particu-
lar set of relationships that by convention make sense—the ‘language of clothes’ (Lurie
1981). A ripped T-shirt, when worn with bondage trousers, spiky dyed hair and large
boots, signified, in 1970s United Kingdom, membership of a particular subcultural
group and not simply the lack of resources to replace a damaged item of clothing. In the
same society, in the 1980s, a suit of a subdued colour with padded shoulders, combined
with solid high heels and carefully shaped hair, signified membership (or at least aspira-
tion) by a woman of the decision-making classes of government and business. The two
‘dress-codes’ are quite different and work as a response to each other and it is through
the precise combination of clothing signs that each is distinguished from other clothing
combinations that are not intended to make a statement.
428 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

The semiological approach to visual and material culture is often traced to the work
of Roland Barthes ((1957b) 1993; (1957a) 1979) whose inspired vignettes of mate-
rial culture, written in the 1950s, were read as a decoding that showed how signs were
combined for ideological effect. His essays on images and photographs ((1961) 1977;
(1964b) 1977) did draw a parallel between the visual and linguistic systems and Bar-
thes’s own statements on semiology in the essay ‘Myth Today’ (1972) and in Elements of
Semiology ((1964a) 1967) referenced the writing of Hjelmslev, Trubetzkoy and Saussure
and promised a structural and systematic approach to visual and material culture. How-
ever, by the time of the detailed and systematic account of The Fashion System ((1967)
1990), his most sustained attempt at a semiological method, what he produces is an
analysis of how clothes are written about and its codes (the ‘vestimentary code’; the ‘rhe-
torical system’) are those of the language used to refer to clothes. He does not analyse the
signs visible in the clothes themselves, nor even in their visual representation in images.
There was then a moment when Barthes appears to have been convinced that visual and
material culture was amenable to a systematic quasi-linguistic analysis of the origins of
meaning in the ideological values of a capitalist system. But this structuralist phase of his
work was short-lived; by 1970 he was still using the jargon of signs and codes but in a
poststructuralist way, largely to draw out the instability of meaning in written language
and its irreducibility to any origin of meaning (Barthes (1970b) 1975, (1970a) 1982).
Despite his relatively brief and equivocal interest in it, Barthes’s use of semiology
and its origins in linguistics has had an enormous impact on the methods for analysis
of visual and material culture that echoes well into the twenty-first century (e.g. Burgin
1982; Hodge and Kress 1988; Thwaites et al. 1994; Kress and van Leewen 1996; Bignell
1997; Emmison and Smith 2000; Rose 2001; Pink 2001). The metaphor of what we
look at as being amenable to ‘de-coding’ as if it was imbued with meaning in the same
way as an utterance or statement in a language has persisted, especially in the analy-
sis of the visual culture of photographs, advertisements, graphic art, television, movies
and even fine art. The metaphor of language has also persisted in attempts to grasp the
meanings of modern material culture works (e.g. Riggins 1994; Gottdiener 1995; Ditt-
mar 1992; Schiffer 1999), though not necessarily drawing on a semiological model. But
what is problematic about using the metaphor of language for understanding the visual
perception of things, both as materially present and in pictorial images, is that neither
the form nor the structure is consistent or conventional. Written language is perceived
through a very particular process as the eyes gather detailed orthographic information
that is made sense of according to a specific, learnt system. The eyes progressively scan
the symbols, running across the words and sentences, accumulating information in a
linearly ordered spatial and temporal sequence at a fixed focal length. Meaning is de-
rived from the consistent orthographic and structural conventions of the particular lan-
guage. I can read English but while I can recognize written Danish as writing because it
largely shares the same orthographic conventions, apart from the odd word with a simi-
lar origin, writing in Danish is meaningless to me.
In contrast I have no difficulty in understanding the material culture of Danes and
indeed that of most cultures in the world. There will be differences in architecture and
Seeing Things 429

design that I will notice and perhaps take pleasure in but they will seldom make it diffi-
cult for me to visually apprehend the things that I see. Sometimes what I see has a sym-
bolic or quasi-linguistic quality (an emblem or insignia for instance) that I find obscure
and sometimes there is a distinctive technological variation that is unfamiliar and often
fascinating (for example the Danish trikes with bins on the front for carrying children or
stuff). But meaning in the material world is not dependent on language and no formal
structural properties need to be learnt for the visual world to make sense. Very young
children begin to look at the world before they have language and make distinctions
between things as is evident from the feelings they express through noises, gestures and
facial expressions. Indeed, language is often taught and acquired through the shared vi-
sual field of the material world of parent and child. This suggests that the shared visual
field—of people, pets, toys, clothes and food—is constituted by a process that is prelin-
guistic and not dependent on the conventional structuring of language.
Although there was a ‘structuralist’ moment in material cultural studies (e.g. Tilley
1989; Llamazares 1989; Pearce 1992) that explored semiology, the largely anthropologi-
cal tradition of material culture resists any reduction to language or its structure. In-
stead, the material world of humans is seen as co-constitutive of social groups along with
other cultural processes that include language, economy, religion and consumption (e.g.
Mauss 1990; Miller 1987). The approach of material culture does not usually treat ‘seeing
things’, that is how human beings make visual sense of the material world around them,
as a distinct issue. Material objects are interpreted through analysis that includes a de-
scription and perhaps a representation that specifies the cultural situation in theoretically
informed language, that refers to speech, rituals, money, human relations, movement,
actions and so on (Gell 1998; Appadurai 1986). Any problem of ‘seeing’ is here the an-
thropologists’; they are trying to grasp both what it is that the native of the culture sees
and also how it relates to other cultural contexts, especially those from which the anthro-
pologist’s descriptive language is drawn. Visual culture is itself a topic within the study of
material culture and it is noticeable that photographic images have increasingly become
part of the attempt to describe material culture, often replacing the more traditional line
drawings that effectively extract the object from its visual context, often to enable textual
annotation (see the contributions in Buchli 2002 and Tilley et al. 2006). The materiality
of images, especially photographs, is becoming part of the understanding of their cul-
tural significance (Edwards and Hart 2004) and phenomenology has begun to play a role
in understanding the relation between image and object (Pinney 2002). In anthropol-
ogy (Ingold 2000) and other disciplines that try to understand material culture (Attfield
2000; Molotch 2003; Riggins 1994; Gregson and Crewe 2003), objects are usually analy-
sed within the patterns and practices of ordinary lives. It is how things are taken up in use
that is the focus of concern and the analytical problem is one of making the meaning for
the user available to a wider audience in a wider context. But the tendency of the material
culture tradition is to naturalize the seeing of things to the user so that meaning is only a
problem for the analyst or ethnographer; it is taken for granted that the person or social
group being studied see things in a consistent and unproblematic way. In this paper it is
the mundane process of looking at things that I want to explore.
430 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Looking at Things
When the view is unobstructed lookers may choose to follow whatever path they wish
as they scan a visual field, focussing on whatever thing and whatever aspect of that thing
attracts their attention. What is more, since central and peripheral vision work simul-
taneously, even while lookers have their eyes directed at one point of an array, they can
also see much of the rest of the array. The thing in front of us is perceived not through
systematic gathering of information by the senses but through a process of perception
that involves directing the eyes at particular features of the object with the central, sharp,
foveal image being focussed on salient features while at the same time peripheral vision
is situating those salient features (Hochberg 1972: 60). There is no predetermined se-
quence of ‘looking’ but there are patterns in that humans will tend to pay more early
attention to some things than others—the eyes in a face, the face on a body, the figure
in a landscape. The patterning is of course also likely to vary from person to person, ac-
cording to their particular interests in the field of things (Hochberg 1972: 61–5)—a
point I will return to below.
Sartre argues that the difference between the perception of things and imagination
is that there is a superabundance of visual information such that there is an ‘overflow-
ing in the world of “things”: there is always, at each and every moment, infinitely more
than we see; to exhaust the wealth of my actual perception would require infinite
time’ (Sartre 1991: 11). Apprehending a thing visually has a cumulative temporality;
the quick glance can be followed up with a serious and sustained inspection. Atten-
tion can more or less consciously and intentionally move across the array of objects
to look for specific things and Hochberg asserts that ‘most or all visual perception in-
volves highly skilled sequential purposive behaviors, and that some large component of
the perceptual process in the adult is best understood in terms of the “expectations”
and “maps” that underlie these skilled behaviors’ (Hochberg 1972: 63—emphasis in
the original). This is a very strong claim and difficult to reconcile with the coinciden-
tal nature of the flow of the life-world through which we move. But some ways of
looking at things are clearly planned and particular impressions are sought out in the
visual field. Technicians servicing cars follow sequential practices of looking at com-
ponents, sometimes guided by checklists or service manuals. But they also develop
ways of looking that go beyond the issued instructions to involve fine detail in the way
they orient their body to certain objects (Dant 2005, 2010). Even when following a
sequence, how they look at things is never quite the same; it always develops in the
situated context of what it is they see.
The shape of things is identifiable by the lines of edges and boundaries that are
revealed by the contrast of solidity between a thing and the air around it—the ab-
sence of thing. This is cued by colour difference and perspective but the continu-
ity of the line around a thing gives it a ‘form’ or shape. The ‘Gestalt psychologists’
recognized this human capacity to identify the form of a thing as a figure, or entity
in itself; Köhler describes the order of the visual field in which ‘particular areas “be-
long together” as circumscribed units from which their surroundings are excluded’
Seeing Things 431

(1947: 137). The ‘thing’ is perceived as a whole, a discrete entity distinct from its
background not as a series of bits of information. Gestalt psychology argues that these
sensory units of form and figure are richly symbolic and meaningful but it also ar-
gues that the whole that is perceived precedes its recognition as a particular thing. Fa-
mously, this approach also argues that objects are perceived in groups; the similarity
between items connects them, as does their spatial orientation in an array. The Gestalt
psychologists also argue that in most instances the perception of a thing is, however,
stable and that it is seen as ‘solid’ with ‘figure quality’ against the looseness of the
‘ground character’ of the environment that surrounds it (Köhler 1947: 202–3). But
this makes it difficult to explain the illusions that those interested in visual perception
are always fascinated by—where visual stimuli create a mistaken perception or per-
haps an alternating perception when there are two ways of ‘seeing’ something (e.g. the
Necker cube, the duck/rabbit, the vase/profiles, the crone/demoiselle). The Gestaltists
believed that the external field of what was seen corresponded to an internal field of
the brain but as Hochberg argues, the changing relation of central to peripheral vision
and the serial attention to different components in a visual field does not support this
idea (Hochberg 1972: 60–1).
The word ‘array’ is useful because it suggests that distinctions are made between
the material components of an impression and that the composition of the array is
part of what is involved in looking at things. Making distinctions between the things
we see treats the material world as ordered and the entities within it as meaningful in
themselves as well as in relation to each other. There are occasions when we look and
we cannot make sense of what we see but usually when we are looking at things that
are familiar, we can take in the array and without any noticeable passage of time ap-
prehend what we see. The visual apprehension of things can involve a slow continuous
looking that lingers on items or roams across the array gathering a more detailed im-
pression of objects and even the identity of particular items within the array. A visual
field that contains a glass of water on a table is taken in as a scene, a set of things situ-
ated in relation to each other that is the same whichever way and for however long the
eyes travel over the array or rest on particular items (Figure 17.1). Even if seen from
a different angle with very different lighting, the same scene is made sense of in the
same way; it is still a glass of water on a table (Figure 17.2). Of course features of the
situation may give particular meaning to the array and stop it being simply a glass of
water and this is precisely the point of Michael Craig-Martin’s famous 1973 artwork,
An Oak Tree (see Figure 17.3) in which a glass of water sits on a glass shelf above head
height in an art gallery. Craig-Martin provides the viewer with an explanatory text
(Figure 17.3) at eye-height, below and to the left in a location that information about
an artwork is often presented. Some viewers will see the artwork first and then move
closer to read the text, others will read the text first and then move back to see the
artwork. The text plays precisely on the role of art practice as a means of changing the
perception of objects; what is familiar as a glass of water may be transformed through
the cultural alchemy of the work of an artist in collaboration with curators, a label and
an exhibition space.
Figure 17.1 Glass of Water (light), 2010, photograph by author.

Figure 17.2 Glass of Water (dark), 2010, photograph by author.

Seeing Things 433

Figure 17.3 Michael Craig-Martin, An Oak Tree, 1973, glass, water and printed text, Tate
Collection, lent from private collection 2000. Courtesy of the artist, © Michael Craig-Martin
2010.
434 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

The approach of psychology to how we see things usually treats it as a cognitive prob-
lem and theorizes those systems by which percepts could be generated (Gordon 2004;
Gregory 1998; Findlay and Gilchrist 2003). Experimental psychology has played with
structures and modular components—such as cones, blocks, cylinders and other ‘geons’
(geometric icons)—as the building blocks underlying object recognition (see for ex-
ample Bruce et al. 2003: 265–98). This approach has contributed to the design of com-
puter programmes that it is hoped might ‘see’ in a way analogous to how humans see
things but it is not clear that it tells us much about how people actually perceive objects.
Features of perception, such as how a visual system deals with the relative distance of an
object and consequent variation in its apparent size, are tricky for disembodied systems
that have no experience of the world. But if sight is treated as one part of a body, situated
and mobile within a familiar world, such as the embodied person described by phenom-
enology, it is not so difficult. Despite the similarity of approach and the historical links
with phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes Gestalt psychology as retaining the
naturalism characteristic of psychology (1962: 47). Its proposal of the category of ‘form’
as something prior to and of a higher order than the flow of experience of the world is
for Merleau-Ponty both unnecessary and unjustified ((1945) 1962: 46). A particular
problem is the tendency for Gestalt psychology to treat ‘form’ as correlated with physi-
cal structures in the body (Merleau-Ponty (1945) 1962: 151).
Perception is a part of the way that a human body lives and moves through the space
it shares with other objects; there is an optimum distance for viewing different objects
that is determined by the relative size of the object and us. Objects that are too far away
or too close are not amenable to perception so a mountain is impossible to see if you are
on its side and a friend is difficult to recognize on the horizon. As Merleau-Ponty puts
it, ‘our body as a point of view upon things, and things as abstract elements of one single
world, form a system in which each moment is immediately expressive of every other’
((1945) 1962: 301). An object should not be confused with its appearance and there
need be no underlying law or formula by which I judge the object because it is through
having a body with a specific but changing kinaesthetic situation that ‘I am at grips with
the world’ (Merleau-Ponty (1945) 1962: 303). Rather than approach perception as a
systematic problem that must be broken into its component parts, Merleau-Ponty pro-
poses that perception is an expansion of the field of presence of the body in which all
perceptual experiences hang together. The qualities of things are not reducible to those
components that can be measured by instruments but how they fit into the sense or
impression of the thing. Looking is done from a body that moves, hears, touches and
smells. The movement of the eyes, of the head, of the torso and ultimately of the whole
body are part of an act of looking.
As we look at things we are used to identifying their colour as if it is a property of
the thing itself. But Merleau-Ponty says that colour is a ‘non-sensory presence’ ((1945)
1962: 305) by which he means that we identify a colour despite the way our visual
senses receive information from different surfaces, in differing blocks, adjacent to other
colours and above all in different degrees and directions of light (Figure 17.2 is the same
glass as Figure 17.1 viewed from a different direction). Light itself can have a colour
(daylight, candlelight, tungsten lamps, fluorescent lamps) and can alter the colour of
Seeing Things 435

what it falls on. The phenomenological approach treats colour not as a property of
things or of the perceptual apparatus of vision but as a quality of the thing within a
field, which includes lighting and the proximity to the person seeing it. Lighting leads
our eyes and attention and it is often designed to do so in interior spaces; especially
in the theatre or in a window display (‘We perceive in conformity with the light, as
we think in conformity with other people in verbal communication’—Merleau-Ponty
(1945) 1962: 310). Lighting provides a level or an atmosphere in the context of which
an object is perceived. Yet in everyday life we seldom notice light and treat it as neutral,
a background that we assimilate as we or the object moves between different qualities
of light.
An impression of a thing involves not simply sight but a whole bodily engagement;
when I see a glass of water my body can remember what it is to hold one; to feel the
smoothness of glass, its cool hard surface, the weight of the water that is fluid and moves,
the hardness of the glass as it touches my lips and the smooth, cool flow of the liquid
as it enters my mouth. These memories do not need to crowd my conscious, reflective
mind for them to be entailed in what it is to recognize a glass of water—it is the coher-
ence of the body rather than a function of the brain that brings these qualities of percep-
tion together. When we perceive, we not only grasp the thing with our understanding,
we situate ourselves in relation to it and so can grasp our selves in the world. Nonethe-
less we perceive the thing as ‘in-itself-for us’ in that as we direct our attention towards it,
we regard it in relation to us and our projects (Merleau-Ponty (1945) 1962: 322). Is the
car I am looking at one I want to buy? Or, is it in my parking space? Is the glass of water
fresh, am I thirsty and so on? What comes into our field of attention we don’t approach
scientifically, systematically or objectively but in the context of our everyday concerns—
‘In order to perceive things, we need to live them’ (Merleau-Ponty (1945) 1962: 325).
The thing we see is not simply given in perception, it is taken up by us, experienced and
reconstituted within the context of our body and its existing relation with the world.
And the nature of human behaviour is that it has a movement towards the world, a pri-
mordial attachment to the world; it is ‘thrown’ into a natural world. The unity of the
world remains a constant presence to my being; it is always there, as a field to which
my senses respond rather than being a product of consciousness or cognition. My point
of view is a way of my ‘infiltrating into the world in its entirety’ rather than an act of
thought (Merleau-Ponty (1945) 1962: 329). This is in contrast to the exclusive experi-
ence of a hallucination that does not offer a continuous world that can be shared with
others. The certainty of perception can be undermined or cancelled—as with the revela-
tion of an illusion or trompe l’oeil—but only by being replaced with another perception
that fits even better with the rest of the world we experience.

Apperception
If Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology emphasizes the embodied character of how we see
things, an earlier phenomenological approach emphasizes that perception is based on
what we already know of the world. Writing in 1890 on the ‘perception of things’,
William James suggested that what he had been calling perception was more properly
436 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

an ‘apperceptive process’ in which ‘incoming ideas or sensations are said to be “apper-

ceived” by “masses” of ideas already in the mind’ including ‘habits, memory, education,
previous experience and momentary mood’ ((1890) 1950: 107). He later clarified this
idea of apperception:

we never get an experience that remains for us completely nondescript: it always

­reminds of something similar in quality, or of some context . . . drawn, of course,
from the mind’s ready-made stock. We conceive the impression . . . according to our
acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way of ‘ideas.’ This way of taking in
the object is the process of apperception. (James (1899) 1927: 158)

How we see things entails apperception; our apprehension is in terms of what we have
already seen and what we already know of how things in the world look. Even ‘the new’
is always interpreted according to ‘the old’ and as a person ages so he becomes resistant
to his stock of ideas being disturbed or expanded.
Alfred Schutz (1971) develops the concept of apperception drawing on both James’s
and Husserl’s use of the term but it is best understood in terms of his ideas about ‘rel-
evance’, ‘reach’ and ‘typification’ set out in his major work Structures of the Life-World
(1974). Perception is not random or irrelevant but is structured according to our ongo-
ing motives, interests and actions as we interact with the life-world. ‘Thematic relevance’
is the flow of attention, usually below the level of conscious awareness, that connects one
action to another, directing the attention of visual perceptions to what we are doing. It
may sustain a connected sequence of actions but it can be redirected to focus on some-
thing new in the environment or it can turn inwards to connect musings and thoughts.
Thematic relevance may arise from personality and biography and be concerned with
motives, wants and projects, or it can be imposed from beyond the person by the actions
of others or the contingencies of the environment. If imposed relevance is when I find a
car parked in the space outside my house where I hoped to park, motivational relevance
shapes perception and action when I go in search of a second-hand car that will serve
my purposes at a price I can afford. The material stuff of the world is encountered in
this way and attention is not determined by some quality in it (such as its ‘affordance’)
but is directed by its relevance to our continuing interests. We can easily ignore or over-
look that which is irrelevant to us and we pay little attention to most of what passes in
front of our eyes. Some things have an ‘interpretational relevance’ because they cannot
simply be incorporated into continuing action and we need to stop and make sense of
them. Interpretation is not scientific or objective but is motivated by what is relevant
to the person (Schutz and Luckmann 1974: 211). Interpretational relevance structures
how we look at an old car and wonder what it is worth or what it would take to fix it.
Thematic relevance blends into interpretational relevance when there is an interruption
in the flow of experience that demands reflection on something, a conscious and willed
thought that addresses the significance of meaning of something.
If ‘relevance’ structures how we see things, so does ‘reach’. For Schutz (1974), there
are zones of ‘actual’, ‘restorable’ and ‘attainable’ reach in the life-world that refer to the
Seeing Things 437

zones in which a human body orients itself to things. The zone of actual reach refers to
the spatial and temporal location of a person in the world and what they can reach with
their hands and eyes. It constitutes the ‘paramount reality’ of lived experience that is
present for a person who is wide-awake. Restorable reach includes those things that have
been experienced before and could be returned to, and attainable reach includes those
things that might be brought within the zone of actual reach at some point in the fu-
ture. If the zone of restorable reach recalls things from biographical experience, the zone
of attainable reach is formed by the mediated experiences of other people who tell me,
for example that India is a beautiful country to visit. Both relevance and reach structure
how I experience things in the world that I know about. For Schutz knowledge is stored
as ‘typifications’ that arise from a ‘situationally adequate solution to a problematic situ-
ation through the new determination of an experience that could not be mastered with
the aid of the stock of knowledge already on hand’ (Schutz and Luckmann 1974: 231).
That is the stock of knowledge drawn on to apprehend things that we see is organized
according to practical interests and experiences, not as a ‘code’ or abstract system. The
availability of typifications (rather like James’s ‘masses of ideas’) means that perception
is always apperception; nothing is ever looked at with completely fresh eyes working
simply as organs of sight. Put like this, the process of perception sounds personal and
idiosyncratic, but our stocks of knowledge are built up through the cultural context in
which we live. The typifications that we draw on to apprehend what we see for exam-
ple draw on shared and mediated experiences (e.g. images of all types) that have been
framed and given value through talk or text.

Appresentation
In the context of Schutz’s phenomenology ‘apperception’ points to the importance of
previous personal and culturally shared experiences in our visual apprehension of things.
We don’t simply ‘see’ the glass of water or the car, rather we ‘apperceive’ it in relation
to how we have seen glasses and cars before; what we see is made sense of through the
relevance to our interests and motivations in the situation. Another concept, also de-
rived from Husserl, that Schutz uses to explain how we understand mediated and sym-
bolic phenomena is the related idea of ‘appresentation’ (1971: 294). This is the idea that
what is present for someone else can be ‘appresent’ for us—that is not directly present
to experience but through our empathizing with the other’s experience becomes indi-
rectly present. For Husserl, recognizing that others experience the world in a way that
is similar to the way we do leads to the possibility of empathy and sharing of experi-
ence, particularly of the world of things, and the possibility of a ‘transcendental theory
of the Objective world’ (Husserl (1933/1950) 1999: 92—emphasis in the original). The
Objective world includes not only the natural world of things but also the ‘spiritual world’
in so far as its objects refer us to the other’s subjective experience of them. The shared
world also includes ‘all cultural Objects (books, tools, works of any kind and so forth)
which moreover carry with them at the same time the experiential sense of thereness-
for-everyone (that is, everyone belonging to the corresponding cultural community)’
438 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

(Husserl (1933/1950) 1999: 92). It is this sense of sharedness, of impressions based on

very similar apperceptions, that creates a foundation for intersubjectivity. Each impres-
sion of something is apprehended within the person but the stock of impressions and
ideas that it relates to is shared with the community of those with similar experiences.
Other people may be separate consciousnesses but Husserl writes of a ‘­certain mediacy
of intentionality’, a shared orientation of consciousness to the primordial world which
enables ‘a kind of making “co-present”, a kind of “appresentation” ’ (Husserl (1933/1950)
1999: 109).1
This capacity of co-presence, of a presumed common ground of intentionality, means
that I can imagine how someone else will apprehend an object they see in front of them.
As I stand beside someone else looking at a car, I might reasonably imagine that she sees
the car as just as ugly or shabby as I do. Side by side in the art-gallery, we both see a glass
of water on a shelf and are curious about what it is doing there and what its claim to
being an art object is—the one who has read the label sees the same thing but also sees it
differently as well. Appresentation is a version of presentation that is derived from how
I imagine the impression that other person is getting. It is based on my direct percep-
tion of the car or the glass and of the person, and on what I take to be a shared stock of
knowledge, of apperceptions, about how cars, glasses and artworks are. Husserl is clear
that appresentation is not a cognitive process that involves thinking or inference. It is
something that happens in a glance in which the already-given, everyday world is the
basis for understanding what someone else’s sense is responding to. This does not need
to be a precise or exact constitution of equivalent experience. It is because ‘(w)e have
already seen like things before’ that ‘an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted
objective sense to a new case with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a
similar sense’ (Husserl (1933/1950) 1999: 111). The connection of my perception with
the other’s perception is based on similarity, a chain of what Husserl calls ‘pairing’ of
things that are not the same but are alike.2
Pairing is the similarity of the thing I see in front of me to things that I have seen
previously, or pictures of things that I have seen, that leads to apperception. And it is the
pairing of myself with the Other, that makes appresentation possible. If it were a dog
rather than a person looking at the car with me then any ‘analogizing transfer’ would
be on a very different basis and would probably require a conscious act of imagination
on my part. Even if the person was from a very different culture, for example one in
which there were few cars, or few new and well-maintained cars, then her apperceptions
would be different and her perceptions would be less appresent for me. Appresentation
depends on sharing a very similar stock of knowledge and, the further away the other’s
experience, the less likely the person will see things in the same way. The sharing of a
visible reaction stimulates a process of empathizing in appresentation; ‘the outward con-
duct of someone who is angry or cheerful . . . I easily understand from my own conduct
in similar circumstances’ (Husserl (1933/1950) 1999: 120). This is a cumulative process
in which my understanding of the other person’s reaction to her life-world enhances the
appresentation of her apperceptions for me. If she looks distastefully on the ugly old
car, then I can see that her system of apperceptions is closer to mine than simply being
Seeing Things 439

another human being. Husserl says ‘every successful understanding of what occurs in
others has the effect of opening up new associations and new possibilities of understand-
ing’ ((1933/1950) 1999:120). The process is of course reciprocal so that the structure
of my apperceptions is progressively revealed to the other at the same time as mine is to
him—this is the basis of intersubjectivity. The idea of empathy includes being able to
imagine what it would be like to be perceiving the world from his perspective. Because
he has a body like mine I can apprehend the things I see ‘as if I were standing over there
where the Other’s body is’ (Husserl (1933/1950) 1999: 123).
The possibility of community arises from this sharing of associations that Husserl
calls ‘co-perception’. As I and the other person stand looking at the car at least we both
see a car and in this we are part of a ‘functional community of one perception’ that arises
from the fusion of our apperceptions and associations through the process of appresen-
tation that shares a common temporality (Husserl (1933/1950) 1999: 122). The appre-
sentation of apperceptions that enables me to see much the same in a glass of water or
an old car as someone else depends on shared experiences; we must both live in cultures
in which glasses are used to hold and carry water for drinking and cars are objects for
carrying people that become less reliable as they age. For those Others who live in un-
industrialized, isolated rural communities and for those who lived a few hundred years
ago, such a shared set of typifications would not be available.
Schutz develops the concept of ‘appresentational apprehension’ to include cultural
objects such as books, tools, houses, theatres, temples, machines (1971: 314). So, not
only do I understand the Other in co-presence through appresentation, through en-
gaging with his experience empathetically, I can also engage with the Other through
mediations that communicate his experience: ‘I may comprehend the Other by appre-
sentation; by mutual understanding and consent a communicative common environment
is thus established, within which the subjects reciprocally motivate one another in their
mental activities’ (Schutz 1971: 315). This communicative common environment in-
cludes language through which we may exchange values and ideas but it also includes
the various types of images (sketches, diagrams, plans, photographs, moving images) by
which we might share our visual impressions of things. Husserl’s understanding of ap-
perception and appresentation addresses the intersubjective world through which we
share experiences, including impressions of things, which we take to be very similar. But
Schutz takes this further to include in the realm of intersubjective understanding, the
mediated world and the sociocultural world of things made by people that all become
appresentational references in our stocks of knowledge (1971: 328). Schutz’s concept of
the ‘symbol’ is precisely about a pairing that has its reality in another province of mean-
ing or subuniverse from that of paramount reality.
For Schutz a symbol has its pair in a province of meaning beyond that of everyday
life—it may represent something in a dream world, the world of science, a religious or
spiritual world or any other world that is not experienced as everyday reality. This is
noticeably different from the common use of the term symbol as something that sim-
ply stands for something else. If appresentation through symbols links us to a universe
of meaning beyond that of paramount reality, it is still connected and relevant to our
440 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

experiences in the everyday world. This is because people can share symbols that stand
for entities outside paramount reality (e.g. ‘social status’, ‘the environment’, ‘energy’,
‘fashion’), which are also part of the relevance structures that orient them to the things
they see within paramount reality. These abstract entities are constructs of common-
sense thinking that ‘we can apprehend only symbolically; but the symbols appresent-
ing them themselves pertain to the paramount reality and motivate our actions with
it’ (Schutz 1971: 353). The interaction between two friends sharing a meal is solidly
within their shared paramount reality; one pouring a glass of water for the other is
within the realm of everyday life. But the action of sharing a meal and of the gesture
of one pouring water for the other may also be symbolic of the friendship, the particu-
lar form of ‘we-relationship’ that is shared along with the meal. The symbols will vary
according to the type of relationship or the type of social institution that is involved
(‘Its appresenting member is always the common situation as defined by the partici-
pants, namely that which they use, experience, enjoy, or endure together. A joint inter-
est makes them partners, and the idea of partnership is perhaps the most general term
for the appresented We-relation. (We are buddies, lovers, fellow sufferers, etc.)’ Schutz
(1971): 354—emphasis in the original).

Conclusions
In the hands of contemporary phenomenologists such Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek,
the approach of phenomenology to the material world has been given a new lease of life
as ‘postphenomenology’. For Ihde this means a phenomenology that is nonfoundational
and nontranscendental but takes into account variations in perspective (1993:8). For
Verbeek it means a different way of thinking about the relationship between people and
things in which ‘subject and object constitute each other. Not only are they intertwined,
but they coshape one another’ (2005: 112—emphasis in the original). Verbeek’s argu-
ment downplays the privilege accorded to human beings in the existential phenomenol-
ogy of Heidegger and Jaspers who both saw the technological world as alienating, and
is a response to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which challenges traditional no-
tions of agency. I hope to have arrived at a similar position by a slightly different route;
out of Husserl via Merleau-Ponty and Schutz. Merleau-Ponty’s account of how we see
things shows that it is the materiality of the body situated within its material environ-
ment that produces perception; it is not a biomechanical process that can be specified
in terms of organs and functions. He also indicates the importance of experience and
memory in the process of perception—but gives us little detail on how mind contributes
to the process of seeing things. Schutz’s phenomenology may well be discounted by phi-
losophers because of its description of the social world and its inadequacy for analysing
the material world of technology—it is true that his primary interest is in social interac-
tion and micro-sociological analyses. But Schutz’s fascinating attempt to understand the
mediated and symbolic subuniverses in their relationship with the paramount reality of
everyday life is often overlooked. His conceptual framework of relevance, zones of reach
and of typifications gives us a structure to the mind that complements Merleau-Ponty’s
Seeing Things 441

embodied analysis of perception. Schutz’s use of Husserl’s concepts of ‘apperception’ and

‘appresentation’ help to show how memory works with the motor and sensory apparatus
to constitute an embodied and sociocultural being that sees and makes sense of things
as it engages with the life-world.
There is of course a serious limitation to the common ground between members of
the same society that the half a century of sociology subsequent to Schutz’s work has em-
phasized with its analysis of the social divisions of class, sex, race, age and ability. These
differences are ideologically and politically of great importance, especially when they
point to inequalities, and the tendency of phenomenological analysis to smooth over
those contradictions between apperceptions and experience is precisely why Schutz’s
methodology has fallen into disuse. However, social divisions are not rifts in the funda-
mental way that human beings experience the world and variation in apperceptions can
be seen as relational to the sociocultural perspective of different groups. The sociology
of modernity has taught us to be suspicious of the taken-for-granted common ground
in everyday practice because it so often favours the powerful and dominant groups. But
modernity has at the same time increased the capacity for appresentational and apper-
ceptive engagement. Put crudely, once the distinctive experiences of women or peo-
ple of another race have been articulated for me—sometimes interpersonally but often
through mediated means—I am better able to incorporate them into my own under-
standing of the world around me.
What is gained from the phenomenological approach to seeing things is that the
analysis problematizes the relationship between the viewer and the material world in
which he or she lives. That world may be routinely taken for granted by the viewer, but
a phenomenological approach tries to unpack the cultural resources that are drawn on
in the everyday ways in which people look at things as they act in the world without
remarking on their visual qualities. This embodied capacity depends on the biological
resources available to the human animal—precisely that physical equipment given in the
body that may be damaged by malformation, trauma or disease—but it also depends on
the cultural resources that are embedded within the body through social learning. That
social learning may, in part, be via the medium of language. Parents, teachers, peers and
the media may use language to point out, emphasize and give value to what is seen. But
language is only ever supplementary to other modes of communication that above all
include the content of what is in front of our eyes. We learn to look at things through
looking at things and simply pointing and smiling, or showing an image of something
new in close proximity to something loved and familiar, can be good enough to com-
municate value. And the response to the things we see in our visual field is always
too immediate for the encoding and decoding of language, which is always serial and
cumulative.
What is sustained through the various phenomenological—and postphenomeno-
logical—accounts of how we encounter our world is the pragmatic logic of everyday
life. As we see things—glasses of water, cars, whatever—we engage with them through
our practical concerns, both present and past. We don’t use a system like language with
its lexical and syntactical subsystems to make sense of the things we see; if we did then
442 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

our responses to the visual presence of things would be more amenable to analysis and
be both more predictable and more consistent. We see things much more immediately
but make sense of them through our accumulated direct, vicarious and mediated ex-
periences. Our stocks of knowledge are an accumulation of typifications that are both
shared within those who share the various sociocultural locations we occupy, and par-
ticular to our culture. How we see something is shaped both by our biography and by
how we have engaged with our society. Sometimes we do learn a code for distinguish-
ing things—as the bird spotter who learns to distinguish species by particular markings
rather than simply seeing another ‘little brown bird’. But in the flow of ordinary life
such codes are seldom of much use. The vast majority of things we encounter in every-
day life are familiar and routine and we recognize them and respond to them because
we’ve seen something very similar many times before.

FURTHER READING
Harper, Douglas. 1987. Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Berkeley:
­University of California Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill.
­London: Routledge.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press.

Notes
1. All emphases in quotations follow the original.
2. ‘Pairing is a primal form of that passive synthesis which we designate as “association” ’ (Husserl
(1933/1950) 1999: 112).

References
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Attfield, Judy. 2000. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg.
Barthes, Roland. (1957a) 1979. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. New York: Hill and
Wang.
Barthes, Roland. (1957b) 1993. Mythologies. London: Vintage Books.
Barthes, Roland. (1961) 1977. ‘The Photographic Message’, in Image, Music, Text. London: Fon-
tana, 15–31.
Barthes, Roland. (1964a) 1967. Elements of Semiology. London: Cape.
Barthes, Roland. (1964b) 1977. ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image, Music, Text. London:
Fontana, 32–51.
Barthes, Roland. (1967) 1990. The Fashion System. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Barthes, Roland. (1970a) 1982. Empire of Signs. London: Cape.
Barthes, Roland. (1970b) 1975. S/Z. London: Cape.
Bignell, Jonathan. 1997. Media Semiotics: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Seeing Things 443

Bruce, Vicki, Patrick R. Green and Mark A. Georgeson, Mark A. 2003. Visual Perception: Physi-
ology, Psychology and Ecology. Hove: Psychology Press.
Buchli, Victor, ed. 2002. The Material Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Burgin, Victor. 1982. ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, in V. Burgin (ed.), Thinking
­Photography. London: Macmillan, 39–83.
Dant, Tim. 2005. Materiality and Society. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.
Dant, Tim. 2010. ‘The Work of Repair: Gesture, Emotion and Sensual Knowledge’, Sociological
Research Online, 15/3: 7. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/15/3/7.html.
Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dittmar, Helga. 1992. The Social Psychology of Material Possessions. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Janice Hart, eds. 2004. Photographs, Objects, Histories. London:
Routledge.
Emmison, Michael and Philip Smith. 2000. Researching the Visual. London: Sage.
Findlay, John M. and Iain D. Gilchrist. 2003. Active Vision: The Psychology of Looking and Seeing.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gordon, Ian E. 2004. Theories of Visual Perception. Hove: Psychology Press.
Gottdiener, Mark. 1995. Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern
Life. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gregory, Richard L. 1998. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford
­University Press.
Gregson, Nicky and Louise Crewe. 2003. Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture and the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Hochberg, Julian. 1972. ‘The Representation of Things and People’, in E. H. Gombrich, J.
Hochberg and M. Black (eds), Art, Perception and Reality. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University, 47–94.
Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Husserl, Edmund. (1933/1950) 1999. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Ihde, Don. 1993. Postphenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
London: Routledge.
James, William. (1890) 1950. Principles of Psychology: Volume 2. New York: Dover.
James, William. (1899) 1927. Talks to Teachers. London: Longmans, Green.
Köhler, Wolfgang. 1947. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.
London: Routledge.
Llamazares, Ana Maria. 1989. ‘A Semiotic Approach in Rock-art Analysis’, in I. Hodder (ed.),
The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression. London: Unwin Hyman,
242–8.
Lurie, Alison. 1981. The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury.
Mauss, Marcel. (1950) 1990. The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Molotch, Harvey. 2003. Where Stuff Comes From. London: Routledge.

Pearce, Susan M. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
­Institution Press.
Pink, Sarah. 2001. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research.
­London: Sage.
Pinney, Christopher. 2002. ‘Visual Culture: Introduction’, in V. Buchi (ed.), The Material ­Culture
Reader. Oxford: Berg, 87–103.
Polhemus, Ted. 1994. Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk. New York: Thames and Hudson.
Riggins, Stephen. 1994. The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects.
New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rose, Gillian. 2001. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual ­Materials.
London: Sage.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1991. The Psychology of Imagination. New York: Citadel Press.
Schiffer, Michael Brian. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings. London: Routledge.
Schutz, Alfred. 1971. ‘Symbol, Reality and Society’, in Collected Papers Volume 1: The Problem of
Social Reality. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 207–350.
Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. 1974. Structures of the Life-World: Volume 1. London:
Heinemann Educational Books.
Thwaites, Tony, Lloyd Davis and Warwick Mules. 1994. Tools for Cultural Studies. London:
Macmillan.
Tilley, Christopher. 1989. ‘Interpreting Material Culture’, in I. Hodder (ed.), The Meanings of
Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression. London: Unwin Hyman, 185–94.
Tilley, C., K. Webb, S. Küchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer. 2006. Handbook of Material Culture.
London: Sage.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
 18

Photography and
Visual Culture
Fiona Summers

A black-and-white photograph by the artist Willie Doherty, entitled The Other Side
(1988), shows a panoramic view across the rooftops of the city of Derry in Northern
Ireland (see Figure 18.1). Derry appears in a slice of closely packed streets and
buildings—domestic, commercial and religious—situated between the hills which form
the Foyle Valley. Whilst there is a visual contrast between the texture of buildings and
the ploughed earth in the foreground this contrast between rural and urban is mitigated
by the lack of colour in the photograph, which renders both spaces monochrome. The
image evokes conventions of traditional landscape painting and photography as well as
the ‘gritty’ black-and-white documentary reportage that characterized representations
of Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’.1 However, whilst evoking these genres of vi-
sual representation, The Other Side disturbs and disrupts the conventions of both the
picturesque idealism associated with landscape and the realism associated with social
documentary photography, through the questions it poses in relation to what it is we
are looking at and how we are looking. The viewer is positioned at a distance from the
city upon which the person gazes and three lines of white text appear across the image;
the other side written in the immediate foreground and above this, in smaller font
(the laws of pictorial perspective implying a further distance) west is south to the left
and east is north to the right. The presence of text on the image explicitly prompts
awareness of an activity in which we are regularly engaged, that is the act of looking at
and discerning meaning from photographic representations of the world, since we are
immediately asked to position ourselves in relation to the ‘other side’ and to think about
whether what we are doing is looking at it. The cues provided by the written text dis-
rupt the work of narrativization that is a key convention of photographic practice; there
are stories here but the image refuses a singular, simple act of showing how it is (or was).
The ‘other side’ of the subject may refer to a place other than where ‘we’ (camera/viewer)
446 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Figure 18.1 Willie Doherty, The Other Side, 1988, photograph. Courtesy of the artist, © Professor
Willie Doherty.

stand or it may refer to the relationship of other sides between the west bank and east
bank of the River Foyle, which are in the south and north of Derry respectively. How-
ever, viewers encountering this image will vary in their individual knowledge of the city
represented; its name, geographical location in the world, politics and history as well as
personal and emotional investments—or lack of—in what is shown. In this sense, the
process of looking and discerning meaning from the photograph is a process of orien-
tation, recognition and potential misrecognition—of geography, political differences,
identifications—which highlights the ways in which photography is always a point of
view, in both perceptual and ideological regards.
Photography holds a particularly persuasive power to communicate in ways that have
often been seen as more truthful and reliable than other forms of media because it ap-
pears to show an act of visual perception (literally, a vision of the world), which in turn is
made meaningful to the viewer through a further act of visual perception on the viewer’s
part (in the process of perceiving the world within the photographic image), and this ob-
scures the extent to which the photograph constructs a view rather than simply records
it.2 Further, this point of view cannot be determined by either the photographer or
the conventional rules of engagement of the camera within a scene (i.e. that of ‘captur-
ing’), which infer a mimetic relationship between the photograph and the world. Rather,
the interrelationships between photographer, photograph and viewer involve a complex
negotiation of making sense of the meaning of a photograph that has been extensively
theorized by writers such as Susan Sontag (1979), Roland Barthes (1981), Victor Burgin
(1982), John Tagg (1988) and Stuart Hall (1997) who focus particularly on the work of
photographic representation in regard to ideology and power.3 Whilst digital technolo-
gies have effected significant changes to all aspects of the taking, circulating and view-
ing of photographic images since much of this body of work was written, the arguments
expounded by these writers continue to influence contemporary debate and critique on
the social role of photography. Indeed, a significant proportion of writing on photogra-
phy continues to be concerned with issues of interpretation and meaning in photographs
and with the ways that photographs represent and structure identity and subjectivity.
Photography and Visual Culture 447

The Question of ‘Post-Photography’

Despite an interest in focussing on the constitutive differences between analogue
and digital photographic technologies in academic writing on photography since the
1990s (William J. Mitchell’s 1992 book The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-
photographic Era is the mostly widely cited of this group), there has not been a wide-
spread adoption of a purely technologically determinist perspective. Similarly, claims
made during the 1990s that the digital revolution would ultimately lead to the demise
of photography when subjected to scrutiny were found to be wide of the mark. Primar­
ily, this is because photographs continue to carry many of the meanings and values
they have held since before chemicals were replaced by algorithms. That is photographs
still function as significant means of communication and expression: if differently than
they did. In a further aspect, the medium of photography continues after its apparent
demise as a chemical process, by way of the deep and invested familiarity we have with
what are largely understood as indexical representations of the world. To put it another
way, digital photographic technologies provide us with means to make alternate, vividly
imaginary—or vividly faithful—views of the world, but the language and aesthetic of
traditional, analogue photography endures, even if the technology itself will not. Lev
Manovich (2003: 241) explains this in his argument that whilst the way photographs
are constituted, displayed and encountered in modern visual culture is radically altered
in the shift to digital technology, paradoxically the digital simultaneously ‘glorifies’ and
‘immortalizes’ the photographic, because in order for a ‘synthetic’ image generated on
a computer to make sense as a photograph it must borrow the language and aesthetic of
analogue. For instance, limits in the depth of field of the lens and slightly grainy surface
texture of analogue photographs more closely resembles human vision, and therefore
appears more ‘real’ than glossy hyper-real computer-generated or enhanced images so,
as Manovich describes in relation to cinema, ‘barely visible noise’ is added to reduce the
unconvincing perfection produced by the synthetic image (2003: 247). A digital aes-
thetic of perfection and simulcra has not, however, been without its use and meaning
in cultural practice and there is a role for a number of different forms of photography,
which might—rather uneasily—be divided along lines of those which appear to have an
indexical relation to the world (a language and aesthetic associated with analogue) and
those which offer visions of alternative worlds (the hyper-real image associated with the
synthetic), however to some degree photography has always produced images that might
fall either side of that, ultimately intangible, divide.

Photography and Everyday Life

The ubiquity of photographic images and technologies for producing and circulating
photographs, which are increasingly digital and global in scope, has been widely dis-
cussed as a central aspect of contemporary, global media culture.4 As a practice which
produces many billions of objects, can be practiced by anyone with access to at least
basic equipment and has been used so consistently since its invention in the first part
448 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

of the nineteenth century as a means for classification, for inciting desire, empathy and
wonder, as well as signifying strength, bonds of love and national and familial pride,
photography holds a totemic and highly privileged position across all areas of private
and public life, almost without exception. Everyday encounters with photographic im-
ages are characterized by both proximity (advertising displays in shops and on billboards,
newspaper front covers, photo-sharing Web sites, book and magazines) and intimacy
(family portraits, passport photographs, as well as the still images produced by technolo-
gies such as ultrasound or surveillance equipment). The relationship between photogra-
phy and everyday life is intimate in a further way; photographic images are inculcated
in the constitution of subject and identity positions such that we cannot make sense of
ourselves as subjects, or individuals, without an awareness (conscious or unconscious)
of our own representability within the field of vision, and the form this representation
might take. As Vivian Sobchack (2004: 136) argues, culturally pervasive perceptive (and
expressive) technologies such as photography, cinema and computers have enormous
impact on modalities of expression and signification, but there is also an effect of such
technologies (or our encounter with these technologies) that moves beyond significa-
tion of bodily existence to constitution of it. Drawing on a phenomenological concep-
tualization of embodiment, Sobchack focuses on the carnality of visual perception and
expression, to argue ‘insofar as the photographic . . . [has] been objectively constituted
as a new and discrete techno-logic, [it] has also been subjectively incorporated, enabling
a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence’ (2004: 139,
emphasis in original).5 Sobchack’s point here is that the way in which we see and make
sense of ourselves as subjects is fundamentally transformed by photographic visuality.
Even if we individually desire not to record our lives with a camera, to look at old pho-
tographs of ourselves or to imagine how we might look in a photograph it is very likely
that these things do occur, and on a daily basis. We may have three or four photographs
of ourselves on the identification cards in our wallets, hundreds (or thousands) on social
networking sites and stored on our computers and mobile phones. The significance of
these photographs is far beyond merely identifying who we are in any straightforward
sense—this face in the photograph matches this face in the flesh, as an identity card
seeks to—but rather in identifying who we are as subjects; our class position, what kinds
of friendships we have, how closely bonded we are with family, whether we are well or
ill, successful, happy. In turn, personal photographs are coextensive with public and
shared ones, for instance the billions of photographs made available to us through adver-
tising, as well as in art, science, medicine, historical archives, journalism and law. Every
photograph which represents a body or a way of life presents an opportunity, indeed an
imperative, to refract one’s own experience through what is shown, to consider our own
relationality to what we see whether this is a relation of difference or affinity.
A significant proportion of discussion and debate on the social function of pho-
tographic images, found within work on cinema by theorists such as André Bazin,
Jean-Louis Comolli (1980), Christian Metz (1982) and Laura Mulvey (1975), and de-
veloped in relation to still photographs by writers such as Roland Barthes (1981), John
Berger (1991), Susan Sontag (1979, 2003) and Kaja Silverman (1996), has interrogated
Photography and Visual Culture 449

relationships between subject formation, identity and the gaze, of which the camera
(still or film) is arguably its key component.6 The nature of this interrogation is largely
oriented in terms of a Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualization of subjectivity as being
founded in a (mis)recognition of the self as a visual image. That is Lacan’s argument that
the child comes to understand itself as an individual for the first time through seeing
him or herself in a mirror is extended to consider the ways in which we engage with
photographs of ourselves in similar structures of recognition (this is me, I exist) and
misrecognition (what I see apprehends and defines me but is not really ‘me’). Silverman
(1996: 197) argues that our activity of looking at things in the world is structured by
the photographic gaze (the ways in which a camera frames and defines value and mean-
ing), but also, crucially, we experience ourselves (our bodies and habits) as photographic
spectacle.7 Quoting Susan Sontag, Silverman writes: ‘We learn to see ourselves photo-
graphically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look
good in a photograph’ (1996:197). For Silverman, as well as for Roland Barthes, what
is distinctive about still photographic images in comparison to moving images is that
whilst in both mediums the subject comes into being as an image (with all the potential
for misrecognition and alienation this entails, because it is not who we really are or feel
ourselves to be) the still image arrests movement, it freezes liveliness whilst simultane-
ously affirming that some thing existed by turning into an object.
For the human body this action of being turned into an object of vision (rather than,
say, a sentient, mobile, and fleshy body) can be understood in relation to the pose, a
concept which Barthes and Silverman both use to think through the ways in which we
orientate our bodies in relation to the camera lens: ‘Now, once I feel myself observed
by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instan-
taneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’
(Barthes 1981: 10). Barthes argues that this is an active process, the body photographed
is not passively caught in the lens but actively participates in becoming an object of
­vision. Yet, whilst one might desire that the resulting image ‘should always coincide with
my (profound) “self ”’ this is an impossibility, Barthes asserts, since ‘it is the contrary
that must be said: “myself ” never coincides with my image; for it is the image which
is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and “myself ” which is
light, divided, dispersed’ (1981: 12). In relation to formal portrait photography, Barthes
continues:

Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of
the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think
I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit
his art. . . . I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am ( . . . )
photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity. (1981: 13)

The point that Barthes makes here—that there is never complete coincidence be-
tween who one imagines one is and how one appears—should not be interpreted to
imply that there could be a ‘real’ image of oneself which a photograph (actual or in the
450 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

mind’s eye) could present and re-present to others, because the self cannot be contained
as a visible object (even if it is constituted as one). There is a fundamental disjuncture
between pictures of ourselves and our ‘selves’ in which the latter must deal with the more
rigid and coherent constructions of the former—that is photographs make sense of us as
individuals in ways that we may experience as alien or inauthentic, even whilst we may
enjoy this inauthenticity by imagining it as authentic.
Family photography and tourist photography are key examples of the ways in which
the camera is utilized as a means to document imaginings of authentic relations between
people, their feelings for one another and their locations in time and place, which is
magnified by digital technology rather than discarded as a relic of the film camera era.
Much of the work of representation that family photography does is in articulating visu-
ally the performative practices that families must engage with in order to be constituted
as families. No family simply exists, fixed and unchanging, particularly in contemporary
societies where kinship is not defined solely by blood and groupings of kin may be dis-
persed many thousands of miles apart; the relations between the people involved in fam-
ilies must be continuously and actively maintained and memorialized. As writers such
as Annette Kuhn (1995), Marian Hirsch (1997), Patricia Holland (2001) and Jo Spence
(1986) argue, photography plays a highly significant role in practices of performing fa-
milial relations of love and togetherness whilst simultaneously building intimate and
apparently unequivocal memories through capturing the present for future viewing (the
ideal family constituted in an anterior future). In front of the camera, families are able
to enact versions of their relationships which are more ideal, harmonious and simpli-
fied than they may usually experience, most often selecting moments of success and joy
through which to visualize each other as members of a shared unit rather than through
distress and antagonism (which, although equally interrelational are not culturally de-
sired). Similarly, family estrangements and nonconformity are not readily, or at least
typically, part of families’ presentations of self; indeed some ‘members’ of a family may
be rendered invisible in the family albums through refusals to participate in the required
performance. Through digital technology, family photographs continue to be highly re-
garded and valued cultural objects and it has become familiar practice for people to se-
lect images that show them with their children or other family members, smiling happily
and positioned close to each other, for their profile pictures on social networking Web
sites. Here, where we might expect photographs which only show the individual whose
profile it is, what is established as the identity of the individual is their relationship with
others. Indeed, the profile photograph might easily be used as a means through which to
maintain a sense—and presentation—of the connections made offline; a rebuke to the
popular perception that life online is singular and therefore isolated.
In his ethnographic work on families taking photographs at tourist sites in Denmark,
Jonas Larsen suggests that ‘the more family life becomes fluid and based on choices and
emotions, the more tourist photography can be expected to produce accounts of a time-
less and fixed love: The nuclear family is still a powerful choreographing myth’ (2005:
424). Larsen’s observation points to the ways in which the practice of taking photo-
graphs is not a straightforward one of capturing what is already happening (such as
Photography and Visual Culture 451

children exploring part of an historic castle or a family group standing together beside
an iconic building) but that people move their bodies and behave in ways that anticipate
the action of the camera—and the image it will produce. The families Larsen observed
and interviewed typically preferred not to take photographs of scenery, which they sug-
gested would be too much like postcards (and as such would be boring for themselves
and for their friends and extended family to whom they would be shown), but rather
they wanted to picture their ‘familyness’ in the scene. Larsen notes that touch—of bod-
ies to one another—was a prime aspect of the behaviour of families when their cam-
eras were out, but which would not necessarily be maintained once photographing had
ceased (and conflicts—especially between children—would resume). He argues that:

proximity comes into existence because the camera event draws people together. In
this sense, it is cameras, public places, and cultural scripts that make proper family life
possible: relaxed and intimate . . . The desired family is the product of the photographic
event that each family stages and performs actively and bodily. It is the enactment
that produces ‘familyness’. In other words, photographic performances produce rather
than reflect family life. (2005: 430)

Digital Sharing
Most domestic, personal photography is now produced and circulated digitally, the
most immediate effect of which has been a much greater volume of photographs being
both made and shared. José van Dijk (2008) argues that in the move from analogue to
digital, photography is increasingly used as a means for mediating everyday experiences,
so that the camera is no longer reserved for important and ceremonial moments but
may also act as witness to the mundane. For van Dijk the increased volume and scope
of everyday personal photography indicates a shift in emphasis in the role of photogra-
phy from functioning as a memory tool to functioning as a means for social interaction
and bonding, particularly amongst young people, by playing an important part in self-
presentation (2008: 62). Whilst both analogue and digital photography are capable of
serving as tools for memory and offering a means through which people might attempt
to remodel versions of themselves, van Dijk suggests that in contemporary societies the
communicative function of photographs in the here-and-now is more significant than
making memories:

Digital photography is part of . . . [a] larger transformation in which the self becomes
the centre of a virtual universe made up of informational and spatial flows; individuals
articulate their identity as social beings not only by taking and storing photographs to
document their lives, but by participating in communal photographic exchanges that
mark their identity as interactive producers and consumers of culture. (2008: 62–3)

Photography’s traditional commemorative function is not abandoned in this shift,

rather the practices of storing associated with analogue photography—at home in
452 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

albums, old envelopes and boxes—radically alter in new patterns of ‘distributed sharing’
whereby the exchanging of digital personal photographs becomes a form of distributed
memory (van Dijk 2008: 68).
The photo-sharing Web site Flickr may be read as a key location through which
distributed memory takes place, with many millions of users across the globe upload-
ing photographs at a collective rate of approximately a billion per year.8 Flickr is not
simply a vast repository for photographs, but is a more dynamic form of archive made
through communities for sharing, connecting and commenting. The site is structured as
a relatively decentralized network and it is intended that members experience it as such,
which can, for novice users, make navigation interesting and playful but also somewhat
undirected and labyrinthine. In order to make sense of Flickr as a visitor or member,
one is required to explore the vast network of connections between members’ pages, in-
dividual photographs, groups and tags in a mode which is often most productive as a
form of wandering, since the network as a whole is invisible, or at least is so intensely
complex as to be unfathomable in its entirety. In most instances the photographs that
are encountered on Flickr are those that one has come to see through a combination
of semi-organized searching, happenstance and curiosity; discovering, for example that
there is a group pool named ‘Mountain Decay (and Flatland Rot)’.
Writing about Flickr, Susan Murray (2008: 151) suggests that digital photography
‘signals a shift in the engagement with the everyday that has to do with a move towards
transience and the development of a communal aesthetic that does not respect tradi-
tional amateur/professional hierarchies’. Although there are group pools that signify
some expertise with camera technique and equipment (such as ‘Leica M8 users’ or ‘Neu-
tral density filters’) there are countless group pools which contain photographs using a
range of camera types, taken by photographers whose amateur or professional status
is most often not identified (or significant to how the image is seen). Groups are most
often based on themes; for example frogs, sunsets, cupcakes or benches, constituting an
endless collection and sorting of virtual objects.9 The metaphor of the ‘pool’ makes logi-
cal sense in the flow of images (members’ photograph collections are described on Flickr
as ‘photostreams’), by positioning clusters of photographs in what can be relatively tran-
sient collections; group pools shift in popularity (how many members join and how
many view the pool), the attention they receive from members (how often they upload
to the pool, post comments and discussions) and new ones are constantly being created.
Group pools are ways of creating communities on Flickr and offer some means for navi-
gation, but there is limited research on how much (and in what ways) members invest
time and interest in the group pools and whether, as a function of the site, group pools
are more attractive to users than other means of navigation such as tagging.
Tagging on Flickr is entirely user-generated: members tag their own photographs
and have complete freedom to choose words and phrases, from basic descriptions such
as ‘London’ to more specific phrases ‘Our family trip to London’. Tags are the principal
term in the search mechanism for photos on Flickr and as such are an important means
of categorizing individual images. However this categorization does not fix any photo-
graph in a single place, since most users when they add tags, will add more than one, so
Photography and Visual Culture 453

a photograph will fit in multiple places (and similarly may be entered in more than one
pool). In sum, the taxonomy of Flickr might be best described as rhizomatic (like the
Web) with complex networks of connection and nodes (group pools).10 This is signifi-
cant in terms both of how an archive of digital images comes to be actualized (it can ac-
commodate vast networks of interconnection and contain more objects than can ever be
viewed by a single person) and how viewer-members encounter and build the archive.
As Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis (2008) note, the mode of tagging used on
Flickr has been described as ‘folksonomy’, a Web-centric portmanteau of ‘folk’ and ‘tax-
onomy’ which is used to denote the collaborative organization of content. The use of
tagging here, along with commenting, titling and annotating also points to the role and
importance of a range of textual practices in photo sharing and archiving; photo shar-
ing Web sites are far from purely visual phenomena. The text-based tag attached to the
photograph, Rubinstein and Sluis observe, is particularly significant because it is wholly
active in creating connections to all the other photographs it might relate to. Since the
tag is actually a hyperlink (possibly one of the most easily user-generated hyperlinks cur-
rently operating on the Web) it does the work of enabling users of the site to immedi-
ately situate their photographs within navigable reach of other users (2008: 19). In this
sense, once tagged it is inevitable that the image will be viewed in relation to a series of
others, that is in a flow, or in motion. This elicits a potential shift in the understanding
of the relation between temporality and the photograph which informed much of the
work of writers such as Barthes, Sontag and Silverman, for whom the photographic im-
age’s distinction from the moving image was its capacity to arrest movement (and time).
Contemporary writing on photography by writers such as van Dijk, Murray and Rubin-
stein and Sluis suggests that we are no longer looking at ‘frozen moments of time’ when
we look at photographs but rather have become engaged in viewing practices that are
‘more akin to live transmission’ (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008: 22). The ability to view a
photograph on the camera screen at the point it is captured, and then to delete or edit,
email and upload it online, unfixing or reframing its context, within moments of it hav-
ing been taken imbues photography with a level of immediacy that has come to seem an
obvious, if not yet mundane, feature of what photographic technologies can do.
For Murray this confluence of digital image technology and social network software
has brought about a new aesthetic, in which photographs are no longer seen as being
precious to the extent that analogue photographs were and the ability to store and erase
on memory cards, as well as closure of the temporal gap between capturing and view-
ing, enabled by digital cameras, ‘provides a sense of disposability and immediacy to the
photographic image that was never there before’ (2008: 156).11 This perspective attaches
a sense of loss to the predominance of digital technology (though not necessarily a re-
grettable one) which relates to wider debates about the perception of authenticity (and
‘aura’) as inherent to analogue technologies; in contrast to digital technologies where
authenticity is not only absent but is regarded as an impossibility (where once the au-
ratic quality of art was felt to be undermined by the advent of mechanical, analogue
technologies, analogue’s ‘aura’ is put under threat by digital modes of reproduction).12
However, whilst there is evidently an increased transience to the photographic image
454 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

(easily deleted, or overwhelmed in the continuous flow), I would in turn argue that the
repository of photographs archived online (within collaboratively built and shared, pri-
vate, commercial and institutional archives) places a tangible value on individual pho-
tographs and photography as a practice which can still be understood in terms of values
such as authenticity and permanence. That is despite the existence of an infinite volume
of photographic images and the ease with which photographs can be taken (‘crudely’
snapped on mobile phones, auto-focus digital cameras and Webcams) attitudes towards
the means of photographic production and its result, if not dutifully reverent, are not
dismissive either; the communicative, expressive and rhetorical functions of photo-
graphs prevail as significant means through which people engage with and make sense
of photographic images and through which claims continue to be made about the rela-
tive enduring value or meaning of one photograph or another.

The Pain of Others: The Photograph

as Document and Witness
The desire to memorialize through visual representation remains an important moti-
vating factor in the production and circulation of photographs and despite extensive
interrogation of the reliability of photography to provide accurate documentation of
the actuality of a place, person or event photographs still matter very much as objects
through which to witness and remember. Writing about the imperatives of mourning
and memory in the ruin of the New York World Trade Centre in 2001 and since, Alison
Young (2005) identifies two kinds of memorial images—firstly, those that became sig-
nificant in searching for the missing, mostly personal photographs which were displayed
around the city (and were in turn photographed in places where they were collected to-
gether) and secondly, photographs of the building’s towers which were shown in news-
papers, magazine articles and on television in coverage and discussion, and later on Web
sites devoted to commemorating the Centre as it was. On remembrance walls at Ground
Zero photographs of lost friends and relatives appeared alongside photographs of the for-
mer physical structure of the building, both types of image—human and nonhuman—
vibrate with a sense of the past as painful, unrecoverable loss, whilst nevertheless acting as
(ghostly) markers of proof that someone/something existed, the ‘it has been’ which can-
not be grasped in the ‘it is no longer’ of the present. The personal photographs displayed
around Ground Zero are like those displayed at numerous sites of public outrage and on
gravestones throughout the world. The display of photographs in this way may be read
as acts of both private and public mourning, in which the private photograph is brought
into public space and is recognizable in that domain as private, intimate and personal,
yet shared through that recognizability. Indeed, a viewer might flinch at the thought of
one of their own vernacular photographs positioned in such circumstances and of their
photographs which would become imbued with a melancholy opened up to the public.
The role of still photography around the site of the World Trade Centre is given
additional meaning by the conditions of intense visual coverage and scrutiny that oc-
curred during the events of 11 September and the weeks following. The technologies
Photography and Visual Culture 455

that enabled many millions of people around the world to ‘witness’ events on television
effected a cinematic quality to what is in many ways an unrepresentable situation. The
compulsion to attempt to visualize and to watch as much as possible of the location and
people involved is indicative of the cultural conflation of seeing and knowing—if we see
we will understand (more)—in which photography has played a key role. However, the
attempt to see and show can only mask the ultimate failure of complete comprehension
and the moving photographic image has no more succeeded in transparently presenting
the real than the still photograph has. David Campany (2003) argues that photographs
of the collapsed remains and debris of buildings at Ground Zero by the photographer
Joel Meyerowitz are imbued with added symbolic weight through his use of a technol-
ogy which precedes the televisual. Meyerowitz’s use of a 1942 plate camera, Campany
asserts, confers nostalgia of a time before television and new media networks, which is
rooted in an attachment to recovering the past and the idea that the return to a former
technology ‘will somehow rescue the processes of memory that have been made so com-
plicated by the sheer amount of information we assimilate from diverse technologies’
(2003: 126). The use of a plate camera may be read here as a means to re-pose problems
associated with the (in)ability of a photograph to be faithful to its subject (here, in an
act of mourning and memorialization) by employing a device which produces images
slowly, and therefore, it would appear, honestly. A further interpretation of these photo-
graphs of the crumbled remains of concrete and glass structures is that each recalls other
images of modern war and destruction, connecting the site of this singular event to oth-
ers within a network of acts of devastation and injury.

Negotiating the Past: The Role of

Photography in the Memory Museum
As much as photography has served as a means to document and provide witness to both
significant moments and the everyday, it also has a prime function in how versions of the
past are communicated to interested viewers in the spaces of museums and exhibitions.
Writing on the photographs taken by American soldiers of prisoners at Abu Ghraib,
Sontag (2004) notes that photographs have ‘laid down the tracks of how important con-
flicts are judged and remembered’, and adds that, ‘the memory museum is now mostly
a visual one (2004: 24).13 These two things to which Sontag refers—that photographs
immortalize particular specific moments and that museums use photography for acts of
memory and remembering—are not coincidental, and this points to the way in which
desires to commemorate versions of the past can be highly dependent on a kind of pho-
tographic ‘fossil record’ that remains (which may be already part of dominant discourse
or requires seeking out). However, it would be erroneous to be overly deterministic
about the trajectory of the visual record and we cannot predict or assume what meanings
will be derived from the photographs that bear witness to events, for example to infer
that the ones which are powerful now will continue to hold cultural value in the future,
or at least the same kind of value. That is we cannot know by what means the future will
recount (or judge) the past, however much we may attempt to determine or imagine the
456 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

visual record. Photographs do have considerable narrative power, but these narratives are
not atemporal nor are they politically or culturally neutral.
Darren Newbury’s work on anti-apartheid photography (2009) and in particular
his discussion (2005) of the role of photography in two museums in South Africa—the
Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto—
offers careful examination of the ways in which, following changes in the political
­organization of South Africa in the 1990s, the photographs taken by oppositional or-
ganizations such as Afrapix and Drum magazine photographers took on the function of
photographic archives, forming the basis of means of showing the past in what became
‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. Sontag’s assertion that photographs leave an imprint in
how conflicts are remembered resonates in the naming of Soweto’s Hector Pieterson
Museum, which is located in the area where thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson was shot
and killed at the start of the June 1976 Soweto student uprising. As Newbury describes,
Pieterson was not the first or only child to be shot that day, but because Sam Nzima’s
photograph of Hector being carried by fellow student Mbuyisa Makhubo with his dis-
traught sister, Antoinette, running by their side, became a national and international
icon of the uprising, it is Pieterson in particular who is remembered. In Nzima’s photo-
graph, a reproduction of which is sited outside the museum close by the location where
it was taken, it seems inconceivable for a viewer to avoid the anguish in the expression
and posture of the children fleeing the police violence (unseen beyond the frame) and it
is this potential of the medium to position the viewer as a witness and thereby move the
viewer emotionally—which might mobilize the viewer politically—that made photog-
raphy a powerful and important part of the anti-apartheid struggle. Shown in a museum
over thirty years later at a time when the nation has undergone substantial political and
social change, the anguish and pain of the photograph has not dissipated but is reframed
to function as a remembrance of things past (and perhaps a call to prevent its reoccur-
rence) rather than a spur to immediate political awareness and action (for new genera-
tions of audience this may be their first encounter with the image and in this sense the
photograph continues to illicit political awareness).
Alongside instances of struggle photography, Newbury explains, in the museum there
are photographs taken in the townships of protests and violence, of the type which were
used for national and international news stories, as well as images of nonviolent, domes-
tic life. In the context of the museum, both types of photograph function as historical
documents of life for black South Africans living under apartheid, the photographs of
domestic life however, ‘offer an alternative visual record to that with which people would
be familiar from press and broadcast sources’ (2005: 283). This connects to the problems
associated with the over-determined visual record that photographic images can convey
of a place, person or event. The repetition of specific photographic representations (of
violence, or poverty, or crisis for example) can congeal in such a way that it becomes
difficult to see around or beyond them. Because photographic representations are so
prevalent and seductive (even when what is shown isn’t conventionally picturesque) it is
possible for the image to appear to stand in for and determine whatever subject is being
‘captured’. However, this is not to suggest that photographs produce narrow or false
Photography and Visual Culture 457

visions of the real truth, since photography has an important role to play in how truths
are conceived and constructed. That is as a means of communication and sense-making,
photographs enable ways of understanding, remembering and producing meaning, but
they do so ideologically and in temporally and spatially specific contexts. Photographs
taken of uprisings in Soweto and exhibited in the Hector Pieterson ­Museum show this
meaning making at work; as Newbury (2005: 285) notes, photographs taken on behalf
of insurance agencies tell a story of property damage, police photographs tell a story of
criminality and the photographs that black photojournalists took tell a story of injustice
and resistance to the predominantly white mainstream press, all of which are collected
up in the service of an historical account of a nation’s past and desire for reconciliation.
Photographs reframed in order to account for a nation or other collective past are
often reframed for, or by, an international audience. In this context, Rachel Hughes
(2003) asks questions about the politics and curatorship of the portrait photographs
taken of incoming prisoners to Cambodia’s S-21 prison during the genocide of the
1970s, which have been exhibited worldwide in museums and galleries since the mid
1990s. As Hughes points out, in their original context these photographs were ‘for both
prisoners and their masters, emblems of the regime’s omnipotence and efficiency’; means
to reinforce the institutional power of both the prison camp and Pol Pot’s Democratic
Kampuchea. Following the fall of the regime in 1979 the site of the prison became a
commemorative exhibition space (Tuol Sleng Museum) and the photographs part of
an archive stored there, where they were visited and studied by both Cambodian and
non-Camodian researchers. Following this, in the early 1990s, the photographs were re-
garded as requiring rescue from ‘a volatile political situation, years of neglect, a lack of
resources and the absence of trained staff’ by a North American–based Photo Archive
Group set up by two photojournalists who had viewed the archive.14 A central conse-
quence of the Photo Archive Group’s project to restore and index the photographs was
their international circulation in both news and visual arts contexts, where they were
­reproduced in mainstream magazines, a dedicated case-bound publication and in an ex-
hibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997. Hughes, assertion that,
‘the generation of sympathy for, and interest in, Cambodia’s past and present has un-
doubtedly been fuelled by the global exposure of the photographs’ points to the ways in
which photography operates as a significant affective and motivating device, yet at the
same time in this operation important questions of context, political power and owner-
ship may be overlooked, as she argues, ‘crucial questions regarding this exposure, how-
ever, remain under-explored’ (2003: 30). For although such photographs might provide
a way in which contemporary viewers may ‘see’ what is otherwise unseeable because it is
in the past, the multiple reproduction of these images might, as Barbie Zelizer suggests,
‘function most directly to achieve what [photography] ought to have stifled—atrocity’s
normalisation’ (quoted in Hughes 2003: 40). In this mapping of the movement of the
S-21 photographs, Hughes traces an important relation between the view that archive
photographs ‘hold the true memory of past events’ and the way in which deterioration
in the materiality of the photographs can ‘be perceived, quite literally, as a lack of mem-
ory’ (2003: 28). Yet, as Hughes points out, merely to preserve and exhibit photographs
458 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

of the past does not produce memory as a discrete, factual object; restoring the materi-
ality of the image should not preclude vital questions about whose memory and what
form of memory is made to seem materially present in the here-and-now.

Conclusion
In writing this survey of work on photography, structured through an intent to sketch
out a view of the landscape of contemporary themes within photographic practice and
writing on photography, it is apparent that whilst there may be significant signposts to-
wards what photography is—and might yet be—the future of photography is likely to
continue to be intriguingly complex in its application, meanings and effects. The ubiq-
uity and pervasiveness of digital technologies in the daily lives of many (if not most)
people around the globe, has evidently not reduced the importance of photography but
rather has activated and built on photography’s ability to mutate (as it did into cinema
in the 1890s) in order to become crucial to the networked societies in which it is argued
we (as global citizens) live, work and connect. There is now an unimaginable amount
of photographs in virtual and/or material existence, and yet individual images from the
present and past continue to have the capacity to elicit feelings of surprise, joy, anger,
shame, grief and memory in ways that can be deeply felt and experienced, however
much the individual photograph has come to occupy a position which is often seen as
transient and impermanent. In my view there remains a strong case for arguing that ‘a’
photograph might be both impermanent and enduring and that this relation of tran-
sience/permanence typifies the ontology of photography both before and after the emer-
gence of widespread digital technologies, since any photograph is both a brief fleeting
moment in continuous time and a securing of that moment in frozen, suspended time.
In this vein it is helpful to consider a much earlier discussion of the ontology of the pho-
tographic image; in his 1931 essay ‘A Short History of Photography’ Walter Benjamin
advances a complex understanding of the relation between the photographic camera,
human optical perception, the conscious and unconscious mind as well as the moments
of future time that are held in the photographic image. Theorized through the concept of
the ‘optical unconscious’, Benjamin argues that the camera’s ability to capture moments
in the flow of time enables us to see retrospectively elements within a scene which are
lost to the conscious mind (or memory) as time, and that which occurs through it flows
on, and away. For Benjamin the photograph provides evidence of an optical unconscious
­parallel to the ‘instinctual unconscious’ revealed through psychoanalysis ((1931) 1972: 7)
because the camera records what the eye might have seen but that the conscious brain
could not fully absorb or retain (and as such the eye could not consciously perceive).
Consequently, the photographic camera and image produced by it is a technology of
temporality as much as it is of optics since in viewing a photograph we seek out evidence
not only of what was but also what was yet to come; as Benjamin notes,

the spectator feels an irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of chance, of
the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character in the picture;
Photography and Visual Culture 459

to find that imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past mo-
ment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may rediscover it.
((1936) 1972: 7)

In connecting Benjamin’s view to the landscape of networked, distributed data and

images in which we now find ourselves situated I want to suggest that the role of photog-
raphy within digital culture alludes to a promise to offer us a means to negotiate and ‘see’
better what we cannot see amidst the unprecedented degree of irreconcilable information
and data streams. The point that Benjamin describes above is the way in which the viewer
may make an attempt to understand the present by looking back for clues (in the form of
visual cues within the photograph; a strained smile, awkward embrace, a previously un-
noticed exchange of glances) in order to contextualize the future-present in its past. Pho-
tography then might persist still in providing at least the hope of contextualizing who we
are and what place we occupy, when so much of what might have seemed established has
become un-tethered and when things we feel should be un-tethered remain stubbornly
fixed. Through picture messaging, photo-blogging, photo sharing and uploading photo-
graphs to social network sites we are both grappling with information (and contributing
to the data stream) whilst also making an attempt to share and communicate in a lan-
guage which lends itself particularly ably to sharing across potential barriers of spoken
language, literacy and varying degrees of computer expertise. Digital culture is defined,
at least in part by information flows of a level of infinite complexity that is beyond the
capacity of human comprehension, and so it is that photography—fully imbued with the
consequences of this culture—has come to form a prime means for making sense in ways
that we can experience as something which feels very much like familiar and direct human
perception. Photography is an intricate yet shifting assemblage of technologies, bodies,
politics and aesthetics; tangible and ephemeral, at this moment photography appears par-
adoxically to have become established and to be at the point of experiencing radical, dy-
namic change. Indeed, the role and meaning of photographic images is likely to persist as
a key question within the study of visual culture; the ground is far from settled.

FURTHER READING
Evans, Jessica and Hunt, Barbara. 1997. The Camerawork Essays. London: Rivers Oram Press.
Rubinstein, Daniel and Sluis, Katrina. 2008. ‘A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Net-
worked Image’, Photographies, 1/1: 9–28.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Notes
1. Doherty (1988) discusses his work in relation to photographic documentation of Derry in
Circa Art Magazine.
2. Central to an understanding of the camera as a perceptual apparatus is the assertion that
the camera lens functions as an extension of the eye. The argument can be traced back to
460 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

philosophical understandings of much earlier technologies such as the telescope and micro-
scope, which as Martin Jay (1994) notes, were instrumental in producing modern perspec-
tive. This was developed in early film theory—with deep scepticism towards the extension of
a single sense—by Jean-Louis Baudry (1974), Christian Metz (1982) and others, later, more
optimistically by Marshall McLuhan (1967) and recently by Vivian Sobchack (1992, 2004)
who sees the relation between apparatus and eye as carnal and embodied. For additional de-
bate on the relation between photographic representation and visual perception see Friday
(2002), particularly Chapter 3, pp. 47–65.
3. Burgin, Tagg and Hall all contributed to the UK magazine Camerawork, published between
1976 and 1985. The essays published in Camerawork typically share a similar approach to
the critique of photographic representation, namely in their interrogation of photography as
a social practice. See Jessica Evans and Barbara Hunt (1997) The Camerawork Essays, which
provides an anthology of key essays from the period.
4. For work on the role of images in contemporary media culture see Lull (2001), Lash and
Lury (2004) and Feury (2008). Frosh (2001) and Machin (2004) provide discussion of
global commercial image banks such as Getty Images, which although containing many
thousands of images, tend to reproduce a limited and hierarchical flow of generic images
emanating from a largely Euro-American consumerist perspective.
5. In this claim Sobchack is making about photography, she also includes the cinematic and
‘the electronic’. Although she uses the word ‘new’ to discuss these technologies she isn’t sug-
gesting that our relationship to perceptive and expressive technologies, and the changes that
emerge in these relationships, are only very recent. It might be most helpful to think of
transformations as stretching back in time and ongoing.
6. For a detailed account of the arguments put forward by Roland Barthes, André Bazin and
Christian Metz in this regard see Jay (1994).
7. Silverman’s argument is broadly similar to Sobchack’s (1992, 2004) conceptualization of the
intimate relation between technological and human perception (discussed above); however
Silverman, in taking a more psychoanalytic perspective, emphasizes the role of the gaze in
producing the body as an object.
8. Flickr publicizes the numbers of photographs uploaded to the site by counting in billions
and identifies, through the Flickr Blog, the first one billionth (no longer in existence on the
site), the second (uploaded November 2007, photo description: Chinatown in Sydney), the
third (uploaded November 2008, tagged ‘New Orleans’), the fourth (uploaded October
2009, no tag or description, title: DSC09782), and counting continues. These photographs
are, according to Flickr, identified entirely based on their place in the sequence of uploads
rather than because they in some way represent the Flickr brand or mission. In many ways,
simply having a place in the upload stream of images and having (or not having) tags, or a
title assigned by the camera represents the Flickr identity appositely.
9. Group pools function on Flickr by members joining the group and then adding specific
photographs from their own collection appropriate to the group description.
10. The term ‘rhizomatic’ is used in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1988) work to con-
trast with dominant arboreal epistemologies and is understood as a network of multiplici-
ties, which can be ruptured and remade so that flows (of information, say) can be rerouted
around points of rupture. The terms ‘rhizome’ and ‘arboreal’ derive principally from botany
where they classify differences in plants (grass is rhizomatic for example, whereas an oak
tree is arboreal). The Web has widely been described as a rhizomatic system and Flickr may
Photography and Visual Culture 461

function in similar—though not identical—ways (for instance if Flickr group pools may be
seen as nodes, this is not to imply they are performing the same role as the nodes in com-
puter network systems).
11. Murray notes that Polaroid technology provided immediate photographs before digital cam-
eras were available, however there were financial costs involved for the user that are not there
to the same degree as digital photography, which, she argues, gives no-cost disposability.
Peter Buse (2008) provides further discussion of Polaroid technology and the immediate
image. For an alternative perspective on the value of immediacy attached to digital photog-
raphy see Kathleen Robbins’s (2008) discussion of the benefits of using a film rather than
digital camera because of the delay between exposure and viewing the transparency.
12. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Walter Benjamin (1936) ar-
gues that the traditional work of art is changed forever by mechanical reproduction and
in particular its contemplative, revered quality—its aura—is lost. John Berger summarizes
Benjamin’s insight in the following passage, which might in a contemporary context be very
aptly applied to digital photographic technologies: ‘what the modern means of reproduction
have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it . . . from any preserve. For the
first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available,
valueless, free’ ((1931) 1972: 32). Significantly, Benjamin is ambivalent about the value of
an artwork’s aura and furthermore, although in ‘The Work of Art’ essay he places photogra-
phy and aura in opposition, in a later essay on a childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, Ben-
jamin develops an alternative, less oppositional notion of photographic aura. For a detailed
discussion of this see Carolin Duttlinger (2008).
13. Sontag argues that the defining association for people around the world of the 2003 Iraq
invasion and subsequent conflict will be the photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners in
Abu Ghraib. For further examination of the Abu Ghraib photographs and their implications
see Butler (2005, 2009), Sjoberg (2007), Hagopian (2007) and van Dijk (2008). See also
Edwards (2001) and Edwards and Hart (eds) (2004) for discussion of the relation between
photographs (particularly ethnographic photographs), history and museums.
14. Douglas Niven and Christopher Riley, quoted in Hughes (2003: 29). The Archive Group sought to
rescue the photographs whilst also training Cambodians in archive preservation. Hughes provides
further discussion and analysis of this project, including how parts of the archive were removed
for ‘safe-keeping’ and that Niven and Riley were framed as having discovered the photographs.

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 19

Television as a Global
Visual Medium
Kristyn Gorton

Television is not just what appears on screen; it is a variety of invisible yet specific
practices that occur in the air, in orbit and across lands.
—Lisa Parks (2005: 69)

As Lisa Parks reminds us, television, as a global visual medium, is not ‘just what appears
on screen’ but is also ‘a variety of invisible yet specific practices that occur in the air, in
orbit and across lands’ (2005: 69). Television is able to traverse national boundaries,
influence ideology and seep into the minds of its viewing public. Indeed, its ability to
manipulate and reach across global parameters prompted fear and concern in early re-
ception research. Now with the move towards digitalization some of these concerns are
being repeated amidst new, emergent issues regarding convergence, content streaming,
aesthetics, quality and branding. The following chapter explores television as a global
medium while considering the role and function of television in contemporary soci-
ety and culture by considering the emotional investment viewers make in what they
watch.
We are in what has been referred to as ‘TV 3’, which covers the period post-1995.
As Robin Nelson argues TV 3 ‘marks a new era hailing the triumph of digital-satellite
capacity to distribute transnationally, bypassing national distribution and, in some
instances, regulatory controls’ (2007: 8; see also Creeber and Hills 2007). This leads to
questions, rehearsed before, about how one culture is received and understood in an-
other. It also raises concerns about how advanced capitalism affects viewing. As Nelson
points out, ‘[i]n Western culture, the increasing affluence of consumer individualism
has, for good or ill, promoted immediate over deferred gratifications and the pleasures
of excess’ (2007: 168–9). However, the move towards digitialization is not simply one to
Television as a Global Visual Medium 465

do with content and consumer, it will also affect the institutional forces that dominate
television. As John Caldwell argues: ‘Televisual form in the age of digital simply cannot
be accounted for without talking about the institutional forces that spur and manage
those forms’ (Caldwell 2004: 46).
Interpersonal forms of media, such as television, are integrated into people’s daily
lives. Many families in the Western world, for example have televisions in their kitch-
ens and/or bedrooms, as well as in the main family room. This means that the television
often becomes a backdrop, as well as a focal point, in people’s everyday lives. As a social
tool and as something with varied content, television is something people talk about,
whether in groups, over the ‘watercooler’, or on online forums. Chat rooms dedicated to
particular programmes now offer ‘webisodes’ or ‘mobisodes’ to further a viewer’s interest
in particular television programmes. The consequences of this are a further engagement
with television and its various media outputs.
Although television is often part of people’s everyday lives and rituals, this does not
necessarily mean that viewers are consistently making meaning out of what they watch:
there are times when viewers are passive, and times when they are active. In his con-
clusion to research carried out by the Glasgow Media Group, Greg Philo states that:
‘it would be quite wrong to see audiences as simply absorbing all media messages, and
certainly as being unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. But it is also wrong
to see viewers and readers as effortlessly active, creating their own meanings in each en-
counter with the text’ (1999: 287). For this reason, work on global television studies
and ethnography continues to offer vital ways of studying audiences and the meanings
they make.
Lisa Parks’s work on satellites in Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (2005)
for example illustrates not only the way exports are read in other cultures, but also
how an American television programme such as Dallas is understood in the ‘outback’.
Focussing on the ways in which satellites are used and how this use tells us something
about cultural practice allows Parks to comment both on the Indigenous culture she vis-
its and the global presence it mediates. She argues that: ‘Aboriginal Australians who own
and operate Imparja TV use satellites not just to downlink, dub, and rerun American
and British programs and flow structures; rather, they select shows and arrange them in
ways that give shape and meaning to the Imparja footprint. [. . .] Imparja’s flow can be
conceived as hybrid in the sense that it represents a rewriting or reconfiguration of tele-
vision programming made for audiences elsewhere’ (2005: 63). Parks witnesses the way
in which Indigenous Australians make meaning out of television exports instead of hav-
ing meaning forced upon them. Her research leads her to suggest that we imagine ‘flow’
and ‘footprint’ ‘not as fixed schedules and closed boundaries but as zones of situated
knowledges and cultural incongruities that may compel struggles for cultural survival
rather than simply suppress them’ (2005: 62). In imagining more permeable and move-
able boundaries, Parks’s work supports the notion of an active audience and continues a
line of research that interrogates the notion of cultural imperialism.
In thinking about the changes in the global television landscape, we must also con-
sider how new technologies such as DVR recording devices (TiVo for instance) and an
466 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

increase in sales and availability of DVD box sets create new ways of viewing television.
Handheld television devices also mean that television features more prominently in our
lives than ever before. Indeed, we can argue that there are more irrational patterns in
viewing where people watch television on their handheld recording devices than when
they sit in front of the television in their homes (Morley: 2006). Increasing convergence
within media texts—between Internet, television and film—has meant that we must
think about how we watch differently. Virginia Nightingale (2007) argues that televi-
sion is becoming more like the Internet and the Internet is becoming more like televi-
sion. Nelson points out that some people are already reading their emails through their
television and argues that ‘increasingly the ubiquitous domestic small screens, through
sharing digital technology, will become one’ (2007: 12). The move towards digitaliza-
tion in the UK, for instance will also greatly impact what we watch and how we watch
it and will, as some argue, radically alter our relationship to television. But do these
new viewing practices, which are more personalized and anchored around life-style,
‘mean that television is less central or more central to our ways of life?’ (Taylor and Wood
2008:146). Lisa Taylor and Helen Wood pose this interesting question in their work
on television audiences and argue that we may never find the answers ‘if prevailing dis-
courses of new media force us to ask entirely different questions’ (2008: 146). In other
words, if we lose sight of the intimate relationship viewers have with television in favour
of seeing television as simply part of media convergence, then we will also overlook im-
portant questions and research that aims to interrogate the specificities of television and
its audience.
In Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (2001), for instance Anna
McCarthy considers ‘[w]hat the TV set does outside the home—what social acts it per-
forms, or is roped into, what struggles it embodies and intervenes in, what agencies
speak through it, and which subjects it silences or alternatively give a voice’ (2001: 1,
author’s italics). In so doing, she poses very provocative questions about the presence of
television in the public domain. For instance, she asks: ‘How much is the experience of
waiting built into the format of TV programming and images in general—waiting for
an upcoming program, a better music video, the resumption of a narrative interrupted
by commercials? In other words, is waiting a “deep structure” of television spectatorship
regardless of where we watch TV?’ (2001: 218–9). McCarthy’s questions are impor-
tant insofar as they remind us how often television is used by its viewers to pass time.
Whether we are waiting in a doctor’s office or for dinner to be ready, television is often
available to deal with feelings of boredom or restlessness. These engagements are very
seldom emotional and very often forgettable. Indeed, a good deal of the time spent in
front of the television can be understood as meaningless.
And yet, as McCarthy points out, televisions are often situated in eating places to
make people feel better about eating alone or to relieve their anxieties of wasting time.
She refers to a place in Manhattan called ‘The Video Diner’, which has individualized
booths where you can watch TV and eat—and contrasts this with sports bars and news
bars. She reminds us that we need to think about the ‘material conventions of the screen
as an object’ (2001: 222); in other words, we need to think about how the physical
Television as a Global Visual Medium 467

position of the screen affects the spectator’s experience of watching TV. Perhaps we can
take this a step further to suggest that it is necessary to think about the viewer’s orienta-
tion to the screen in order to make sense of her engagement with what she watches. The
viewer in the Video diner will have a very different commitment to a TV programme
than the person in a sports bar, as will the person who sits down to watch a particular
programme versus the one who tunes in while she waits. McCarthy’s research is indic-
ative of new, more self-conscious and self-reflexive research within television studies,
which has generated significant questions about the television audience, the role of tele-
vision in the global public sphere and the way people engage with what they watch.
The following section explores the place of television in the global sphere and discusses
emergent theoretical ideas regarding the cultural influence television has on its ­audience.
In so doing, it will raise issues regarding new models of television flow. I will also exam-
ine the emotional attachment viewers have with television: both in terms of the global
brands that dominate our screens and the individual meanings we make.

The ‘Americanization’ of Global Television

In their influential collection titled Peripheral Vision: New Patterns of Global Television
(1996), editors John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham argued that a
‘sea- change’ in television systems started in the late 1970s (1996: 1). These changes were
part of broader movements happening in the Western world including: ‘globalisation,
trade liberalization, increased national and international competition and a decrease in
the centrality of the state as a provider of goods and services’ (1996: 1). New changes in
technology, specifically the satellite also meant more channels and choice in television
programming. As Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham suggest the ‘satellite has acted as a
kind of “Trojan-horse” of media liberalization’ (1996: 2). Until the late 1970s, North
America, Latin American and Australia were the only three regions to have a mixed sys-
tem of broadcasting, which is a combination of public and private programming (Sin-
clair et al. 1996: 2). The change from public to private broadcasting systems meant that
there was a heavy dependence on American imports (hence the popularity and world-
wide distribution of Dallas). But it also led to more cross-cultural swaps—so the Latin
American telenovellas (like soap operas) became popular in southern Europe (1996: 3).
Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham advance the idea of ‘geolinguistic regions’, which they
describe as the ‘broad proposition that export markets will develop amongst countries
which share a similar language and culture’ (1996: 26). Instead of thinking about the
way television flows from one country to another, ‘geolinguistic regions’ encourages us
to think about the way television is distributed to similar speaking cultures—such as the
flow of the telenovella form from South America to Spain.
In general terms, media imperialism involves thinking that the major world source
for media outputs can be found primarily in the USA and secondarily in Europe, spe-
cifically the UK, and that these centres act as hubs through which all cultural products
must flow (Sinclair et al. 1996: 6). In his assessment of ‘media imperialism’ in the early
1980s, Fred Fejes argued that: ‘A third concern that the media imperialism approach
468 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

must address if it is to progress is the issue of culture’ (1981: 287). As Fejes pointed out,
it is necessary for researchers of media imperialism to think about the ways it affects
culture. The related term, ‘cultural imperialism’, therefore refers to the ways in which
culture (language, modes of address, life-style, etc) is affected by media texts. In his in-
fluential Mass Communications and American Empire (1969), Herbert Schiller argued
that ‘The structure, character and direction of the domestic communications apparatus
are no longer, if they ever were, entirely national concerns. This powerful mechanism
now directly impinges on peoples’ lives everywhere. It is essential therefore, that there
should be at least some familiarity with what the American communications system is
like, how it has evolved, what motivates it and where it is pointing’ (1969: 17). Schil-
ler’s work was among the first to look directly at the domestic and international mass
communications structure and policy in the USA and consider its global influence and
the influence of his work continues to dominate. Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham refer
to Schiller’s work as the ‘locus classicus of the cultural imperialism thesis’ (1996: 6) and
Jonathan Bignell and Elke Weissmann suggest, ‘most work takes Schiller as its starting
point’ (2008: 93). Indeed, recent work on global television suggests ‘there are signs of
a critical reassessment of “globalisation” in favour of a more “retro” theoretical position
that uses the imperialist perspective with some new insights’ (Corcoran 2007: 3).
As suggested earlier, the idea that American cultural products dominated other cul-
tures started to prove one-sided. Theoretical perspectives such as postmodernism and
postcolonialism and research into ‘active’ audiences led TV theorists to reconsider this
‘one-way street’ model. What they found was that although there were a lot of US im-
ports there were also local programmes that commanded large audiences. The assump-
tion that the Western model would be more powerful overlooked alternative models
that were in many cases preferred. Indeed, media studies more generally now takes into
account the way in which ‘culture and symbolic representations now flow readily be-
tween countries via media, travellers and migrants, and is increasingly taken up into
people’s senses of self ’ (Washbourne 2010: 26).
In The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993), for instance
Hamid Naficy relates a moving anecdote about his daughter, Shayda, and his niece, Set-
areh, who met each other in Los Angeles and bonded over The Little Mermaid. ­Although
Setareh spoke only German and Persian and Shayda could only speak English, they
communicated through the songs of the popular Disney film. This experience leads him
to argue that

[t]he globalisation of American pop culture does not automatically translate into
­globalisation of American control. This globalised culture provides a shared discursive
space where transnationals such as Setareh and Shayda can localise it, make their own
uses of it, domesticate and indigenize it. They may think with American cultural prod-
ucts but they do not think American. (Naficy 1993: 2)

Naficy’s point is important insofar as it challenges the suggestion that American

products will turn their consumers into Americans. His work also continues the idea
Television as a Global Visual Medium 469

that viewers and consumers communicate through products, they are not dominated by
them. His experience provides us with an emotional account of how film and television
provides a platform through which people can communicate. The songs allowed Seterah
and Shayda to feel a sense of connection, despite the differences in their background
and language.

New Directions in Global Television Flow

Earlier conceptions of Americanization have greatly changed and as Arjun Appadurai
argues, for ‘the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than
Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans’ and so on, arguing that ‘[T]he
new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order
that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models’
(2003: 40). Extending Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’, Appa-
durai advances terms such as ‘ethnoscapes’ and ‘mediascapes’ as a means of framing the
conditions involved in the current global cultural economy. These terms are more help-
ful in thinking about television flow and the landscape it covers.
Several theorists on global television have returned to the concept of ‘flow’, first
discussed by Raymond Williams, in order to understand how content and technology
interact across global parameters. Williams’s work on television is often remembered
through the term ‘flow’, which he used to describe the television watching experience.
However, as Lynn Spigel (2009) points out in her introduction to the 1992 publication
of Television: Technology and Cultural Form (originally published 1974), Williams’s anal-
ysis of ‘flow’ is just one chapter in a ‘throughgoing critique of the relationships among
television’s technological invention, its innovation as a media institution and textual
form, and its connection to social relationships and experience in modern Western cul-
ture’ ((1974) 1992: x). Indeed, Williams’s work on television, as Spigel suggests, which
includes his selected writings on television (1989) and his columns in The Listener,
­comprise a significant contribution to the study of television and its audiences. In his
chapter on ‘Programming: Distribution and Flow’, Williams describes the ‘interruptions’
inherent to the television-watching experience, but also notes the ‘flow’ that happens
when programmes and advertisements begin to merge together on television. Williams
saw this ‘flow’ as something distinct to American television and recounts the following
experience of watching television in Miami, after arriving on an Atlantic liner: ‘A crime
in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary
counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance
in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York’ (Williams
(1974) 1992: 85–6). Here Williams refers to the way in which television programmes
and advertisements ‘flow’ together even though there are breaks in the programming
schedule which, for Williams, results in ‘a single irresponsible flow of images and feel-
ings’ ((1974) 1992: 86). In other words, because the programmes and advertisements
share similar styles and content, the entire experience produces a ‘flow’ of feelings that
are not always linked to any one programme or advertisement in particular.
470 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Although television flow has changed since Williams wrote with the advent of DVRs
and DVD box sets (see Kompare 2006), Albert Moran argues that the term itself con-
tinues to be a useful way to think about global television in that it joins ‘the notion of
transportation with that of communication’ (2009: 13). In other words, it ‘unites car-
riage and content’ (2009: 12). The notion of flow reminds us that the two, ‘carriage’ and
‘content’, should be thought of together, rather than imagining global television as either
about the physical way in which it flows or the message itself.
In his work on the ‘global television marketplace’, Timothy Havens points towards
the ‘disagreements about the forces that determine global television flows’ (2006: 3).
He suggests that the ‘debate pits political economists, who argue that structural fea-
tures of global television determine the kinds of programming that travel internationally
and the places where they travel (i.e., Herman and McChesney 1997), against cultural
scholars, who suggest that cultural homologies among exporting and importing
­nations determine such flows (i.e., Tracey and Redal 1995)’ (Havens 2006: 3). Havens
argues that ‘local executives act as intermediaries between viewers and exporters, decid-
ing which programmes to purchase and how to schedule them based upon their own
understandings of the culture’ (2006: 3). ‘Thus, if a nation has the financial resources,
it will produce its own programming; if not, it will seek imports from the most cultur-
ally similar nations it can find’ (2006: 4). In their work on global television, Denise D.
Bielby and C. Lee Harrington, like Havens, point towards the importance of television
executives in terms of our understanding of cross-national television flow. They discuss
the importance of NAPTE (National Association of Television Program Executives) in
determining what is bought and sold in television (2008). Havens’s and Bielby and Har-
rington’s work illustrates the power television executives have in determining what we
watch and what programmes are commissioned or cancelled.
Other theorists, such as Edward S. Herman and Robert McChesney, argue that ‘De-
regulation and new technologies not only stimulated global media expansion, they also
provided the basis for a striking new wave of corporate consolidation in the media in-
dustry [. . .] Most important, the late 1980s gave birth to the development of a truly
global media market, where the dominant firms were increasingly transnational firms’
(2003: 36). Herman and McChesney’s argument concerning the role TNCs (transna-
tional corporations) play in the development of the current global cultural economy is
crucial, especially in contemporary discussions of branding and streaming.
Unlike previous models of global television, which focus on the ways in which na-
tions affect the cultural output on television through regulations and policy, Michael
Curtin’s work suggests that textual elements carry a significant weight when it comes
to why people watch certain programmes. Instead of thinking about national borders
in terms of the organization of meanings and identities, Curtin suggests rethinking the
idea of nationality to consider instead the ways in which ‘media capitals’ affect flow.
Curtin defines ‘media capitals’ as a ‘nexus or switching point, rather than a container’
they are ‘particular cities that have become centres for the finance, production and dis-
tribution of television programs; cities like Bombay, Cairo and Hong Kong’ (2003:
203). Instead of thinking about the ways in which nations effect content (through
Television as a Global Visual Medium 471

regulatory constraints), Curtin’s research suggests that particular cities across the globe
are responsible for the production and distribution of television content. He argues that
‘neo-network’ television firms now focus their attention on marketing and promotion,
which marks a change from the network era where the control of a handful of national
channels was the ‘key to profitability’ (2003: 212). According to Curtin, this means that
certain series, such as Star Trek or production companies, such as Disney animation be-
come dominant global brands: ‘[g]iven a greater range of choices, audiences are drawn
to products by textual elements—characters, storylines, special effects—rather than by
the technological and regulatory constraints formerly imposed on the delivery system’
(Curtin 2003: 212).
As Simone Murray points out in her work on ‘brand loyalties’, the ‘commercial infra-
structure for orchestrating content re-use emerges from the late 20th-century de-regulation
of Western media markets, and the concentration of media properties of all kinds in the
hands of a select group of multinational media conglomerates’ (2005: 418). In other words,
the opening up of the global marketplace in terms of television distribution has meant a
consolidation in who controls content distribution. Murray argues that this has meant
that media audiences are increasingly ‘content-led’ rather than ‘technology-led’, which has
meant that the ‘contemporary corporate ideal’ is to move from a ‘household brand’ to a
‘house of brands’ (2005: 422, author’s italics). As Murray explains:

What exactly constitutes the brand in media enterprises is frequently moot. Increas-
ingly, there is a move away from emphasising the globalised media conglomerate as the
dominant brand (e.g. Time Warner) in favour of focusing on subsidiary enterprises as
their own brands (e.g. Warner Bros, HBO, DC Comics), or even specific media prop-
erties or characters as the brand kernel (e.g. Time, Sex and the City or Harry Potter).
(2005: 422)

As Murray suggests, media enterprises are increasingly using their ‘house of brands’ to
generate their consumer base rather than emphasize their corporate monopoly. ­Murray
argues that ‘[i]n order for consumers to participate enthusiastically in the market for
streamed content, producers must infuse goods with highly specific attitudinal and de-
mographic characteristics sufficient to encourage in consumers an emotional investment
in the corporate brand’ (2003: 13–14). Murray’s work points towards the importance of
emotion in terms of understanding global audiences. The final section will address this
‘emotional investment’ and its connection to recent work on convergence.

Emotional Engagements
‘We are in a crisis of belonging, a population crisis, of who, what, when, and where.
More and more people feel as though they do not belong. More and more people are
seeking to belong, and more and more people are not counted as belonging,’ so begins
Toby Miller’s book titled Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism and Tele-
vision in a Neoliberal Age (2007: 1, author’s italics). Miller’s pronouncement regarding
472 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

the state of the world and its citizens urges us to think more radically about the ways in
which belonging becomes a very important issue in contemporary society. I would argue
that part of this desire to belong can not only be found expressed through fictional and
factual storylines on television but also in the way people get emotionally involved with
what they watch.
In Selling Television: British Television in the Global Marketplace, for example Jeanette
Steemers argues that ‘the “public” is thus experienced in the private (or domestic) realm:
it is “domesticated”. But at the same time the “private” itself is thus transformed or “so-
cialized”. The space (and experience) created is neither “public” nor private in the tradi-
tional senses’ (2004: 295–6).
In his work on ‘convergence culture’, Henry Jenkins defines convergence as ‘the flow
of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media in-
dustries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere
in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’ (2006: 2). In other words,
Jenkins is not just thinking about the technological development of media forms and
the ways in which they affect each other—he is also thinking about the ways in which
technological developments affect culture and affect people’s use of media in their ev-
eryday lives. Convergence in Jenkins’s work is not just about television being like the
Internet and the Internet like television, but also the way in which people will seek in-
formation and new ways of connection through various media platforms (2006: 3).
Jenkins’s interpretation of convergence leads him to come up with the term, ‘affec-
tive economics’. He argues that ‘according to the logic of “affective economics,” the
ideal consumer is active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked’ (2006: 20).
His conception of ‘affective economics’ effectively bridges concerns regarding ‘carriage’
and ‘content’. One example of the kind of convergence and ‘affective economics’ that
­Jenkins refers to can be found on the Web sites of television programmes such as Lost
and 24. On these Web sites users can download ‘mobisodes’ at a cost to see some extra
scenes not aired on television. Users can also play themed games and be sent on a ‘Jack
Bauer’–esque mission through their mobile phones. Here technologies converge: tele-
vision, the Internet and mobiles work together to provide a service to their user. But,
as Jenkins suggests, this is also about ‘affective economics’ as the Web sites rely on the
fact that their viewers will be emotionally involved enough in the series to want to
pay to find out more about the show or to experience simulated stories related to the
­programmes they enjoy.
Recent sociological literature on the concept of individualism, including primarily
the work of Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991), Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-­Gernsheim
(2001) and Zygmunt Bauman (2001), illustrates the demand on the individual to be
self-reflexive and to self-monitor and yet, to be aware of the risks posed by modern so-
ciety. This culture of individualism has given way to what Elliott and Lemert refer to
as “privatised worlds”. In The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization
(2006) Elliott and Lemert chart a shift from a politicized culture to a privatized cul-
ture. Drawing on work by Beck, amongst others, they consider the impact of ‘reflex-
ive individualism’ and the way in which it places emphasis on ‘choosing, changing and
Television as a Global Visual Medium 473

transforming’ (Elliott and Lemert 2006: 97). The shift that Elliott and Lemert identify
has also been the subject of work by Lauren Berlant, who argues that we increasingly
live in ‘an intimate public sphere’. According to Berlant the shift from a political public
sphere to an intimate public sphere has led to a national politics that does not figure the
nation in terms of the racial, economic and sexual inequalities that separate and divide
the public; instead ‘the dominant idea marketed by patriotic traditionalists is of a core
nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate
domains of the quotidian’ (1997: 4). And what better place to perform these acts and
identities than on television? Indeed, more recently, Berlant examines the way in which
intimacy has increasingly been moved into the public domain and negotiated on our
television screens. She argues, for instance that ‘in the U.S. therapy saturates the scene of
intimacy, from psychoanalysis and twelve-step groups to girl talk, talk shows, and other
witnessing genres’ (Berlant 2000: 1).
We can see the influence of the rise of individualization on television, particularly
in the popularity of ‘reality’ and life-style television. Rachel Moseley has identified the
‘makeover takeover’ that has affected British television and argues that ‘British makeover
shows exploit television’s potential for intimacy, familiarity, ordinariness and the radi-
cal destabilisation of the division between public and private’ (2000: 313). In Reality
TV, Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn refer to the ‘revelation’ side of reality programmes
(2004)—which underlines the way in which programmes pivot around the final ‘ta dah’
moment, and as Biressi and Nunn argue, can be seen as part of the key to the success
of the reality genre (2004: 3). Indeed, Charlotte Brunsdon charts a shift from a narra-
tive of transformation around skill acquisition to one that emphasizes the ‘reveal’. As
she writes: ‘While contemporary lifestyle programs retain a didactic element, it is narra-
tively subordinated to an instantaneous display of transformation’ (2004: 80). Beverley
Skeggs (2004), Helen Wood (2004) and Charlotte Brunsdon (2004) have all discussed
the way in which life-style and reality television ‘life-style Britain’. As Wood and Skeggs
argue: ‘choice mediates taste, displaying the success and failure of the self to make itself ’
(2004: 206).
Reality programmes underline an individual’s ability to self-regulate, make choices,
compete, monitor his or her performance and transform: examples include Big Brother’s
‘diary room’ (Endemol 1999–); ‘healthy competition’ in Survivor (CBS, 2000–; ITV,
2001–), Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1, 2004–), The Biggest Loser (NBC, 2004–), and
transformation in 10 Years Younger (Channel 4, 2004–), The Swan (Fox, 2004–2005),
Extreme Makeover (ABC, 2002–2007), What Not to Wear (BBC2, 2001–2004; BBC1
2004–). These programmes illustrate the emphasis placed on ‘choosing, changing and
transforming’ that Elliott and Lemert identify as part of a self-reflexive individualist
society. As they argue: ‘The main legacy of this cultural trend is that individuals are in-
creasingly expected to produce context for themselves. The designing of a life, of a self-
project, is deeply rooted as both social norm and cultural obligation’ (Elliott and Lemert
2006: 13). As Elliott and Lemert suggest, individual choice and self-transformation have
become a cultural imperative and this demand is evident in the format and content of
reality and life-style television.
474 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

The shift to a more individualized society and emphasis on ‘choice’ impacts not just
what we watch but how we watch it. In terms of programming, the emphasis on consum-
erism is evident in the television ‘tie-ins’ and Web sites that cater to an individual interac-
tion with the programme and its characters. Recording devices such as TiVo mean that
viewers can choose what they watch and when they want to watch it. Interactive devices
(such as the ‘red button’) put the viewer in control of what they watch. In Remediation:
Understanding New Media (2001), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that ‘[e]
ven when television acknowledges itself as a medium, it is committed to the pursuit of
the immediate to a degree that film and earlier technologies are not. Because of the struc-
ture of financing, television is even more immediately responsive than film to what adver-
tisers and producers perceive as cultural demands. It is as if television programs need to
win the moment-by-moment approval of their large, popular audiences, to evoke a set of
rapid and predictable emotional responses: television must pursue immediacy as authen-
tic emotion, as exemplified most plainly in the “heartwarming” drama’ (2001: 187).
This sense of choice, control, interactivity and emotional engagement has led some
scholars to think that fans/viewers have more power over what they watch than ever be-
fore. In his research on audiences and TV 3, for instance Derek Johnson cites examples
in which fans or avid watchers of series are invited by the producers to write episodes,
both in an effort to involve the audience but also within a strategy to acquire ‘free la-
bour’ (2007: 6). However, Johnson is wary of the true welcome producers give these
fan writers and argues that ‘production institutions simultaneously work to manage fan
proximities and bring them under industrial control’ (2007: 9). In ‘inviting’ fans and
avid watchers in, producers both benefit from the ‘free labour’ of their knowledge and
maintain control over their participation. So while fans are more involved than before,
they are also under more control.
Although most viewers have learned through their television-watching experience
to be critical of what they watch, they may also find themselves emotionally involved
with the characters or participants. This establishes an uneasy relationship for the view-
ers between their emotional reactions and their critical judgements. They might believe
reality programmes to be rubbish but find themselves tuning in each night and getting
emotionally involved.
Indeed, there are many viewers who take pleasure in reality and life-style programmes
even when they are conscious of their constructed and ideologically questionable nature.
My students, for instance often tell me that although they know many reality pro-
grammes, such as Big Brother or American Idol (Fremantle Media, 2002—), are heavily
edited, they take pleasure in watching them and even find themselves crying during the
back-stories. This is not to say that all viewers respond to this kind of double-thinking,
but to underline that even those aware of the constructed nature of these programmes
still enjoy their viewing experience: their critical knowledge does not always mediate
against their viewing pleasures.
A paradox emerges here and runs throughout reality and life-style programming. One
the one hand we, as viewers, are drawn into the emotional situations the characters find
themselves in, and yet, on the other hand, we are also encouraged to speculate, judge and
attend to the choices and decisions the families have made and continue to make. In her
Television as a Global Visual Medium 475

work on Wife Swap, for instance Helen Piper suggests that ‘there is clearly an affective
invitation [in Wife Swap] to identify with the women’s feelings and responses, but there
is also an invitation to judge according to subjective concepts of “normal” (and by im-
plication abnormal) domestic arrangements’ (2004: 276). This dual-response of empa-
thizing and judging confuses easy lines of identification with the participants. As Piper
points out: ‘you might share Ann’s distaste of Diane’s family’s reliance on deep-fried
food, for example, but does that oblige you to identify with her other lower-middle-class
pretensions?’ (2004: 279). However, instead of understanding the relationship between
viewer and participant as Piper outlines, we can instead suggest that this confusion of
empathy and judgement means that the viewer is selecting and choosing what aspects of
both wives she or he feels are acceptable, and perhaps, that the viewer is actively partici-
pating in the act of ‘choosing, changing and transforming’.
Berlant refers to the ‘paradox of partial legibility’ in her work on public intimacy
and suggests that ‘the experience of social hierarchy is intensely individuating, yet it
also makes people public and generic: it turns them into kinds of people who are both
attached to and under described by the identities that organise them’ (1997: 1). Wife
Swap is about differing wifely roles—what kind of wife a wife can be. The focus on the
kind of wife rather than who the wife herself is means that we, as viewers, only partially
attach ourselves to these people; the lack of description allows us to enter in our own
judgements and choices.1

Conclusion
As this chapter has illustrated, research into television as a global visual medium yields
debates around ‘carriage’ and ‘content’ and the interface between the two. As John T.
Caldwell suggests: ‘Studying television’s “production of culture” is simply no longer
entirely convincing if one does not also talk about television’s “culture of production” ’
(2004: 45). It is crucial to consider both the way culture is constructed through the flow
of television but we must also examine the culture around television production globally
to truly understand why we watch what we do on television. Earlier models of global
television produced a one-sided flow that did not take into account the popularity of
local/national television programming. New areas for research within television studies
regarding the transnational flow of programmes have greatly changed our conception of
how television is made and received in one culture and understood in another. Indeed,
a growing area of interest is around the adaptation and remakes of television series be-
tween countries such as the USA and the UK (see Steemers 2004; Rixon 2006).
Television as a global visual medium is not simply about who buys, sells or watches,
but the flow between them. Increasingly, this flow is a highly privatized and consumer-
­based model based on content streaming and branding. Transnational corporations
­construct what Murray refers to as a ‘house of brands’ which capture audiences and
keep them coming back for more. Global marketplaces such as Amazon capitalize on
this relationship by sending emails to consumers suggesting further series viewers might
like if they enjoyed ‘x’. Emotion, as a concept, is becoming a key way to understand
the global television marketplace because of the emphasis on viewers’ attachments to
476 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

their favourite characters and series. This attachment has also led to changes in viewing
practices: more and more people are ‘bingeing’ on television through DVD box sets or
watching on DVRs to avoid commercial interruptions, which, as discussed, alters Wil-
liams’s earlier conception of television flow.
These changes will affect not just what we watch but also how we study television as
an academic discipline. James Bennett argues that the move towards digitalization will
affect television studies and suggests that the field should pay close attention to ‘both the
interfaces and applications that structure our access to “television” content and manage
user flows, as well as the discourses and aesthetics of such content/programming itself ’
(2008: 161). These two concerns, ‘content streaming’2 and aesthetics, are quickly becom-
ing key issues within the field of television studies and illustrate new issues within the
study of global television. Max Dawson, for instance argues that we must consider how
television programmes adopt new aesthetics to fit the smaller screen (2007). As hand-
held devices become more accessible, new television programmes emerge that are more
suited to the small screen. Likewise, it could also be argued that HD will affect television
format and even narrative as aesthetics take precedence over story. Television as a global
visual medium is changing rapidly as are the viewing practices of its audience. Indeed,
it is difficult to say whether the medium will still exist as a box set in our living rooms.
However, our emotional attachments to what we watch continue to engage us and keep
us glued to the screen—and continue to allow TNC’s to monopolize the global flow.
Television’s future often comes under question with the advent of new media tech-
nologies. However, regardless of where it is watched (whether on the Internet, on the
box set or on a handheld device), television remains an overwhelmingly accessible and
powerful visual medium. The liveness and immediacy of the images it can transport into
the intimacy of our domestic spaces means that it is still a visual medium that people
tune into daily and rely on to keep them ‘in touch’ with the world. These images have a
profound effect on our life-styles and choices; our decisions regarding the kind of per-
son we imagine ourselves to be. Indeed, television not only provides information but
also continues to be a visual medium that emotionally engages its viewers. The major-
ity of people in the Western world experience global events through the television—it
is a medium that unites us. And yet, it is continually degraded and viewed as inferior to
other visual mediums. As a discipline, television studies has inherited this dismissal and
is often considered less serious than film or theatre studies. Television’s relationship to
mass audiences means that it is rarely thought of as ‘high art’ or worthy of serious critical
attention. And yet, this connection to the masses is one of the many reasons television
demands our attention and understanding as a global visual medium.

Further Reading
Havens, Timothy. 2006. Global Television Marketplace. London: British Film Institute.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and
London: New York University Press.
Moran, Albert. 2009. New Flows in Global TV. Bristol: Intellect.
Television as a Global Visual Medium 477

Murray, Simone. 2005. ‘Brand Loyalties: Rethinking Content in Global Corporate Media’,
Media, Culture and Society, 27/3: 415–35.
Parks, Lisa and Shanti Kumar, eds. 2003. Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. New York: New
York University Press.

Notes
This chapter includes condensed and revised material from my book Media Audiences: Tele-
vision, Meaning and Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
1. For more on this see Gorton (2008).
2. Simone Murray notes that there is a lack of ‘terminological consensus amongst media aca-
demics’ (2005: 419) around streaming. She argues that the ‘specific value of the term “con-
tent streaming” inheres in its ability to connote a broader, quintessentially 21st-century
conceptualisation of content as innately liquid and multipurposable, one applicable across
varied strategy, production and consumption contexts’ (419).

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 20

Film and Visual Culture

Andrew Spicer

The Crisis in Film Studies

The impact of digital technologies and the rise of New Media Studies has had a sig-
nificant impact on Film Studies which, according to some commentators, is currently
experiencing a crisis of legitimation in which its historical, theoretical, methodological
and ontological foundations have been called into question. The material basis that film
shared with photography—the effect of light striking and altering a strip of chemically
treated paper which creates a physical, indexical connection to the world (the trace of
the particular instant in time that has been captured)—has now been severed through
digital transpositions into algorithmic numbers. The disappearance of the supposedly
specific qualities of film as a medium, the realism of the image and the mechanical re-
production of the camera, has led to widespread pronouncements about the ‘death of
cinema’ (see Geuens 2000; Tryon 2009: 73–6); if film was the dominant cultural form
of the twentieth century, the twenty-first will belong to ‘new media’.1
As a consequence, it is often argued, by both academics and practitioners, that we are
living now in an era of ‘post-cinema’, or what Richard Grusin has more helpfully identi-
fied as a ‘cinema of interactions’, in which film has become a distributed form, circulat-
ing in various guises across a range of different media, and where the distinctive social
and cultural ritual of watching a theatrically projected film is in the process of being
replaced by a diffused continuum in which the viewer or user interacts with a digital
artefact in various locations in a multiplicity of ways. As Grusin argues, in the ‘current
historical moment’ film, like other media, is no longer singular and separate but only ex-
ists in relation to other media (2007: 215). Although Hollywood movies are still central
to an understanding of what film is and continue to dominate the marketplace—what
Thomas Elsaesser calls ‘business as usual’ (2000: 190–1)—it is no longer the Hollywood
of old; film production, distribution and exhibition are changing significantly.
Film and Visual Culture 481

Many areas of film scholarship—what David Bordwell characterizes as ‘middle-level

research’ (1996: 26–30)2—remain unaffected by these changes, but a significant number
of studies argue that the impact of new audio-visual technologies is profound and neces-
sitates that Film Studies be fundamentally rethought and redefined, attempting to un-
derstand film’s new role within a radically transformed postmodern cultural landscape.
The title of Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams’s seminal collection, Reinventing Film
Studies (2000), indicates its commitment to a major reconceptualization of the peren-
nial issues that Film Studies has engaged with including medium-specificity, authorship,
spectatorship, realism, aesthetics, the centrality of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ and film
history. As Janet Harbord comments in The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Stud-
ies, film’s encounter with digital technologies has given these questions a new urgency
(2007: 16). Chuck Tryon’s Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence
(2009) sturdily charts the changes that are occurring, while Dudley Andrew’s What Cin-
ema Is! (2010) is imbued with a deep concern that something precious and unique about
film might be being lost. Such concerns inform the most eloquent and wide-ranging ac-
count, David Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film, which argues that because of the on-
tological changes occasioned by the shift from analogue to digital, film is no longer the
preeminent modern medium that was constitutive of modernity itself, but has become
‘completely historical’ (2007: 93).
For Laura Mulvey, whose work has been central to Film Studies, the present moment
is both challenging and, potentially, highly productive. She argues that film’s ‘disap-
pearance’ into digital multimedia offers a peculiarly valuable vantage point, a ‘threshold
moment’, in which to look both forwards and backwards. It has allowed the affinities
between new digital media and the optical media of the nineteenth century to be per-
ceived, thereby releasing those earlier practices that prefigured film ‘into their differenti-
ated forms and histories’ rather than being inertly homogenized as ‘pre-cinema’ (2007:
xv–xvi). In the process film, as it has conventionally been understood, has begun to be
recognized as a century-long phase within a ‘larger continuous history . . . of “moving
images” ’ (Carroll 1996: xiii), where film becomes one component in ‘an integrated his-
tory of audiovision’ (Zielinski 1999: 22), understanding its role within a wider configu-
ration of visual technologies (Lyons and Plunkett 2007: xvii–xxv) in order to produce
an intermedial or ‘convergence’ history (Staiger and Hake 2009).
In what follows I will not attempt an inevitably superficial survey of recent litera-
ture on film—impossible in such a short space anyway—but focus on some of the more
important accounts that have explicitly addressed this perceived ‘crisis’ in Film Studies
caused by the impact of digital technologies. Particular attention will be given to those
that engage with broad issues to do with the nature of film itself and thus which attempt
to reinvent or reconceptualize the discipline in the wake of New Media.3 In this way
I hope to open out the issues adumbrated in this introduction and to explore film’s rela-
tionships with wider practices of looking and, explicitly in the final section, explore the
connections with Visual Culture. What will become clear is that in the process of recon-
ceptualizing the nature of Film Studies, most film scholars now recognize that because
image media mutate, recombine and migrate across disparate contexts, the discussion of
482 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

any medium is now a ‘necessarily interdisciplinary question’ (Beckman and Ma 2008: 4,

original emphasis). However, we need to start with Film Studies’ ‘turn to history’
(Spicer 2004) that this ‘crisis’ has occasioned, examining revisionist histories that have
­significantly broadened an understanding of how film emerged in high modernity and
therefore what it might become.

The Turn to History: Film and Modernity

These revisionist histories contrast with the teleological narratives that characterized
earlier film histories, which assumed the sovereignty of the ninety-minute feature film
(Gunning 2000: 317). Informed by changes in the nature of history itself as a disci-
pline, the objects of film history (including films themselves) are no longer understood
as transparent data or facts, but as problematic forms of ‘evidence’ produced discursively
(Sobchack 2000a: 301, 312; see also Sklar 1990; Chapman, Glancy and Harper 2007).4
Specifically, the present ‘threshold moment’ has encouraged film historians to reexamine
film’s relationship to the technological, social and cultural transformations that consti-
tuted modernity, exploring film’s role in the reconfiguration of motion, time and space,
and also perception.5
Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz’s Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
(1995) was central to this reexamination. The editors contend that film was not
simply a new medium but central to how modernity was experienced and understood
by a broad public. Film, they argue, ‘arose from and existed in the intertwining of mo-
dernity’s component parts: technology mediated by visual and cognitive stimulation;
the re-presentation of reality enabled by technology; and an urban, commercial, mass-
produced technique defined as the seizure of continuous movement’ (10). Charney’s
Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity and Drift (1998) explored the philosophical and
ontological implications of this process, arguing that film enabled the dialectical rela-
tionship between modernity’s shocks, surprises, distractions and overwhelming stimuli
and its corollary, drift, the experience of vacancy, the sensation of empty moments, to
be understood and negotiated. Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time
(2002) also explored film’s paradoxical function as the permanent record of fleeting
moments, situating the emergence of cinema within the increasing regularization and
standardization of time in late modernity, the development of ‘industrialized time’ that
was essential to the penetration of capitalist work practices (8). She argues that early
film ‘actualities’ made the contingent and the ephemeral legible, seizing and record-
ing fragments of time and endowing them with a significance (10). In the process,
film became the central form where temporality could be captured and made visible in
space, an imprint of a pure moment in time that was both a record and, through move-
ment and change, also a display ‘that never ceases to strike the spectator as open, fluid,
­malleable—the site of newness and difference itself ’ (32).
Tom Gunning’s work was seminal to a revised understanding of early film spec-
tatorship. His influential notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’ argued that rather than
naively mistaking the film image for reality, the film spectator was ‘astonished by its
Film and Visual Culture 483

transformation. Far from credulity, it [was] the incredible nature of the illusion that
render[ed] the viewer speechless’ (1990: 118; see also Gunning 1995). As a comple-
ment to Gunning, Schwartz’s Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle
Paris (1998) valuably demonstrates how the taste and the perceptive apparatus whereby
the new phenomenon of film could be understood was itself created through the popu-
larity of ‘spectacular realities’, phenomena such as shopping boulevards, the mass press
and wax museums that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century and
which, along with film, helped create modern mass society. Ben Singer’s Melodrama
and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (2001) focuses on one form—
sensational melodrama, notably serial-queen adventures such as The Perils of Pauline
(1914)—but also situates this within the material context of sensationalism in other con-
temporaneous popular amusements: stage melodrama, dime novels, tabloid story papers
and publicity, amusement parks and thrill rides and the discursive context of writings
by contemporary observers, journalists, theorists and practitioners who made the con-
nection between modern urban experience and film. Singer explores film’s connection
to the new intensified, sensory environment of the metropolis, its speed, discontinuities
and ‘audiovisual fragmentation’, arguing that cinema became the most powerful form
of this new ‘aesthetics of astonishment’, combining the capturing of powerful fleeting
impressions, kinetic speed, novel sights, and visceral stimulation (2001: 130). His em-
pirically grounded research shows how the forces shaping modernity—the shocks, frag-
mentation and superabundance of sensation famously identified by Walter Benjamin
and Georg Simmel—actually operated in detail.
These studies, by implication, alert us to Mulvey’s ‘perceived affinities’, providing
an historical perspective on digital culture and how it might be understood, but others
explicitly explored that connection. Miriam Hansen’s influential ‘The Mass Production
of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’ (2000), valuably extended
the discussion of film’s relationship to modernity by arguing that ‘classical Hollywood
cinema’—the cornerstone of Film Studies and conventionally presented as a timeless,
universal narrative idiom or ‘what film is’—was actually a very specific form of film both
historically and culturally. However, through its worldwide reach, classical Hollywood
film became the first ‘global sensory vernacular’, a central element in the ‘changing fabric
of everyday life, sociability and leisure’ that provided ‘an aesthetic horizon for the experi-
ence of industrial mass society’. In the process, narrative film created new subjectivities
by enabling ‘viewers to confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity’ (333–44).6
Two studies by Anne Friedberg extended this exploration of film’s connection with mo-
dernity into the digital era. In Window Shopping (1993), Friedberg traces the cultural
contexts of commodified forms of looking and the experiences of spatial and temporal
mobility. Rather than understand film as an autonomous aesthetic product, she too ar-
gues that it must be read in the ‘architectural context’ of its reception as it emerged in
the rich context of various forms of looking that were taking place: in the activities of
shopping and tourism in a variety of locations, in dioramas, panoramas and phantasma-
gorias, in exhibition halls, winter-gardens, arcades, department stores, amusement parks
and museums. Film was a key component in what she designates the ‘mobilized virtual
484 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

gaze’, contributing to a ‘gradual and indistinct epistemological tear along the fabric of
modernity’ (2), eventually becoming central to the fabric of contemporary, postmodern
life in malls, videos and DVDs, the Web, and virtual reality technologies. In The Virtual
Window (2006), Friedberg examines the metaphorical and material importance of the
window and its successor the screen as a framing device that has shaped perception and
the understanding of images from Alberti’s De Pictura (1435) through to contemporary
‘postcinematic’ visualities of camera phones, BlackBerries and other ‘mobile’ devices
(6). Although film, unlike painting or architecture, was for a long period wedded to the
single screen as its ‘window on the world’ with split screen technologies the province
of avant-garde practices, Friedberg argues that this is now changing in the age of new
media where the multiple screen format has now become the new vernacular. In the
process, the specificity of film has become irreparably altered by digital technologies in
which screens are converging, losing their apparatical distinctions, thereby promoting a
different logic of visuality (217, 242).

The Reshaping of Film: Production

Technologies and Consumption
The historical analyses already considered, in contradistinction to the unbridled techno-
philic euphoria that characterized the mid 1990s7, advance an understanding that digital
forms are the product of changes that are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, trans-
formations of existing practices rather than unprecedented (see Boddy 2008). Philip
Rosen identifies a succession of hybridities rather than a great break (2001: 303), and
Brian Massumi argues that the interaction of the digital and the analogue is occurring
‘in self-varying continuity’ (2002: 138). Henry Jenkins’s highly influential Convergence
Culture (2006) understands the present moment as transitional—‘not fully integrated
and ramshackle’ (18)—where old and new forms ‘collide’ as they jostle for position and
power. He argues that ‘Old media are not being replaced. Rather, their functions and
status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies’ (14). As Jay Bolter and Rich-
ard Grusin contend, new media work by refashioning older media (centrally film) in
both form and content and are thus ‘remediations’ of existing forms (1998).
The Hollywood feature film is now a hybrid form, that, in the ‘transitional post-
major studio pre-Internet era’ (Tryon 2009: 2–3), employs both analogue and digital
technologies. However, feature films are increasingly being shot on digital video (DV)
rather than celluloid, which may well soon cease to be manufactured (Enticknap 2005:
224–9). George Lucas has famously described film as an ‘outdated Victorian technol-
ogy’ and announced, after Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002), that he would
‘never make another film—on film—again’ (in Enticknap 2009: 416). More low-budget
and experimental film-makers such as Mike Figgis are increasingly using digital formats
because of their enhanced aesthetic possibilities and their increased speed and efficiency
(Figgis 2007). There has been a huge expansion of ultra low-budget film production,
partly inspired by The Blair Witch Project (1999), that uses inexpensive equipment, stan-
dard editing software and that seeks an audience through the Internet, bypassing the
Film and Visual Culture 485

normal distribution and exhibition mechanisms (Tryon 2009: 93–4, 175). The energies
of the film-making process are increasingly shifting from production (filming on loca-
tion or in the studio) to post-production (Harbord 2007: 88). A range of new compa-
nies have sprung up, operating from cyberstudios, which exist to handle the intricacies
of computer processing.
World cinema continues to be dominated by the digital, special effects–driven Hol-
lywood blockbuster with media ownership still concentrated in a small number of
multinational companies, what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat call the ‘entrenched asym-
metries of international power’ (2000: 380). However, their account also indicates that
this system is changing because global cultural and economic hegemonies have become
more subtle and dispersed. Hollywood is no longer the orchestrator of a world sys-
tem of images, but one mode in the complex transnational construction of ‘imaginary
landscapes’ (2000: 383). In recognition of this shift, Film Studies has become increas-
ingly interested in the concept of ‘transnational cinemas’, exploring the interactions of
local and global cultures, and the development of low-budget forms of film-making
(often using inexpensive digital technologies) in small, ‘third world’ or postcolonial
cinemas that can provide them with a distinctive existence. These studies argue that a
new kind of decentred multinational system has developed which has altered the earlier
paradigm of separate national cinemas and the older opposition between Hollywood
and European Art Cinema (Stam and Shohat 2000: 395; see also Naficy 1999, 2001;
Ďurovičová and Newman 2010; Galt and Schoonover 2010; Iordanova, Martin-Jones
and Vidal 2010).8 Hamid Naficy contends that in a ‘post-diasporic era’ of increas-
ing national fragmentation and the physical displacement of peoples across the globe,
the contribution of ‘accented cinema’ created by displaced, exilic, ‘asylee’, diasporic,
­ethnic, transnational and cosmopolitan film-makers has become increasing important
and influential (2009: 3–4, 11). Accented cinema, he argues, challenges classic cin-
ema’s coherence of time, space and causality through its use of interlocking narratives,
fragmentation and the circularity of time and space in often lengthy episodic narra-
tives with multiple points-of-view, multilingual dialogues, multicultural characters and
­numerous locations.
If modes and locations of production are shifting, so too are forms of film consump-
tion. Cinemagoing continues to be an important social and cultural activity (Corbett
2001: 18; Acland 2003: 45–81, 212–28; Tryon 2009: 64, 77–8). Although some com-
mentators, for instance John Belton, have cast doubt on the real impact of digital tech-
nologies calling it a ‘false revolution’ (2002: 98–114), the success of 3D projections of
Avatar (that premiered in the UK in December 2009) suggest that audiences may con-
tinue to want the ‘special thrill’ of seeing a feature film in a large auditorium. However,
this mode of exhibition has lost its centrality to the industry; only 15 per cent of a film’s
revenue typically comes from its theatrical release (Caldwell 2008: 9). It is been dis-
placed by a range of different forms of film consumption on a diversity of screens, from
IMAX to iPod (Wasson 2007), involving new modes of distribution including the In-
ternet (Wasko 2002; Tryon 2009: 93–124). New forms of film have evolved including
the director’s cut, the animated prequel, the film’s Web site with various ‘extras’ and the
486 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

DVD release that incorporates additional material including deleted scenes. A ‘platform
agnostic’ generation of film viewers, relatively indifferent to the form in which they en-
counter a film, are also looking to the Internet as an unlimited warehouse for digital ver-
sions of films that can be downloaded ‘on demand’ onto home computers (Tryon 2009:
94–5). The ‘long tail’ of digital distribution makes available huge numbers of films that
allows for niche marketing (Anderson 2009: 133–5).
Increasingly film consumption is centred in the home. ‘Home film cultures’ have
grown rapidly since the 1980s, fuelled by the widespread release of titles on video and
now DVD, leading to the growth of a new form of connoisseurship, the collector who
amasses an extensive library of films (Klinger 2006). DVD ‘special editions’ with au-
thoritative commentaries and extratextual material can add to a film’s cultural capital
and its sense of significance, promoting a form of knowledgeable cinephilia, though this
often takes the form of the cult film rather than the historically significant one (Barlow
2005: 76–7, 110–11). And, as Aaron Barlow argues, DVDs must be understood as a
new form of film, one that enables chapter viewing, freeze framing, forward and reverse
slow motion and rapid scanning, even subtitling, all of which are controlled by viewers
themselves. DVDs thus alter the way in which a film is experienced by the viewer, pro-
moting modes of attention and engagement that differ significantly from seeing a film
theatrically (Barlow 2005: 19; Isaacs 2008: 13–14).
These new forms of interaction are assiduously promoted by media corporations
which, in an era of convergence, now work to a different logic that reshapes the relation-
ship between audiences and producers (Jenkins 2006: 12). The new digital technologies
have been designed to be more responsive to consumer feedback, and are more ‘partici-
patory’, although, as Jenkins acknowledges, in most interactive environments what the
user does is prestructured by the designer and shaped by existing social and cultural pro-
tocols. Jenkins claims that the increasing proliferation of fan and Internet communities
that dissect and comment on the various versions of a film are gradually gaining more
power and influence as companies begin to respond to their needs and desires (2006:
258; see also Keane 2007: 76–86).
Nor are these new forms of viewing confined to current films. As Victor Burgin ar-
gues in The Remembered Film, there are now far more possibilities for controlling and
selecting the viewing experience of almost any film including ‘classics’ and thus ‘for
dismantling and reconfiguring the once inviolable objects offered by narrative cinema’,
formerly localized in time and space (2004: 8–9). Laura Mulvey’s exploration of this
changed relationship to earlier films in Death 24x a Second argues that freeze framing al-
ters the connection between the still frame and the moving image, between continuous
movement and stillness, and thus has the capacity to restore to film the weighty presence
of passing time that earlier theorists, André Bazin and Roland Barthes, associated with
the still photograph (2006: 66). Digital processes allow viewers to contemplate the sen-
suous beauty of specific images, breaking down the linearity of narrative continuity and
splitting apart the different levels of time that are usually fused together. However, Mul-
vey argues, this new relationship to time is not a return to an earlier mode of attention.
The older ontology of the singularity of the moment and the unrepeatable succession of
Film and Visual Culture 487

events has been replaced by a new ontology in which ‘ambivalence, impurity and uncer-
tainty displace traditional oppositions’ (2006: 12).

The Evolution of Film: New Forms

and Practices—Digital Film Aesthetics
Digital technologies have led to the evolution of new forms of film and aesthetic prac-
tices. The most sustained and penetrating attempt to analyse ‘digital cinema’ is Lev
Manovich’s The Language of New Media that understands it as the product of the two
interconnected histories of computing and media technologies (2001: 20). Manovich
argues that in losing its indexical connection to the material world and becoming elec-
tronic art, film is now best understood as an expressive, graphic medium, as a subgenre
of painting (295) or ‘a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of
its many elements’ (302, original emphasis). The ‘logic of replacement’, characteristic of
analogue film, has given way to the ‘logic of addition and coexistence’ (325), where data
are endlessly mutable, selecting and recombining elements from existing menus, provid-
ing a navigable space for the user to surf (287). Analogue film’s characteristic manipula-
tion of space and time through montage and the cut has been replaced by the morph or
digital composite (143), where elements are not juxtaposed but blended, and boundar-
ies erased rather than foregrounded (155). For Manovich, this mutability of data offers
extraordinary new possibilities for film-makers to generate, organize, manipulate and
distribute images (314), including the reemergence of complex spatial narratives (324).
Few of these possibilities have so far been realized in mainstream cinema that has
concentrated on using CGI to create visceral special effects within the existing aesthetic
paradigms of classical cinema, albeit with the proliferation of mythic or fantasy worlds,
often derived from comics or graphic novels. However, digital techniques have had an
impact on film aesthetics in shot length, framing, camera movement, and the varied
combinations of CGI and live action (Allen 2002). The existing principles of aesthetic
distance and sequential unfolding are gradually giving way to ones based on ‘envelop-
ment and temporal simultaneity’ (Morse 1999: 64). ‘Impossible’ events are shown as if
actually happening and an ultra-detailed photo-realism renders the fantastic with the
surface accuracy associated with photography. This has the function of insinuating that
the real and the digital exist in the same time and space, and also presenting CGI im-
agery as a self-validating spectacle, thus demonstrating what Bolter and Grusin call the
twin logics of ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’ (1998: 6, 14, 21, 155). Increasingly, the
‘real’ is presented as a form of spectacle (Wollen and Hayward 1993: 2; King 2005: 13).
This connects film, as Andrew Darley demonstrates in Visual Digital Culture (2000), to
a range of practices (including music videos, computer games, theme park simulation
rides and advertisements) whose mode is hyperreal spectacle, and which solicit audi-
ences into seeking direct and immediate visual pleasures in a poetics of surface play and
immersive spectacle rather than intelligibility (2000: 169–73,193 and passim).
As Manovich indicated, use of the morph is becoming more frequent. But, as Viv-
ian Sobchack reminds us, although it represents, in its effortless shape-shifting that
488 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

confuses (often disturbingly) the animate and the inanimate, a fluidity and instability of
body shape and identity that is characteristically postmodern, like all digital practices,
­morphing has a complex genealogy. It is thus an evolutionary practice with powerful
historical precedents that link ‘present day digital practice to a much broader history . . .
of metamorphosis and its meanings’, including early cinema’s magic shows, attractions
and trick films (2000b xiv–xv). A rather different digital effect was ‘bullet-time’ used in
The Matrix (1999) in which, through a combination of conventional camerawork and
computer animation, ‘while an event plays out in slow motion, the camera appears to
move the action at a higher speed and in a different direction’ (Purse 2005: 152). The ef-
fect is both dynamic and immersive, drawing the spectator ‘fully into the diegetic space,
disrupting the conventional spatial relationship between the spectator, the screen, and
the filmic world’ (157–8). In the sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions (both 2003), this
enveloping, immersive effect increased through the use of free-floating cameras within
entirely virtual sets (Keane 2007: 125).
If mainstream feature films use digital aesthetics conservatively, much more radi-
cal uses occur in more avant-garde cultural practices.9 A number of studies have docu-
mented these new forms.10 A useful conspectus is provided in Holly Willis’s New Digital
Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, which argues that digital film-making is creating
new forms of self-reflexive film that have fluid boundaries, breaking out of the confines
of the rectangular cinema frame and standard genres. These new (or revived) forms are
situated at the intersection of formerly separate realms of film-making: music video, ani-
mation, print design, street art, live club events, videoart, installations in galleries and
museums, and now digital graffiti (2005: 4). These various locations are creating, along
with the Internet, new environments in which viewers engage and interact with film.
Like Manovich, Willis argues that digital films are characterized by a radical reorienta-
tion of spatial perception, the synthetic digital imagery creating a giddy sense of freedom
that produces open and kaleidoscopic structures (2005: 67–8). These works help create
a new film grammar and syntax built on hybridity and mixed forms, melding disparate
film stocks, genres and formats that look back to modernist avant-garde experimenta-
tion but also create new ‘digitextual’ forms (Everett 2003), in their radical challenge to
the paradigms of classical Hollywood cinema.
In the process of creating these new forms across multiple platforms, the role of the
director is shifting significantly, morphing into the ‘digitextualist’ attuned to the flow
and mix of codes on multiple screens in various locations. David Lynch, who always
stretched the definition of what film could be—Inland Empire (2006) proceeds through
the associative logic of hyperlinks—has devoted increasing energy and time to experi-
ments with flash animation and low-definition digital video available to view on his Web
site. In the process, Lynch has created a ‘meta-auteur persona, consistently reflecting on
the changing nature of authorship and spectatorship and adapting the presentation of
his work accordingly’ (Samardzija 2010: 4). Peter Greenaway, whose whole career has
been devoted to subverting the ‘four tyrannies’ of traditional film-making, the script,
actor, camera and frame, has comprehensively abandoned a single format in works that
are multiple and densely layered, making him one of the great practitioners of the new
Film and Visual Culture 489

form of ‘database cinema’ (Manovich 2001: 237–39). This is best exemplified in The
Tulse Luper Suitcases (2004), a ‘media mosaic’, consisting of four feature films, an inter-
active CD-ROM, 92 DVDs, an online game, a television series, numerous museum/
gallery shows of the 92 suitcases, books and exhibitions, and the construction of several
interactive Web sites that add new material, rework footage and encourage the user to
connect with Greenaway’s earlier work, and other aspects of Luper’s ‘life’, as well as host-
ing a huge virtual archive that contains databases of images and information. Greenaway
thus creates a complex, elusive, fragmentary ‘historiographic metafiction’ whose prolif-
erating networks have generated their own fictional world (Peeters 2008: 323–38).
However, this ‘metacinema’ unfolding across multiple media platforms is not con-
fined to avant-garde practice. Jenkins’s central example of convergence culture and
‘transmedia storytelling’ that creates an encyclopaedic digital ‘multimyth’, is the Wa-
chowski brothers’ hugely successful ‘The Matrix’ franchise (2006: 95–134). This con-
sisted of an initial feature film released in 1999, two sequels released in 2003, nine short
animated films made by different film-makers (The Animatrix) and a videogame (Enter
the Matrix) also released in 2003—which the distributors, Warner Bros., styled the ‘Year
of The Matrix’—several comic books and short stories released on the Web site and a
‘special’ ten-disc DVD, The Ultimate Matrix Collection (2004), containing six discs of
additional material including detailed explanations of digital aesthetic innovations such
as ‘bullet time’. A clever mixture of popular fears concerning the impact and direction
of technological change, cryptic allusions (including a reference to Baudrillard’s Simula-
cra and Simulations), and an old-fashioned narrative of redemption and visceral action
sequences, ‘The Matrix’ was less a cinematic text than an evolving popular culture entity,
what Bruce Isaacs labels a third order metacinematic ‘hypermyth’ composed of simu-
lacral tropes or cinematic quotations, that engages viewers in various forms in its evolv-
ing construction of a simulated, digitextual universe (2008: 118–30). Isaacs argues that
it represents the characteristic work of a new generation of directors (his other example
is Quentin Tarantino) for whom the cinematic imaginary is better than the real thing,
who display a love of cinema not a love of art (181).

Film and Visual Culture

What the Wachowskis’ ‘The Matrix’ or Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases demon-
strate is that, if a particular form of cinema is over, film, in its varied ‘virtual life’, contin-
ues to be a crucial component of art and popular culture in the digital age. Film, in all
its guises, remains central to a contemporary culture in which the conception of stable,
enduring, finished works authenticated by an original version is disappearing, replaced
by ‘one that recognizes continual mutation and proliferation of variants’ (Mitchell 1992:
52). Just as film was essential, as has been discussed, to the ways in which a broad public
could come to terms with modernity, so it remains fundamental to postmodern digital
culture. As Manovich argues, film has prepared audiences for new media because cin-
ematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one
experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access
490 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

and interact with all cultural data. We continue to see the world through rectangular
frames, and cinema’s aesthetic strategies have become the basic organizational principles
of computer software and even virtual reality machines (2001: 50, 79, 81–6).
However, to understand that film retains an important place in the digital era and
that the changes it has experienced are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, is not to
underestimate the extent or profundity of those changes. The multiple and proliferating
forms of film across a range of media and on a variety of screens has impelled, as noted
in the introductionary section, a questioning of film’s specificity and identity, prompting
an uncertainty as to whether ‘film is a central text with ancillary products in other media
forms, or simply a media platform in a multimedia environment’ (Harbord 2007: 43).
David Rodowick argues that at an ontological level, a particular form of perception that
gave attention to things in themselves and their duration, an appreciation of the sensu-
ous depth of reproduced images and with them the ‘complexity and density of phenom-
enological experience’ and a ‘deep connectedness with a way of being in the world’, with
memory and history, is now passing as we move into a digital culture (2007: 69–79).11
He suggests that because digital images are less tied to the ‘prior existence of things’ as
they neither occupy space nor change through time (137), they change our conception
and our phenomenological relationship with images (86–7, 98). As Rodowick acknowl-
edges, digital images often seem colder, less involving (107–8) and their proliferation
may involve a retreat from the sensuous exploration of the physical world and the ma-
terial structure of everyday life that were so central to the development of photography
and film. Although Rodowick concludes that ‘synthetic imagery is neither an inferior
representation of physical reality nor a failed replacement for the photographic, but
rather a fully coherent expression of a different reality, in fact, a new ontology’ that pro-
vides the opportunity for the artist to probe imaginative life and a new kind of sociality
(174–6), he also poses the question: ‘When filmmaking and viewing become fully digi-
tal arts, will a certain experience of cinema be irretrievably lost?’ (31). In the same vein,
Leo Enticknap wonders how future film scholars will be able to understand the aesthet-
ics and impact on audiences of 35 mm film if it only exists as a digital surrogate (2009:
420; see also Dixon 2000: 229).
These are genuine fears, but the specific crisis that Film Studies is experiencing
through the impact of digital technologies and its loss of ‘medium specificity’ is mir-
rored in other disciplines (see, for instance, Krauss 1999) and is itself symptomatic of
a deeper uncertainty about new ways of living and experiencing the world (Gunning
2000: 328). As Thomas Elsaesser remarks, the term ‘digital’ is ‘less a technology than a
cultural metaphor of crisis and transition’ (1998: 202).12 Thus the problems many film
scholars are wrestling with should engage the attention of those who practice Visual
Culture Studies. Mieke Bal characterizes Film Studies, along with Art History, as an
object-defined discipline and thus to be distinguished from the interdisciplinary project
of Visual Culture and its concern with practices of looking both historically and in the
digital age (2003: 7, 9, 11, 13). There are eminent film scholars, such as Dudley Andrew,
who wish to maintain Film Studies’ disciplinary boundaries and who fear film’s submer-
gence into ‘some larger notion of the history of audiovisions’ or its disappearance into
Film and Visual Culture 491

‘the foggy field of cultural studies’ (2010: xvii).13 Even Lisa Cartwright, whose work has
been central to Visual Culture, argues in her essay on film and digital technologies that
disciplinary convergence should not mean ‘a flattening of difference and a de-skilling of
[film’s] labor force’ (2002: 424).
However, what the studies discussed in this chapter demonstrate is that an engage-
ment with broader concerns does not preclude retaining a particular focus on film,
nor detailed empirical research into specific forms, practices and historical moments.
Anne Friedberg—whose own work exemplifies this process—argues that increasingly
film scholars are coming to recognize the importance of Visual Culture Studies which,
she argues, has encouraged them ‘to contextualize the study of film and other media in
relation to a deeper history of visual representation and within a broader conception
of the practices of vision and visuality’ (2006: 253, n. 21). If, as I have suggested, Film
Studies is becoming more interdisciplinary, with film scholars increasingly moving into
the terrain occupied by cultural history and visual studies and discussing phenomena
rather than objects, working with a wider conception of ‘film’ both historically and in
the present, then its relationship with Visual Culture will become increasingly close
and productive. Indeed, I want to argue that Film Studies’ continuing historical and
theoretical project (broadly conceived) is vital to a dynamic and expanding ‘interdisci-
pline’ of Visual Culture, one that can draw on the resources of a variety of disciplines to
‘construct a new and distinctive object of research’ (Mitchell (2002) 2005: 356). I see
no reason why the particular knowledge and training of film scholars and the very real
achievements of film scholarship need to be sacrificed in this process as they continue
to engage with the broader issues of perception and visuality that Visual Culture has
helped to identify.

Conclusion
The debates about film’s medium specificity and ontology are, as Dudley Andrew’s re-
cent polemic (2010) indicates, far from settled. But, as this chapter has argued, the im-
pact of digital technologies has impelled film scholars, from a range of perspectives, to
try to redefine their discipline and broaden its research agenda. As noted, we appear to
be living in a threshold moment when the relationship between the past, present and
future of film can be rethought. This has involved both a turn to history—I did not have
the space to consider many other provocative and stimulating accounts such as Giuli-
ana Bruno’s work on film and architecture (1993, 2002)—and the growth of a range of
more explicitly philosophical studies, including, in addition to those I have mentioned,
important monographs by Sean Cubitt (2004) and Garrett Stewart (2007), which try to
tease out the ontological as well as the aesthetic implications of the shift from analogue
to digital. As I have suggested, the major shift that has happened in the past decade or
so has been the sustained effort by scholars, notably Manovich, to apprehend and also,
importantly, to describe in detail, the evolutionary nature of new media, to understand
new forms and practices as historical, hybrid and possibly transitional. This has replaced,
to a large extent, the disabling future casting that characterized previous studies of new
492 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

media. Therefore we can look forward to studies of digital cinema that become ever
more precise in their delineation of technological and aesthetic changes in the produc-
tion, distribution, exhibition and consumption of film. But, even more important, ones,
such as Nicholas Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age (2009), that also engage with the
possible cultural meanings of those changes.
As I have shown, in the process of considering the evolution of new forms of film,
Film Studies has been forced to revise its central tenets including the centrality of Hol-
lywood. This has necessitated a scrutiny of Hollywood itself—as in Jon Lewis’s pro-
vocative collection The End of Cinema as We Know It (2001) and Geoff King’s work on
‘Indiewood’ (2009)—but also an important new research agenda that considers the
evolution of transnational cinema. In addition to the studies mentioned, important
work is being undertaken on other forms of global cinema, for instance Derek Bose’s
study of Bollywood (2006). What I have characterized as Film Studies’ postdigital re-
visionist project has included the rethinking of auteurism and the role of the director
(with Greenaway and Lynch as exemplars of the shift away from the feature film into
multisite modes), but has also involved new work on film genres (e.g. Langford 2005)
and on gender, for instance Krin Gabbard and William Luhr’s collection (2008) that
includes attention to masculinities as well as femininities, queer and ethnic represen-
tations. Finally, Bruce Isaacs’s work (2008), already referenced, on ‘metacinematic hy-
permyths’ suggests a highly productive area for further research and enquiry, one that
moves beyond the confines of The Matrix mini-industry or Tarantino to consider how
films themselves are part of wider cultural networks that accrete and proliferate endlessly
in the highly populated cyberspace of digital culture.

Further Reading
Chapman, James, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper, eds. 2007. The New Film History: Sources, Meth-
ods, Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gledhill, Christine and Linda Williams, eds. 2000. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold.
Harbord, Janet. 2007. The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lyons, James and John Plunkett, eds. 2007. Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the
Internet. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Manovich, Len. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Rodowick, D. N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.

Notes
1. Definitions of what constitutes ‘new media’ vary but typically include the Internet, Web
sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMS and DVDs. For a useful over-
view, see Lister et al. (2009: 9–51).
2. Bordwell contrasts current ‘post-theory’ scholarship with earlier studies that, he argues, as-
pired to the formulation of abstract ‘grand theory’, a problematic distinction. For a useful
overview of the changes in film theory see Tredell (2002).
Film and Visual Culture 493

3. Space does not permit a consideration of Gilles Deleuze’s two highly influential accounts of
cinema—Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Athlone Press, 1992) and Cinema 2: The
Time Image (London: Athlone Press, 1989)—that have generated a mini industry of criti-
cal exegesis and commentary. See, inter alia, Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain Is the Screen:
Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000).
4. See New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8/3 (September 2010); Special Issue: Re-
searching Cinema History.
5. These accounts are informed by the seminal studies of Crary (1992 and 2001), Schivelbusch
(1986 and 1995) and Kern (2003).
6. Hansen has recently extended her argument: see Hansen (2010).
7. Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995) is a famous
example.
8. The journal Transnational Cinemas started in February 2010.
9. Documentary film-making has also been evolving into a more open form through the use of
digital technologies: see Cubitt (2002: 27); Gaines and Renov (1999).
10. These include Le Grice (2001), Reiser and Zapp (2002), Shaw and Weibel (2002), Hamlyn
(2003) and Hanson (2004); see also Zielinski (1999: 279–303).
11. For further discussion of this point see Rodowick (2001: 203–34) and Rosen (2001:
301–49).
12. Vincent Mosco (2004) has explored the various myths that have been constructed around
the new digital technologies.
13. See the contributions to the ‘In Focus: What Is Cinema’ section of Cinema Journal, 43/3
(Spring 2004).

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 21

Pragmatic Vision:
Connecting Aesthetics,
Materiality and Culture
in Landscape
Architectural Practice
Kathryn Moore

Redefining Perception
The main premise of this chapter is that a radical redefinition of the relationship be-
tween the senses and intelligence is way, way overdue. Written from the perspective of
an experienced teacher and practitioner of landscape architecture, the chapter notes that
the problems are not specific to this discipline alone, but are equally relevant to architec-
ture, urban design and other art and design disciplines, as well as philosophy, aesthetics,
visual culture and education more generally.
I will argue that making a fundamental shift in the way we think about how we per-
ceive enables us to focus on what we see rather than what we imagine might lurk be-
neath the surface; it is the interpretation of what we see, the materiality of the world that
should be the focus of visual culture studies and design theory if we are to teach design
expertise and create the quality environments expected by society. Exposing the concep-
tual void and widespread cultural misconceptions created by current foundational theo-
ries of perception as well as elaborating the specific problems this causes within design
pedagogy and the design process, the chapter outlines the consequences of adopting an
alternative, pragmatic conception of consciousness for perception, visual skill, aesthet-
ics, objectivity, language and meaning. It is set within the context of emerging radical
design practices in landscape architecture.
500 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Emerging Design Practice

In the context of a growing response to the disastrous environments created in the last
few decades, cities across the world have strategies for sustainability, long-term ecologi-
cal balance, creativity and cultural identity. There is at last, a tangible recognition that
the physical, cultural and social condition of our environment has a profound effect on
the quality of life and is a key component of robust economic growth. We know that
good-looking quality places lift the spirit and have a dramatic effect on people’s morale,
confidence and sense of self-worth. Dreary, unkempt, dysfunctional places make people
feel unvalued and resentful. This is nothing but common sense really, a statement of the
obvious. It’s just a pity it’s taken some of us so long to realize it. Now, it has become a
political reality and we all have a responsibility.
With financial meltdown and climate change at the forefront of the new political
agenda, an extraordinary but fragile renaissance is taking place as society, governments
and investors are beginning to appreciate the true value and complexity of the land-
scape. This is reflected in the number and range of legislative initiatives emerging across
the world, such as the European Landscape Convention, a UNESCO proposal for an
International Landscape Convention and a number of national and regional landscape
charters being developed in Central America, Asia Pacific, Australia, Costa Rica, Brazil,
Mexico, Argentina and Colombia.
Running parallel with these legislative and policy initiatives there is evidence of a con-
siderable shift in planning and development hierarchies, with landscape determined as
the lead driver for change, an important economic and social concern that is now firmly
on the mainstream political agenda. Examples include the speculative West 8 Blue Isles
Plan to create artificial dune islands off the coast of Belgium and the Netherlands to neu-
tralize the rising sea level for the coming century and provide a million small estates, and
Palmboom and van der Bouts plan for 450 hectares of urban extension at Amsterdam.
This consists of 18,000 dwellings on the IJmeer Lake, which has six islands of different
sizes, where the city and the water work together as a whole, the buildings are treated
as part of the landscape and the configuration of land and water, and the composition
of shorelines preceded the land use planning decisions. Integrating nature and culture,
dealing with issues of expertise and public aspirations, with conservation and design,
protection and the creation of new landscapes is the landscape-planning project for the
Black Country Consortium in the West Midlands. Based on the concept of broaden-
ing horizons, derived from an understanding of the region’s topography, the history of
mineral exploitation and landscape despoliation, Capita Lovejoy proposes to manipulate
layers of urban topography, urban floor and urban architecture to radically change the
visual and spatial identity of the region over a thirty-, sixty- and ninety-year period.
Illustrating the point that regarding landscape as a resource that is environmen-
tal, economic and social is valid, Juurlink and Geluck’s Leek-Roden Inter-municipal
landscape masterplan for 6,000 dwellings and 110 hectares of business activity on the
Drents plateau proposes a new model of scattered development to create great diversity
in living environments by spreading the dwellings along subtly different landscape types
Pragmatic Vision 501

and characters. An embryonic proposal in Costa Rica to plan the expansion of the city
within the context of the surrounding mountains, taking into account the uniqueness of
the urban form of central San Jose, considers the cultural iconography and narratives of
its landscape, as well as its biological, horticultural and agricultural potential.
Cutting across the traditional artistic/ecological divide are projects such as Vall d’en
Joan in Spain. Here, Batlle i Roig’s extraordinary idea is to work with the engineers’
technological requirements to reclaim the valley from being merely a dump for urban
waste by creating dams and platforms, but to transform them into terraces and fields,
using technical, agricultural solutions to re-create the romance of long-lost agricultural
landscapes. Along a 75 km stretch of coast on the Dead Sea, Gross Max assesses abiotic,
biotic and human factors along with the requirements of future users and the availability
of flat land to inform the development process in areas where there is little rain and tour-
ism is seen as the only way to sustain the economy (Topos 1998; Gross.Max. 2007).
Unafraid of engaging with aesthetics, the Norwegian Public Road Authority has cre-
ated the necessary legislation to require multidisciplinary working across many depart-
mental boundaries, to deliver a national and local strategy for the highway infrastructure.
The ambition is to design all new roads without adversely affecting important landscape
features and significantly, to add beauty to the surroundings. The Rainbow Route across
the Netherlands, with 120 km of infrastructure, including the motorway, town centres,
recreational areas, agriculture, forestry, housing and business activity, being developed as
one project by the Dutch Ministry of Spatial Design, Water Management and Transport
exemplifies an integrated approach to development, planned and co-ordinated from a
landscape point of view.
Focussing on the relationship between people and their physical environment as well
as demonstrating the connection between research and artistic practice, Mathur and
Cunha redefine the edge between the sea, the monsoon and river in an exhibition chal-
lenging conceptions of Mumbai’s relationship with water (Mathur and Cunha 2009),
and in the Living Lottery project in Birmingham, Spaghetti Junction is taken as a point
of arrival rather than as a means of escape, as something to look at and watch from
nearby and far away requiring an investigation in terms of its topographical location, lo-
cally and regionally. The important ethical and democratic dimension of this renaissance
is reflected in projects such as the Right To Landscape movement (a collaborative initia-
tive between Lincoln University, New Zealand, the Cambridge Centre for Landscape
and People (CCLP) UK and the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon). This
chapter explores theories relating to the value of landscape and ways in which it could
become a positive tool to protect human rights, working towards justice and the well-
being of indigenous populations and local communities.
Each of these demonstrates that it is no longer enough to simply consider the land-
scape or take it into account. It is not an afterthought, the bits left in between the
buildings, developments, highways and town centres, or a vague blanket cover that will
look after itself. Given its proper status, it is the context upon and within which these
dynamic processes take place. With all of its cultural, social and physical potential, the
landscape is seen as a base layer, against which decisions about all future development
502 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

need to be made. It is precisely these kinds of holistic strategies that are important in
addressing the major challenges of industrialization, urbanization, energy, demographic
shifts and changing patterns of work and habitation, as well as climate change, the de-
pletion of natural resources, de/forestation, problems relating to food production, bio-
diversity, heritage, a host of issues relating to the quality of life and other aspects of land
use change and development.
These projects are, however, exceptional. To have any real chance of providing a sus-
tainable and lasting blueprint for the landscape, this way of working needs to become
whole heartedly absorbed into all of the decision-making institutions and organiza-
tions responsible for policy, strategic or regional planning at a national and interna-
tional level, as well as, of course, in education. To do so requires reevaluating many of
the assumptions we have about the nature of the visual, aesthetics, the design process
and landscape, so that these kinds of projects do not happen by chance, but by design.
One way to do this is by developing a pragmatic, holistic approach to consciousness
and perception.
This helps clarify and resolve the great design riddle: why it is still largely considered
to be unteachable and how we can dismantle this old idea?

Design Dichotomy
The role of design in all of this is far from clear, in fact it is rather tenuous, fragile and
easily dismissed. It is of course, possible to teach many aspects of design—design theory,
criticism, history, its technology and modes of communication. There are guides on col-
laboration, team building and how to carry out design reviews. But the real nitty-gritty
of the discipline, the designing part of design, is clouded by subjectivity, and therefore
somehow impossible to teach. Spectacularly ill defined, it is often seen as a highly per-
sonal, mysterious act, almost like alchemy. And then there is the dangerous idea that it is
possible, indeed preferable, to hide behind the supposed objective neutrality implied by
the more ‘scientific’, technology-based, problem-solving approaches. We even hesitate
about defining what it is that designers do, considering talk about aesthetic and artistic
sensibility, let alone design expertise to be a contradiction in terms.

Challenging Foundational Theories of Perception

The problem is philosophical. Endlessly nuanced and variable, the general picture we
have of the perceptual process depends on a sensory interface or mode of thinking
that somehow intervenes on our behalf to organize various inputs in order to serve
intelligence—a ‘disastrous idea that has haunted Western philosophy since the
­seventeenth century’ (Putnam 1999: 43.) As a result, significant chunks of the design
process are lost in an arcane, sensory miasma, the consequence of a damaging metaphys-
ical duality that has slipped under the intellectual radar, disguised in visual and percep-
tual theories. The challenge is to develop a greater understanding as to what designing
means, in both theory and practice, by disengaging it from such primitive bodily ways
Pragmatic Vision 503

of knowing,­ separating it from psychology and using a fresh, common sense approach
to bring materiality back into the picture.
The core argument has been developed by taking one of the main preoccupations of
contemporary cultural discourse, the argument for and against the existence of universal
truth, and carrying it into the perceptual realm by adopting a pragmatic line of inquiry
which questions the very nature of foundational belief. With this one pivotal adjust-
ment, the whole metaphysical edifice built on the flawed conception of a sensory mode
of thinking comes tumbling down. Constructed in its place is a means of dealing with
spatial, visual information that is artistically and conceptually rigorous, making it pos-
sible to move debate into the real world informed by knowledge and ideas.
The villain of the piece is an old philosophical tradition that actually prevents us
from having informed discussions about the significance of the way things look, the ma-
terial, physical qualities of what we see. Reinforced by a host of beliefs, myths and fables
it exiles materiality to a metaphysical wilderness where it languishes, separated from in-
telligence, safely hidden out of sight, out of mind. Manifested in the interface thought
to exist between us ‘in here’ and the real world ‘out there’, likened to a veil, this is what
is thought to help correlate, crystallize, process or structure our sensory impressions. It
is called many things—a sensory modality, visual thinking, the aural or tactile modal-
ity, the experiential, the haptic, even unfocussed peripheral vision. Whatever it is called,
however it is characterized, it is there to pick up the really important stuff. It sifts the
wheat from the chaff, sorts out the things worth noticing. Discriminating on our behalf,
it helps us understand the world. Dig deep enough, however, and all you find are value
judgements masquerading as universal truth, the ‘real’ truth that exists ‘out’ there if only
we look hard enough, or are lucky enough to be clever enough, or sensitive enough to
find it. The actual mechanics of it remain a mystery or as Jay puts it ‘somewhat clouded’
(Jay 1994: 7). From a pragmatic point of view, this perceptual whodunit is insoluble
because the entire plot is based on a rationalist belief in different modes of thinking and
prelinguistic starting points of thought, a set of assumptions that have been with us so
long they have become a part of common sense. It is difficult to exaggerate how much
the general understanding of intelligence is dominated by this divide and, in turn, the
difficulties it creates.

Fragmenting Consciousness
The visual, sensory mode of thinking is perhaps the most celebrated expression of this
interface. There are contradictory views of the visual. The focus of considerable atten-
tion, on the one hand it is regarded as the holy grail of art education yet at the same
time is derided and despised by many philosophers and design theorists. The most com-
mon view characterizes the visual as an ancient, more primitive mode of thinking, less
sophisticated than verbal thinking, which is supposedly conceptual, intellectual and
on a higher level (see Koestler 1964; Goldschmidt 1994). Each is thought to involve
a different cognitive style. Visual thinking, it follows, having nothing to do with in-
telligence, is more likely to be subjective, intuitive and irrational, ‘chaotic, instinctive
504 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

and unpredictable’ (Raney 1999), whereas verbal thinking, more usually associated with
the cool rationality of language, is apparently linear, analytical and logical. A raft of
­misconceptions directly related to this basic premise sets the scene for a diminution of
the visual, not only as a cognitive style, but also in the act of looking, the skill of seeing
and the physical appearance of things. The situation is made all the more complex by the
presumption that the senses are discrete and function separately. This implies that not
only do we use a sensory mode of thinking, but also experience the world selectively, one
sense at a time, for example visually, orally or simply through touch. It informs the idea
that things can be designed in a way that privileges one particular sense over another
and even that landscapes or art can be appreciated from one sensory dimension, all of
which is done viscerally, without thinking. But is it really possible to design for sound
and touch, without considering the spatial or visual implications? Spatial dimensions,
roughness, smoothness, materials, themselves have visual, aural and tactile qualities. It is
impossible to separate them. Is it reasonable to suppose that we can suppress our sense
of smell, taste and touch? True, you can stick your fingers in your ears, to block out the
passing traffic, but it is impossible to decide not to hear it, even though you may not al-
ways notice it. It is impossible to be in a landscape and decide not to feel the wind and
the rain, not to sniff the air or hear sounds of life. You can protect yourself against them,
you may well take them for granted, become casual about what notice you take of them,
but you can’t just decide them away.
The notion that the sensory inputs are separate, engendered by the penchant for di-
viding up consciousness, comes about, Dewey explains, because we presume that since
we see a painting through our eyes and hear music through our ears, it is only too easy
to think that such visual or auditory qualities are ‘central if not exclusive’ to the expres-
sion of the ideas, to the immediate nature of the work and to the way we experience the
work (Dewey (1934) 1980: 123). Nothing he adds, ‘could be further from the truth’.
Suggesting that a painting or the smell of bread, ‘are stimuli to which we respond with
emotional, imaginative and intellectual values drawn from ourselves . . .’, he argues these
are not to be seen as separate responses to be synthesized (no matter how quickly), but
one response only (Dewey (1934) 1980: 123).
An added complication and contradictory scenario engendered by the distinctions
made between vision and the other senses is fed by what Jay calls an ‘essentially ocular-
phobic discourse’ (Jay 1994: 15). With a vigorous denouncement of a so-called cultural
over-emphasis on what is characterized as the dominant ‘cool and distant realm of vision’
(Pallasmaa 1994: 29), once again, the visual is singled out as a prime suspect, but this
time from an entirely different perspective. Ingold summarizes the list of trumped-up
charges brought against it,

that sound penetrates, whereas vision isolates, that what we hear are sounds that fill the
space around us whereas what we see are things abstracted or ‘cut out’ from the space
before us, that the body responds to sound like a resonant cavity and to light like a re-
flecting screen, that the auditory world is dynamic and the visual world static, that to
hear is to participate whereas to see is to observe from a distance, that hearing is social
Pragmatic Vision 505

whereas vision is asocial or individual, that hearing is morally virtuous whereas vision
is intrinsically untrustworthy, and finally, that hearing is sympathetic whereas vision is
indifferent or even treacherous. (Ingold 2000: 251–2).

It’s an impressive list of crimes and misdemeanours, prosecuted in particular by phe-

nomenological discourse, with the visual as chief perpetrator and villain of the piece.
Now installed as the primary instrument of objective knowledge it is held responsible
for architecture having apparently turned ‘into the retinal art of the eye’ (Pallasmaa
1994: 29), creating a lack of sensuality or experience of being in the world, which is
what Heidegger refers to as a loss of nearness.
The separation of the senses, one from another, together with the fallacy which
William James identifies of casually borrowing psychological principles and terms to
explain concepts that have nothing to do with psychology (James 1884: 65) makes it
almost inevitable that the perceived characteristics of a visual mode of thinking, either
with all that irrational, subjective or cool and distant baggage attached, impacts on
every aspect of the visual, physical world. Causing mischief and mayhem, it is, Ingold
remarks, as if ‘vision had been compelled to take on the mantle of a particular cognitive
style and all the virtues and vices that go with it’ (Ingold 2000: 286). The weight of prej-
udice against the visual distorts our conceptions of images and almost any other kind of
so-called visual information and the visual dimension of materiality, if considered at all,
is regarded with suspicion. Reflexively we associate graphics, for example with ‘illiteracy,
delusion, shape shifting and colouring emotion’ (Stafford 1997: 11). Images are seen as
deceptive, seductive and notoriously unreliable, and questions of form, subjective and
certainly not worthy of much attention. We are urged to ‘avoid the gravitational pull of
the object’ (Borden and Rendell 2000: 5) and warned that focussing on what something
looks like is an unnecessary indulgence, a ‘retreat into form’ used to ‘justify inattention
to function, construction, environment, and so on’ (Schuman 1991: 4–5).

Cultural Misconceptions
Although rarely articulated, the concept of a sensory interface is hugely pervasive, af-
fecting almost every facet of Western culture. Henry James described it as a theory that
‘cheats us of seeing’ (Henry James to Robert Louis Stephenson, on 12 January 1891
(Putnam 1999: 3)). What is also evident is that it robs us of artistic sensibility too. It
lies at the heart of the common idea that art involves a different conceptual framework
from science, a different mode of thinking, that art is a pleasurable pastime whereas sci-
ence is a serious endeavour and that it is possible to forget all you know in order to fully
appreciate a piece of music, a painting or the landscape, embracing the sensuality of the
experience with a clean slate, uncontaminated by knowledge or rationality. Why, despite
so much evidence to the contrary, do we still characterize scientists as cool, detached,
unencumbered by emotion and artists as passionate, subjective and slightly deranged,
why do we think decisions can be made on the one hand intuitively without knowledge
and on the other objectively, without value judgements?
506 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Epistemological Crises
The prevalence of this dogma explains why a premium is put on reading or writing rather
than drawing. We are not learning to be aware of our surroundings, to recognize our re-
sponses to place and space and are rarely shown why things look like they do given the
time, place or context. More generally, it skews the way intelligence is defined or what
counts as valid knowledge and gives a prejudicial and narrow view of the role of language.
The same implacability militates against arguments for resources, space, time or money
in competition with more so-called rational disciplines. Nullifying any educational ratio-
nale for substantial areas of decision making within the arts there is instead a misguided
dependence on concepts such as creativity, the genius loci, ideation or the mind’s eye,
delving into the subconscious or sharpening intuitive responses. Whilst this makes what
designers do seem rather mysterious and intriguing, it is in fact, deeply questionable. Re-
sponsible for the continuing distinction made between theory and practice, the separa-
tion of ideas from form, emotions from intelligence and a host of other misconceptions,
the sensory interface fuels the myth that anything other than the purely practical or
neutrally functional is a bit iffy, too subjective, a matter of taste really and best avoided.
Giving the impression that concepts such as artistic rationality, aesthetic sensibility and
design expertise are contradictions in terms rather than credible educational objectives,
it baulks any attempt to provide a convincing rationale for art education, still generally
regarded as ‘nice but not necessary’ as Eisner reluctantly admits (Eisner 2002: xi).

Implications for Design Pedagogy

Educationally this is disastrous. At the centre of aesthetic experience, the sensory mode
of thinking is what students are expected to reap the benefits of, if they are to be in any
way successful. But the fundamental dichotomy between body and mind enshrined
in theories of perception actually creates insoluble puzzles within aesthetics that in-
evitably spill into design discourse. Is the aesthetic frisson created by the recognition
of a perfect, and unchanging truth out there in the world, or a resonance with ­innate
archetypal structures in the mind? Or to put it another way, is beauty objective or
subjective?
Aesthetics, almost more than any other discipline, is dependent on the idea of uni-
versal truth. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is approached from a position that is
highly esoteric and obscure or the sensual, foggy perceptual world of feelings or from
one that is transcendental or empirical in perspective. In aesthetic theory, what really
counts are the universal superstructures that stand outside culture but act to underpin
and unite our responses. In the attempt to identify these universals, in here, out there,
somewhere, we are supposed to set aside all reason, opening ourselves without reserva-
tion to what is outside of us in order to sense something ‘other’. From a pragmatic per-
spective, asking anyone to step outside of what they know to sense significance or beauty
as it really is, without the encumbrances of knowledge and culture, is as pointless as it
is ridiculous.
Pragmatic Vision 507

Then, most damaging of all, running through a whole range of design theory is the
highly pejorative attitude towards the visual, underscoring the supercilious contention
that whatever it is that determines our responses, it is certainly not ‘merely’ visual. It may
well be acknowledged as a component, but is also thought to be a distraction. The physi-
cal, material qualities of place are thus edged out of the frame because an appreciation of
such things is considered too subjective or ephemeral. Marginalizing the visual dimen-
sion is to sideline the physical form of the landscape, which is systematically overlooked
in the search for invisible or hidden meaning to supply the aesthetic buzz. As a result, we
have lost the art of critical looking. Through long-term neglect and discrimination, we
no longer have the confidence, the appetite or even the language to talk about appear-
ances. It is abundantly clear however, that we live and work in a visual, spatial medium.
It is both pretentious and foolhardy to think we can manipulate it without knowing the
implications of what we are dealing with. Undervaluing the cultural and social implica-
tions of appearances disables attempts to understand the impact the quality of the real,
tangible environment has on the quality of life.
There is a more insidious side to this. Legitimizing a numbing passivity in the eye of
the beholder, it is the senses and the like that call the tune. It makes no difference if the
agency is a belief in unconscious or subconscious archetypal structures in our minds or
unchanging significant truths in the world, the process depends on the senses having a
perceptive resonance or moment of clarity in order to recognize and filter information
for us. In other words, it lets us off the hook.
In thrall to the unconscious, deep-seated structures or archetypal resonances (things
which by definition we can never, ever know), we use the site, intuition, God, ecology,
universal morality, whatever takes our metaphysical fancy, to justify our beliefs and de-
sires, rather than come clean and take responsibility for our own thoughts and actions in
response to what we know. In doing so we are unwittingly building a safe house for all
kinds of hidden agendas. Since the visual dimension in particular is increasingly swept
under the philosophical carpet, other criteria are called upon to do the aesthetic leg-
work. In this way, the concept of the genius loci for example obscures a whole range of
aspirations, including the call for a return to old ways of seeing, utilitarian pleas to de-
sign the practical way, the search for symmetry and balance, ecological diversity, public
participation and classical architecture, process rather than product and, like John Ma-
jor’s cricket and warm beer, sentimentality, a longing for a time and place that exists only
in the imagination. Such constraints become integral parts of what Johnson describes as
a ‘false consciousness’ projected by architects ‘about the correctness of what they design,
mostly without external verification’ (Johnson 1994: 394).
But perhaps most damaging of all is that an implicit and pervasive dependence on
such concepts often serves to reinforce existing preconceptions and prejudices rather
than encourage a more challenging or imaginative approach. It is an easy way to relin-
quish the responsibility we have as designers to investigate, analyse and interpret the sig-
nificance of what we see in a critical, grounded, culturally astute way. It has a stultifying
impact on design practice. It is an easy option and a bad habit, and currently it is fuel-
ling a pervasive emphasis on ‘process and programmatic context’ rather than content.
508 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

The Pragmatic Approach

The alternative is not about rethinking how to design. There are many brilliant design-
ers around who know how to do this only too well. It is more about reassessing how we
think we think we design. Using an entirely different basis from which to understand
the way we think unlocks a major part of the debate. The philosophical argument is sur-
prisingly simple. Rorty and other pragmatists insist that it is a mistake to assume there
is a difference to be made in the first place, wrong to think consciousness is fragmented
into different kinds of knowing or intelligence or different conceptual spheres of knowl-
edge. In addition, the characteristics of the subjective/objective dichotomy that theo-
rists and thinkers have been trying so hard to dispel over the last few decades matches
precisely that of the visual/verbal duality. Both have the same foundational basis. If one
dichotomy can be proved erroneous, then so can another. One simple move, take away
the foundation stone, the very idea that there are different modes of thinking, and there
is no need to worry about how the different realms can be reconciled. All those intrac-
table problems melt away.
Disassemble the argument for different types of reasoning and the idea that there are
different ways of thinking is similarly undone. From a pragmatic perspective, it follows
that neither uses a special kind of reasoning. Essentially, this is to say that we think the
same way no matter what we happen to be thinking about. In understanding emotions or
equations, formulae or artistic responses we interpret, reinterpret, judge and try to make
sense of our feelings because there is simply no other way to make sense of what we see, to
make sense of the world. Just because we are looking at a painting does not mean we are
thinking in pictures, or that when we are reading a book, we are thinking linguistically.
Whatever grabs our attention or catches our eye, no matter what gets us thinking, we al-
ways get to think about it by the same route, through language. There are no exceptions,
no special cases, ifs or buts. Language binds us, separates us, it quite literally defines us.

Reworking Perception
‘Offering a middle way between reactionary metaphysics and irresponsible relativism’
(Putnam 1999: 5), redefining the relationship between the senses and intelligence means
that essentially there is no need to choose one or the other. This releases us from the end-
less debate between positions that are natural or cultural, classical versus romantic, scien-
tific or artistic, theoretical from practical, value-laden from quantitative, or approaches
that are personal or community-based. This significant transformation comes about for
the simple reason that we are no longer required to fathom out all those complicated in-
teractions between ‘sensations and the shaping or judging capacity of the mind’ or quite
how much ‘participatory dimension’ there is in the visual process between spectator and
object (Jay 1994: 30). This new approach is not based on concepts of subjectivity or ob-
jectivity. It is interpretative, but not hermeneutical. Following the interpretative line a
step or two further, it argues that not only is reasoning interpretative, as Best (1992) and
Snodgrass and Coyne (2006) have suggested, but that perception also is interpretative.
Pragmatic Vision 509

Rather than arguing as Arnheim and many others have done, that we should recognize
the intelligence of perception, it is to argue that perception is intelligence.
Collapsing the visual, intelligence and language and many other elements of con-
sciousness into a holistic concept of perception takes the supernatural element of design
theory and education out of the equation and reveals that far from masking design ability
or creativity, concepts and language actually allow us access to the arts, both in its making
and criticism. This radical shift makes it possible to get what Bryson calls ‘a firm grasp of
the tangible world’ (Bryson (1999) 2001: 31). A question of developing a common sense
realism about conception and perception, rather than trusting the world to pass messages
to us through sense data, perfect forms or amenable spirits, we can rely on our reactions
and responses being entirely dependent on the sense we make of what we see. We respond
to the world through intelligence and that response is informed by education. This has
implications for notions of truth, visual skills, aesthetics and objectivity.

Truth
The challenge of negotiating the territory between the subjective and the objective is to
avoid the assumption that real, unchanging truth is the ultimate end point of inquiry,
whilst simultaneously avoiding being sucked into the argument that the only alternative
is to believe everything is relative and dependent on a point of view. Put slightly differ-
ently, we should refuse the prop of believing there is such a thing as objective neutral
truth, but also avoid dismissing things we don’t like or understand or agree with as value
judgement, subjective opinions or questions of taste. In any field of endeavour this takes
some thinking about.
Ditching the idea of universal truth as a guide is not the same as saying that truth does
not exist. It is absolutely true that this table does exist. I definitely did have bacon and
eggs for breakfast but these absolute truths are of no particular significance. No matter
how scientifically a site can be defined, all this will ever be is one kind of ­description—no
closer to the essential truth about the site than any other, and as with any other kind of
truth, it will also be open to question and subject to change. Truth is shifting, flexible,
sometimes enduring but never immutable. Significantly, it is also not a matter of ques-
tioning the existence of objects in the world. If there were a tiger in this room, even the
most militant existentialist would not sit there questioning the reality of it being there.
Most people would run and not because of some deep-seated recognition of the intrinsic
nature of ‘tigerness’ but because they know that tigers are dangerous. The tiger incontro-
vertibly does exist. The point is, what do you make of it?

Visual Skill
The benefits of this shift are considerable. From this new perspective visual skill, rather
than being a particular mode of thinking, is an educated awareness of the traditions
of the landscape as well as its physical materiality. It is about having a strong sense of
our culture, neither generic nor archetypal, but a learned, cultivated skill, comprising
510 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

observation and discernment within the traditions, materiality and ideas of a particular
medium. It is a truly critical component of artistic sensibility. To consider the visual in
this light makes it possible to learn about why landscapes look the way they do, how and
why we respond to places and then applying this knowledge to design. When you first
see the Manhattan skyline or the Statue of Liberty, for example the impact is so intense
because of the associations gleaned from numerous books, films and anecdotes. These
influences flood in because we recognize directly the physical fabric of what we see, its
spatial, visual qualities, its form and character, its myths and legends.

Aesthetics
As far as aesthetic-theory is concerned, effectively booting out the presumption that
there is something psychologically elemental in our responses, aesthetic experience is
real enough, but not in the way it has traditionally been conceived. What might cause
an aesthetic experience, the object or the activity, is immaterial. It’s the response that
counts. If we are lucky, we will be rendered speechless by the power of a painting, the
beauty of a landscape, or the balance of a mathematical equation. Pleasurable, emo-
tional, moving and inspiring experiences can happen when reading a classic novel or
merely wandering down the street—it is not the painting that counts, or the landscape
or the music, but the quality of the experience. Since the quality of the experience we
have is defined by what we know, this makes it entirely accessible. Knowledge we can
teach, judgements and values can be learned.

Objectivity
Having startling consequences for the roles of language, the emotions, intelligence and
subjectivity, it also changes our concepts of objectivity. The bottom line is that in any
study, design or otherwise, we are constrained or liberated by the language and concepts
we have at our disposal. There is no other way of knowing, no other kind of meaning
to uncover, no genial spirits to give us a nudge in the right direction. Not the site or
what lies beneath, within or without it, nor even the fears and desires of our prehistoric
ancestors. The point is that in science just as much as in the arts, our interpretation of
problems and their potential solutions changes as Bryson suggests, ‘as the world changes’
(Bryson 1983: xiv). There can be no final analysis based on absolute knowledge. We
need a healthy measure of scepticism to deal with the hard facts enshrined in regional
spatial plans, perennially used to justify the economic imperative for new roads, the dis-
tribution of new settlements, how big they should be or the cost the market will stand in
terms of quality housing or town centre development. The evidence of such quantitative
‘factual’ decisions is only too clear. Just look around any town or city.

The Design Process

Reevaluating these fundamental assumptions inevitably impacts on our thinking with
regards to many aspects of the design process. Technology for example rather than the
Pragmatic Vision 511

mechanical or practical part of a project, we have to see as a means of understanding

how far materials might be pushed or manipulated in order to express ideas with style
and confidence. Drawing, rather than somehow accessing intuition, grazing the senses,
making us more aware of our emotional responses or kicking part of the brain into
touch, is simply a way of working things out, exploring ideas and speculating about pos-
sibilities. As an investigative tool it is hard to beat. It is also a matter of realizing that
‘meaning is not simply something “expressed” or “reflected” in language: it is actually
produced by it’ (Eagleton 1983: 60). There is no other way for meaning to be manifest.
This is the case in all experience. That is as far and as deep as it goes.

Implications for Theory

It sets a different kind of scenario for theory too. Theory is often characterized as some-
thing to be applied, or invoked as and when necessary, thought to be the language of
critics, not designers. Redefining the relationship between artist and critic and therefore
between theory and practice, Dewey argues that when creating art, ‘the act itself is exactly
what it is because of how it is done. In the act there is no distinction, but perfect integra-
tion of manner and content, form and substance’ (Dewey (1934) 1980: 109). Explaining
that it is only upon reflection that distinctions can be made between what is done and
how it is done, this is the kind of theory that is needed, a body of work that will indicate, if
it does its job properly, the relationship between materiality and ideas, form and content.
Esoteric or down to earth, jargon-laden or straightforward, these reflections are pre-
cisely what develops an understanding of the language of the medium. There is an ur-
gent need to refocus and develop theory that is insightful enough to inform design. This
new kind of theory would not be particularly concerned with whether an approach is se-
miotic, structuralist, or poststructuralist, phenomenological or even hermeneutic. There
would be no need to fight one philosophical corner against another and unnecessary to
depend on the language or jargon of that discourse in order to make a point. The main
purpose is to delve into the particularities, appropriateness and expression of certain
ideas in built form, given the place, time and context.

Generating Form
Recognizing that both perception and language are interpretative removes a blindfold.
It is the final radical shift that enables us to understand one of the most obscure aspects
of the whole design process, that of generating form demonstrating the indivisibility
of ideas, theory, expression and technology in practice, realizing that it is as impossible
to design without concepts as it is to talk without a tongue. Sensible discussions can
emerge about the making of informed, imaginative and often-difficult design decisions,
making it clear that there is nothing mysterious about all this. These decisions are the
nuts and bolts of the process. An artistic rationale if you like.
Dispensing with the metaphysical dimension of perception introduces a much-
needed critical element to all of design education, not just certain parts of its theory or
technology. As an approach it certainly rattles some cages. But it helps to democratize
512 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

the design process. Not only does it rid us of many intractable problems associated with
design theory and philosophy but also from a student’s point of view, he or she can at
last stand up and give a proper rationale for his or her work. The student can lead the
critic and to a certain extent, take control. It shifts the balance of power a little. Adopted
in the studio, what makes this approach more liberating is that students, instead of
being left with the sinking feeling that they must be missing that indefinable something,
are able to start working confidently with ideas, expressing and adapting them within
the medium or brief. They can be assured that progressing their design skill is a question
of learning not voodoo. No-one is suggesting that every student will become a brilliant
designer, but at least everyone stands an even chance of learning how to design, which
has to be better than being led to believe that it’s an inherent ability, a gift you might
never manage to open.

The Artistic, Critical Basis of Design Discourse

The understanding that even the most intimate, seemingly mystical elements of the
design process are based on knowledge and knowledge alone prepares the ground for a
fresh artistic and conceptual approach to design, as well as establishing it as a holistic,
critical endeavour. We need to recognize that there is no choice but to engage with ideas
at every stage of the development process, whether this is in the initial research, finding
a concept, inspiration for a design or surveying the scene. It is a question of realizing that
preconceptions and habits of thought inform every aspect of our decision making, any
judgements we make about the value of what we find. The recommendations we make
for future proposals, how and why we draw up a scheme in a particular way or plan the
long-term management and care of the land, all are shaped and framed by our language
and ideas, by what we know.
The unequivocal focus this analysis of consciousness gives to knowledge enables us
to define design more sensibly, taking it beyond the rather trite suggestion that ‘design’
is simply what designers do. Design is a question of research and decision making. De-
signing is about making propositions, presenting a vision for the future. Central to the
discipline is the forward-thinking, the anticipatory and predictive nature of its practice.
On this basis, those who have a responsibility for the landscape (in its broadest sense),
whether they deal with words rather than drawings, a computer rather than a pencil,
they are effecting, predicting or managing spatial change. It all has a visual dimension; it
is all about designing one way or another. But the point is that it does take considerable
expertise to do it well, to work with and express ideas through technology, in a spatial,
visual medium, whatever the scale, from the most ecological to the most hi-tech, from
the restrained to the exuberant.

Shaping the Quality of Experience

Moving the debate away from the arcane and unknowable into the real world informed
by knowledge and ideas serves to remind us how much theory and philosophy can
Pragmatic Vision 513

learn from practice, rather than the reverse and drives home the point that theory and
­philosophy need not necessarily be metaphysical by nature. Using a new paradigm to
work out old problems, the philosophical argument changes the nature of the discourse,
not by discovering a new language as such, but by fusing, overlaying and cutting across
concepts that have up till now been compartmentalized and segregated by a collection
of psychological and philosophical beliefs packaged, promoted and sold so successfully
over time that they have become part of our way of life. It has wider social and political
implications and demands. From this perspective, landscape is not just about ecology,
nature conservation or matters of heritage. It’s not only the physical context, the con-
structed public realm, the national parks, coastlines, squares, promenades and streets,
but it also reflects our memories and values, the sense of pride we share in the places
where we work and live, the experiences we have of a place, as citizens, employers, visi-
tors, students and tourists. It is the material, cultural, social context of our lives.
The landscape is about ideas, and the expression of these ideas shapes the quality of
our experience. Rather than ideas versus nature, we have ideas of nature. Instead of see-
ing nature as something separate from culture, from ourselves, we must recognize that
in the way we live our lives, with every intervention we make, we are expressing (con-
sciously or not) an attitude towards the physical world. The choice is not whether we
work with art or ecology, with nature or culture, but how considerately, imaginatively
and responsibly we go about our business, because for every one of our actions, there is
a reaction in the physical world. We impact on it every minute of every day of our lives.
Where we decide to build new cities or expand old ones, place streets, squares, parks and
gardens. How we do this, why we do this, reflects the value we place on the quality of
our environment. Working with natural processes, given the global challenges we face, is
an ecological imperative. We have no choice in the matter. But it is the whole thing, the
ideas and values we hold and their expression in physical form, be it green, gray or blue,
that defines us. This is what frames the experience we all have of the places we live in,
and it is this experience that is a properly relevant definition of nature. After all, natural
systems don’t stop where the buildings start.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of language in all of this. At present, the constructed
public realm is dismally misrepresented as public open space, recreational space or green
space. The paucity of official planning jargon inevitably leads to an ignorance in policy
and often in practice, of the rich complexity and subtlety of the physical context, thereby
seriously underestimating the impact it has on the quality of life. To address the problem
therefore, we must look to change the habitual descriptions and references. A more differ-
entiated vocabulary, making explicit the quality and character of places, one that elucidates
the multitude of uses and functions of space from the highly symbolic to the everyday, is
needed to make the physical fabric of our lives more tangible. To effect real change, an
evocative, expressive way of speaking that accurately reflects the way we live our lives has to
permeate official documents and guidelines, become accepted and then expected in project
and competition briefs and so on. If we really want to fully articulate the way we experi-
ence the world, there can be no room for the dry bureaucratic talk that squeezes the life out
of any debate about place and space. It is not as though we are stuck for ideas. There is a
514 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

wealth of literature and research, evidence scientific, academic and anecdotal, imaginative
narratives to inspire and show us things we hadn’t noticed in the world.
Shifting paradigms from the metaphysical to the pragmatic enables us to understand
more about the nature of visual skill and the role it plays in design. It does not mean that
mystery and ambiguity no longer have a place, or even that designs cannot be inspired
by metaphysical concepts. But it does mean that we can remove some of the mystery
from the actual process of designing. Visual skill can be seen as something that we need
to learn in order to become designers. With metaphysics out of the picture there are no
universal qualities of beauty, no perfect forms to find. Some things are enduring in their
appeal, like Trafalgar Square or the gardens at Stowe. Others are more ephemeral, their
appeal short-lived, like almost any shopping centre created in the latter part of the twen-
tieth century or BMX bikes or graffiti. The role of fashion and style, so pivotal when
purchasing cars, shoes, T-shirts, changing as it does from week to week, year on year,
is not merely inconsequential second-hand aesthetics; on the contrary, it is absolutely
key to our sense of culture, identity and visual awareness. Dewey’s suggestion that aes-
thetics is ‘a manifestation, a record and celebration of the life of a civilisation, a means
of promoting its development and is also the ultimate judgement upon the quality of a
civilisation’ (Dewey (1934) 1980: 326) hands us the responsibility to ensure the record
is a good one.
Ditching the metaphysical baggage embedded in current theories of perception en-
ables us to articulate the art of design, teach the generation of form, connect spatial
strategies to real places and develop ways of working that not only encourage but also
demand the expression of ideas, the ideas that are fundamental to the design process.

Further Reading
Bryson, N. 1990. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion
Books.
Dewey, J. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Berkley.
Eagleton, T. 2003. After Theory. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books.
Putnam, H. 2002. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, R. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Group.

Note
1. Parts of this chapter have been developed from my book Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying
the Art of Design (Moore 2010).

References
Best, D. 1992. The Rationality of Feeling. London: Falmer Press.
Borden, I. and J. Rendell. 2000. InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Pragmatic Vision 515

Bryson, N. 1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bryson, N. (1999) 2001. ‘The Natural Attitude’, in J. Evans and S. Hall (eds), Visual Culture:
The Reader. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage in association with The Open Univer-
sity, 23–32.
Dewey, J. (1934) 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Berkley.
Eagleton, T. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Eisner, E. 2002. The Arts and the Creation of Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Goldschmidt, G. 1994. ‘On Visual Design Thinking: The Vis Kids of Architecture’, Design Stud-
ies, 15 (2 April): 158–74.
Gross.Max. 2007. Gross.Max. Seoul: C3 Publishing.
Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. London and New York: Routledge.
James, W. 1884. ‘Psychological Foundations’, in J. J. McDermott (ed.), The Writings of William
James, A Comprehensive Edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Jay, M. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, P.-A. 1994. The Theory of Architecture Concepts, Themes and Practices. New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold.
Koestler, A. 1964. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Mathur, A. and D. D. Cunha. 2009. Soak, Munbai in an Estuary. Calcutta: Rupa and Co.
Pallasmaa, J. 1994, July. ‘An Architecture of the Seven Senses: Questions of Perception’, in S.
Holl, J. Pallasmaa and A. Perez-Gomez (eds), Architecture and Urbanism, Special Issue.
Putnam, H. 1999. The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Raney, K. 1999. `Visual Literacy and the Art Curriculum’, NSEAD, International Journal of Art
and Design Education, 18(1): 41–47.
Schuman, T. 1991. ‘Forms of Resistance: Politics, Culture and Architecture’, in T. Dutton (ed.),
Voices in Architectural Education, Cultural Politics and Pedagogy. Westport, CT and London:
Bergin & Garvey, 3–27.
Snodgrass, A. and R. Coyne. 2006. Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking.
Abingdon: Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Stafford, B. M. 1997. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA and London:
MIT Press.
Topos, Ed. 1998. Free Spaces for the City Topos. Munich: Callwey Munchen.
 22

Images and Information in

Cultures of Consumption
Martin Hand

In this chapter I will identify and discuss some of the central debates at the intersection
of research in consumer culture and visual culture. In what follows I will argue that the
role of consumer culture in modern societies is generally understood in terms of ubiqui-
tous visuality. The notion that we live in an increasingly visual culture rests in part upon
the idea that there has been a general commodification of images, that everyday life has
been thoroughly aestheticized through design and branding, and that we consume more
images than ever before via the mediations of advertising and marketing. Indeed, if we
think of the proliferation of advertising industries, the degree of popular attention paid
to the nature and so-called effects of advertising in shaping the terrain of production and
consumption, the current visibility of the brand and its emotional frames, and the in-
creasing visual design of commodities in the twenty-first century it seems that consumer
culture is primarily a visual culture. This is partly an affect of the pervasive idea that
contemporary industrialized societies are now ‘consumerist’ rather than ‘productionist’
in orientation; that there has been an intensive commercialization of sociocultural life in
late capitalism. The majority of work in the field of visual culture that takes consump-
tion as its focus—often called ‘visual consumption’—has concentrated upon advertising
and its audiences. Consumer culture is often understood as, or at least typified in terms
of advertising. This connects with a central, if not the central issue in social scientific
studies of consumer culture: the relative agency of consumers in relation to changing
structures or modes of provision. In this sense, debates about the interpretive agency of
the viewer in visual culture often mirror debates about the role of the consumer in con-
sumer culture. The extent to which ‘viewing’ is thought to be ‘consuming’ has become
a central point of argument, related to increasing visual commodification and of rising
consumerism in late-modern culture. By engaging with some of these debates I will sug-
gest that research in consumer culture and visual culture has a great deal to learn from
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 517

each other. But it is also the case that both are problematized, theoretically and method-
ologically, by some of the substantive changes occurring through pervasive digitization,
particularly around the issue of interpretive agency in relation to information.

Consuming Images
It is now a commonplace to describe contemporary society as ‘consumerist’ or a ‘con-
sumer culture’ (Dunn 2008; Lury 1996; Sassatelli 2007; Slater 1997). It is only relatively
recently that ‘consumption’ has developed such a distinctive identity as a substantive or
theoretical topic in the academy. The development of nineteenth-century capitalism
and the implications for social relations have provided the broader concerns into which
issues of consumption have been slotted (see Veblen (1899) 1953). While sociologists
such as Baudrillard (1981), Bourdieu (1984) and Castells ((1972) 1977) worked, in very
different ways, to reposition consumption as a more distinctive field, this field has been
dominated by culturalist approaches. Moreover, when semiotic approaches to the image
(Hall 1997) are privileged, it is often thought that current cultures of consumption are
the logical consequence of the irrationality of image consumption, particularly through
the construction of need and desire via ubiquitous advertising (Sturken and Cartwright
2001). Such advertising is a key aspect of how reflexive capitalism self-consciously seeks
(not necessarily successfully) to organize the visual field. As Schroeder states ‘[T]he cur-
rent market revolves around the image, consumers consume visions of a good life, fueled
by consumer lifestyle images’ (2002: 43). This is certainly the view of many in market-
ing and design industries and the points of connection and convergence between visual
culture, design and consumption make for rich territory here. We can think of visual
consumption in terms of how advertising and marketing have become central sociocul-
tural institutions in mediating almost all aspects of social life, and how individual and
collective identities now appear inseparable from images.
In mapping the relationships between consumption and visual culture it is necessary
to consider a number of theoretical and substantive shifts involved in the approaches
taken to commodification and consumption. There are three shifts in particular that
form the basis of discussion here. Firstly, there have been significant changes in how ob-
jects or commodities are conceptualized in relation to consumption practices. This can
be seen through substantive changes in the nature of advertising, in how and through
what means objects are visually presented to consumers, and how consumption itself is
visually portrayed. Secondly, the ways in which practices of the design industries and
‘new marketing’ have shifted the terrain of the visual in relation to commodities has,
in a sense, deflated the role of the visual, or at least the modern idea of ‘representation’.
Thirdly, the advent of digitization is having a profound effect upon the scale and scope
of consumer culture in general, the relationships between production and consumption,
and has arguably brought about the death of advertising as it has been conventionally
understood. Indeed, those studying ‘new media’ have pointed to the novel characteris-
tics of networked mediation, suggesting that many-to-many communication establishes
radically different modes of distribution and exchange (Poster 2006).
518 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

One of the key issues for studies of visual consumption is the extent to which we can
rely upon research on advertising and related visual materials to tell us about consump-
tion processes and consumers. In this regard, I think that there is value in questioning
the occularcentric models of consumer culture that prevail in the interdisciplinary area
of visual culture. From the perspective of current research in consumer culture, the ac-
quisition and use of objects in everyday life has practical, experiential and symbolic
dimensions (Sassatelli 2007; Shove et al. 2007). In analyses of ‘visual consumption’,
the latter has taken on undue significance. The primacy of the visual in shaping, deter-
mining and mediating consumption is misleading, particularly when we bring current
theories of materiality and practice to bear on images and information. The reliance on
the notion that goods have a primarily ‘symbolic character’, or that consuming media is
necessarily about seeing, has led us away from considering a more thoroughly contex-
tualized account of visuality in relation to the embodied materialities and multiplicities
of consumption practices. This is partly to do with a continued emphasis upon ‘con-
spicuous consumption’ (Veblen (1899) 1953), which, by definition, tends to privilege
the visible, as opposed to ‘inconspicuous consumption’ (Grunow and Warde 2001),
which focusses upon the routine and invisible. In this way, it is the case that the objects
of consumer culture have largely been treated in semiotic terms: as primarily symbolic
entities operating as ‘intermediaries’ for self-actualizing processes (whether conceived as
‘resistance’, ‘subjectification’, etc), linked to class, identity, gender, ethnicity and so on
(McCracken 1988; Featherstone 2007). In other words, the visual extends here to that
which is potentially ‘decoded’ in terms of social relations; the material culture of con-
temporary society has been subject to techniques of ethnographic and of literary and
semiotic analysis in an effort to analyse the aesthetic, symbolic and experiential dimen-
sions of consumer culture (see Lury 1996; Shove et al. 2007).
While it is arguably the case that studies of consumption have employed inade-
quately sophisticated models of visual media and mediation (see Jansson 2002), it is
also the case that the broad field of ‘visual culture’ has often positioned consumption
in terms of decontextualized commodity fetishism read from a semiotic analysis of ad-
vertising and marketing materials alongside somewhat popular representations of con-
sumers and consumer culture. In reality, the relationships between specific conceptions
and interpretations of the visual (in semiotics, as representation, etc) and theories of
consumption, consumers and consuming are multifaceted. But in terms of the visual
culture of reflexive capitalism, we can see how the significance of semiotic approaches to
consumer goods has actually come to dominate commercial decisions about aesthetics
and general visual appeal (Julier 2000; Shove et al. 2007).

The Visual Face of Capitalism

The critique of modern consumer culture, including the apparent centrality of the com-
modified image and visual-orientated consumer behaviour, is often part of a broader
critique of capitalist modernity. Sassatelli (2007) has observed that much work on social
and cultural change is underpinned by an anticonsumerist rhetoric. Miller (2001) has
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 519

similarly observed how Western intellectuals have come to assume this default position,
often conflating a critique of consumption with a critique of specific socioeconomic and
cultural tendencies in US society (and perhaps an implicit denigration of ‘popular cul-
ture’). The potentially diverse practices of use and interpretation in cultures of consump-
tion are condensed into a monolithic ‘consumer culture’, the assumed effect of which is
to systematically shift processes of identity formation away from stable structures and
ideals and towards the fleeting and illusory notion of ‘presenting’ an ‘image’ of the self to
others. In this view, all sociality is reduced to a commodity, and selves become isolated
(see Lasch 1979; Putnam 2001). In other words, consumer culture produces alienated,
isolated and unstable consumers. This is partly because of the sheer scale, scope and
proliferation of representations in advertising, magazines and so on; ideological repre-
sentations which position the consumer in terms of needing to constantly accumulate
and discard objects in order to resolve contradictions between (meaningless) work and
(pleasurable) consumption.
This discourse of manipulation and exploitation has its immediate roots in post-
Marxist political economy and critical theory. The expansion and reorganization of
capitalist forms of production during the twentieth century has led to what we might
think of as the ‘victory’ of exchange-value over use-value. Indeed, one of the key claims
of Marxist and post-Marxist critical theory has been that cultural industries, particu-
larly advertising, have been able to systematically connect a seemingly infinite number
of images (meanings) to commodities (Featherstone 2007). Both Baudrillard (1970)
1997, 1981) and Jameson (1991) saw this as key to the development of postmodern
culture: a culture of depthlessness, where the ‘commodity-sign’ is an image that has
become free of its material vehicle or object. In other words, the visual culture of post-
modernity is immaterial as societies of production have given way to ones of repro-
duction, the social has been displaced by the cultural, and a total aestheticization of
everyday life has taken place (see Lury 1996). A key research issue arises here regarding
the polysemic nature of image production and consumption, often cast in terms of even
greater domination through image saturation and a resultant banalization of cultural
life (Taylor and Harris 2005). In this work, although both visuality and consumption
are paramount, visual consumption is largely an effect of major changes in production,
particularly flexible specialization. This problematic relationship between production
and consumption has been subject to much criticism and raises important issues about
how we address the more nuanced practices of use and interpretation in potentially di-
verse cultures of visual consumption. While well-known studies of audience and inter-
pretive communities have been paramount in anthropology and cultural studies, they
have not shaped the research field in visual consumption. The point here is that the
concepts of commodity fetishism and the commodity sign are about the triumph of
appearances in either an exploitative or simulational relation, and it is these ideas that
have dominated research in the field of visual consumption. Ironically, the productiv-
ist tendency is reproduced by those pursuing a poststructuralist critical theory, where
radical changes in distribution and exchange are assumed to arise through technologi-
cal change (e.g. Poster 2006). The related trajectory moved away from the commodity
520 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

itself and towards a reading of the sites and objects of consumption as ‘spectacles’: ‘In
societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an
immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away
into a representation’ (Debord 1983: n1).
In the terms of a critical theory of the commodified image the apparent ubiquity of
digital image making, particularly the saturation of digital photography, has the effect of
‘leveling’ the specificity of the image, of rendering all images equivalent as exchangeable
and somewhat autonomous commodities (Taylor and Harris 2005; Sontag 1977). In
this view, while ‘reality’ is always mediated, this is now performed in such a way that so-
cial subjects experience a greater ‘distance’ between themselves and the world. Any sense
of mutual interdependence between realities and subjects is undermined; the bewilder-
ing numbers of images become immaterial vehicles of spectacle, alienation and abstrac-
tion. In critical theory, the importance here is one of drawing a connection between the
increased number of images in the world and the totalizing effects of exchange-value
over use-value. In this way the notion of ‘sensory overload’ and the overproduction of
commodified images associated with the Frankfurt School have become reinvigorated
recently in light of digitization (see Taylor and Harris 2005). Where for Benjamin the
reproducibility of the visual heralded aestheticized urban scenes, we are now in the
realm of the infinitely malleable digital image, with considerable implications for how
we theorize production, consumption and exchange. But despite their merits there are
clear limits to these accounts, I think, when we consider how consumption practices are
conceptualized. Firstly, in these ‘production of consumption’ frameworks, consumption
is taken to be a necessarily capitalist process (which it is not), and ‘superficial’ or at least
secondary in relation to production. Secondly, what we fail to observe are the ways in
which images are interpreted or made by consumers, where it is assumed that either a
standardization of the image has occurred through commodification or it is now impos-
sible for consumers to be effective semioticians or bricoleurs.
The symbolic role of consumer goods can be thought of, then, in terms of the com-
modity-sign and its commercial manipulation by advertising and marketing industries.
From very different sociological and anthropological standpoints which maintain a con-
crete material-symbolic relation, the overproduction of goods has led others to argue that
the acquisition of ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) that act as symbolic markers of social
status also becomes more complex. For example, the related emergence of so-called life-
style consumption has involved the dissolving of previously clear taste markers between
relatively stable social groups (see Chaney 1996; Featherstone 2007). Knowledge of how
to acquire, manipulate and display consumption preferences then becomes ever more
crucial in establishing social, economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). The visual
components of consuming, the proliferation of life-style magazines and other cultural
intermediaries such as brands, becomes an important arena for considering the impact
of increasing numbers of symbolic goods and the ongoing organization and classifica-
tion of everyday life. Perhaps most significantly here, the overproduction and diversifica-
tion of goods questions the abilities of consumers to ‘read’ visual markers with enough
competence, not to develop a consciousness of their own exploitation, but to establish
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 521

any structure or stability in symbolic capital for the conduct of everyday life. This may
result in the positioning of some as the ‘flawed consumers’ of Bauman’s (2000) liquid
modernity. This kind of cultural speed and circulation is also related to the alleged col-
lapse of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and the aestheticization of city spaces in a simulational
or ‘themed’ culture of consumption (Gottdiener 2001). The differences between every-
day commodities and ‘art’ have been eroded, and the professionalization of design and
advertising has transformed them into ‘artistic’ institutional practices (see Forty 1986).
Issues of visual classification are highly significant when we consider the rise of mass
media over the course of the twentieth century, and now the pervasiveness of digital me-
diation through the ‘new visuality’ of the Internet (Schroeder 2002) and the vast visual
content industries (Frosh 2003). In sum, we should perhaps avoid the pitfalls of assum-
ing that the ambivalence and contingency of the image and its consumption is simply
a consequence of postmodernization. As discussed below, such ambivalence has many
trajectories and components, recognition of which has led in part to the move towards
‘co-creation’ in advertising and marketing.

Mediation: Paradigms of Advertising

The dominant visual face of capitalist production has been advertising. Although some
form of advertising arguably existed in ancient Greece, the more systematic visual pro-
motion of goods via print technology takes root among newspapers from the late-
seventeenth century in Europe. During the twentieth century the ways in which this
particular form of visuality has been theorized covers a wide spectrum from notions of
the ‘colonization of consciousness’ (see Ewan 1976) to the proliferation of possibilities
for consumer bricolage and tactical self-transformation (Fiske 1987) to the currently
popular ideas around co-creation and prosumption (Beer and Burrows 2007).
It has been argued that the world of goods has a ‘photographic face’ (Cadava 1999:
135) such that products are conceived primarily in terms of their visuality communicated
through the global advertising industries and burgeoning ‘image factories’ (Frosh 2003).
But the ways in which the relationship between such images and products is organized and
theorized has shifted significantly over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where it
was once thought that images of products (in advertising) reflected the properties or po-
tential effects of the product it is now apparent that images and ideas often precede prod-
ucts. While this may have always been the case to some extent it is now self-conscious and
explicit (Schroeder 2002). This is part of a shift towards experience, attention or image
economies (Lash and Urry 1994) in which images and signs are increasingly significant
as products in their own right. Accordingly, efforts at market segmentation and product
specialization are conducted via the segmentation and specialization of images. The shift
from product-orientated advertising to brand-orientated marketing in some ways exem-
plifies these processes. As a result, the concerted management of brand identities has be-
come central to contemporary or ‘new’ marketing, particularly where brand images are
opened up to multidirectional flows of information, often with unpredictable or creative
results (Klein 2000; Lash 2002; Lury 2004; Matrix 2006; Moor 2007).
522 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

As suggested so far, the dominant arena for an analysis of visual consumption has
been advertising, and with good reason. Such analyses have taken many forms. Some
have been predicated on the kind of commodity fetishism outlined above, where adver-
tising produces a kind of ‘commodity self ’ (Dunn 2008), while others have concentrated
upon the more performative and ambivalent aspects of advertising in shaping or mak-
ing the (post)modern consumer (Cronin 2004; Lury 1996), where others have critiqued
the stereotypical production of the gendered consuming subject (Buckley 1986; Sparke
1986). Many have sought to critique advertising as having a considerable psychological
impact upon consumers, of organizing them into homogenous ‘mass’ groups, and even
of forcing consumers to act against their own will and judgement (see Slater 1997 for
a history of these accounts). A great deal is assumed here in terms of the indexicality of
images and their psychosocial effects and the passivity of consumers. In a more nuanced
practice-orientated argument it has been observed that the proliferation of advertising
images increases the range of options available to consumers, not only in terms of what
can be acquired but also ‘who they can be’ (Warde 2005). The paradox is that this makes
the problem of ‘making the wrong choice’ ever more acute (Slater 1997). As self-identity
is now inextricably tied to consumption practices (Bauman 2007; Featherstone 2007;
Giddens 1991; Lury 1996) the role of advertising in creating both markets and ‘active
consumers’ is central.
Whatever the actual mechanisms and effects of encoding and decoding processes and
practices, the majority of advertising has visually positioned the consumer as agential, as
active in making choices about acquisition, and ‘speaks’ to consumers as individualized
social actors. The images used in advertising invariably (and somewhat obviously) por-
tray a potential process of positive self-actualization and becoming and are intended to be
read relatively ‘narrowly’. Historically, such positive affirmations have taken many forms,
from offering fantasies of democratization (Loeb 1994) to self-control and civility (Lears
1994). The critique of visual advertising, then, proposes that consumers make choices
but those choices are largely manufactured and determined by the advertising industries
as they seek ways to segment and create new specialized and niche markets (making the
consumer passive in effect). The extent to which this is the case provides much material
for debate, particularly in the context of modern-postmodern-information societies.
In both theoretical and methodological terms we should be initially cautious about
simply ascribing too much agency and causal power to the advertising industry. Adver-
tising takes place within broader cultural contexts of consumption, and more specifi-
cally in professional cultures which shape the nature of the practice (see Cronin 2004;
Nixon 2003). Indeed, as Cronin (2004) observes, we should pay a great deal of attention
to how advertising agencies articulate some very specific concerns of their sociohistorical
location. The promotion of particular forms of subjectivity through images (the ‘ironic’
consumer, the ‘knowing’ consumer) are not simply conspiratorial creations in the minds
of advertising professionals, but are caught up in wider changes in the mobilization of
consumer agency (e.g. the ‘green consumer’). It is also very difficult, methodologically,
to ascertain whether advertising actually persuades consumers to purchase products, a
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 523

point which I will come back to below in considering the role of social practices in shap-
ing visual consumption. Nonetheless, it has been argued convincingly that advertising
is significant in creating the visual terrain of consumption by encouraging consumers to
identify with particular images of life-style, the logos of brand names, and to link con-
sumers to other aspects of marketing (Matrix 2006; Schroeder 2002).
Following this line of thought, advertising images produce new possibilities of mean-
ing for products. Chains of associations are linked to images, which have been generally
conceived in terms of use and exchange values, and of ‘commodity fetishism’. Adver-
tising, from a Marxian perspective, is a machine for fetishizing commodities in that it
strips commodities of information about the conditions of production and imbues them
with a range of cultural meanings which mystify the object (see also Barthes 1972).
Cultural meanings attached to products via advertising might be emotionally charged,
anthropomorphic, and most important become embedded in the object (such that, say,
perfume becomes ‘romantic’, ‘feminine’ and so on). Such qualities are highly differen-
tiated across product genres though juxtaposition of diverse visual images, a process
which becomes more complex as markets become highly segmented both in terms of
products and life-style categories in reflexive capitalism. Rather than assume a reified re-
lation, it is instructive here to briefly identify a series of shifts in the relation of image to
product. Leiss et al. (2005) develop an analytic strategy of historically mapping advertis-
ing formats in order to explain key shifts in how representation has been organized, spe-
cifically in terms of how products and people are entangled in meaningful ways. Their
model is a useful one here in identifying trends and trajectories of advertising research
in relation to socioeconomic change.

Products
The historical literature on advertising has generally argued that early forms were neces-
sarily local in orientation, focussed upon the assumed intrinsic qualities of the product,
and the trustworthiness of the producer (see Leach 1993; McFall 2004). This has been
called ‘rational’ or ‘reason-why’ advertising (McFall 2004) and usually featured images
of the product alone with associated explanatory text concerned with explaining why
this specific product should be acquired. Leiss et al. (2005) have argued that in the early
part of the twentieth century such advertising operated along two cultural frames—
‘idolatry’ and ‘iconography’. In the first, products are presented purely in terms of their
use-value and are largely abstracted from the processes of production—in other words,
as self-evidently valuable in its own right. In the second, products are embodiments
of the attributes of modernization (‘functionality’, ‘efficiency’, ‘labour-saving’) and are
configured by reference to how the product and its purchase will be understood socially.
The product is the centre of visual attention, often in isolation, where text is used mainly
to elaborate on the specific attributes of the object (Leiss et al. 2005: 175) This format
has all but disappeared (except returning in ironic form) since the early part of the twen-
tieth century (Hand and Shove 2004).
524 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Life-styles
According to Leiss et al. (2005) and others we see a move towards the ‘personalization’
or customization of advertising operating along different cultural frames: ‘narcissism’
(products are personalized and the potential outcomes are emulative in nature) and ‘to-
temism’ (products are emblems of collectively orientated consumption practices). This
move away from ‘rational’ advertising was the outcome of many developments from
the 1920s onwards, including the increasing involvement of psychologists in providing
models of the differentiated ‘consumer mind’, the rapid growth of urban centres and
associated changes in labour and product markets, the new media technologies such
as radio and eventually television, resulting in the mass-mediation of advertising along
Fordist lines. As part of a broader aestheticization of, for example domestic space, the
product becomes part of an ensemble of symbolic meanings which move outside of the
supposed intrinsic qualities of the object. This symbolic association does not necessar-
ily work on logical or immediately coherent connections but once established ‘brings
the product into a meaningful relationship with abstract values and ideas signified by
a natural or social setting’ (Leiss et al. 2005: 179). The increasing use of ‘art’ and pho-
tography in advertising resulted in these connections being easier to make where in the
personalized format, ‘people are explicitly and directly interpreted in their relationship
to the world of the product. Social admiration, pride of ownership, anxiety about lack
of use, or satisfaction in consumption become important humanizing dimensions of the
interpretation of products’ (Leiss et al. 2005: 184). In tandem with the increasing stan-
dardization of goods, and whole ensembles of goods (such as the ‘fitted kitchen’), we see
efforts to personalize the product image. The relationship between person and product
is an interactive and reciprocal entanglement in which self-improvement in the broadest
sense will result.

Branding and Design

By the late-twentieth century, brand images had supplanted products as the key focus
of advertising. The cultural frame here is life-styles or ‘life scripts’. This combines as-
pects of the product-image and personalized formats. Activities or practices that were
once presented as necessary or as labour are now a matter of constructed self-identity
or social identity (cooking might be a prime example here). These so-called life-style
advertisements have became the most prominent at the present time and appear to be
intertwined with the ascendance of new marketing practices and techniques that incor-
porate elements of the brand (see Lury 2004). This is also related to shifts in the rela-
tionships between materials and historicity, where for example previous styles can be
retrofitted and become a matter of ‘personal choice’ rather than standardized design.
It has been acknowledged by many that, regardless of the nuances of actual consump-
tion practices, advertising now addresses or interpolates the ‘post modern consumer’
(see Featherstone 2007; Sassatelli 2007; Sturken and Cartwright 2001). Advertisements
know that consumers know, so to speak. The simple positioning of products in relation
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 525

to generic meanings will no longer suffice in a media-saturated culture where the effi-
cacy and symbolic meaning of products can circulate rapidly and be subject to endless
debate and diversification. In this sense, for some, we live in an age of postadvertising.
That is dynamic processes of branding which try to manage the intertextual mobilities
of images, products and consumers, have rendered the ‘static’ reception-orientated un-
derstanding of advertising redundant. This is partly to do with digitization and the dis-
tribution of the image becoming free of traditional moorings (for example the predicted
demise of billboard advertising via hand-held devices). It is also an outcome of shifts
towards producer-consumer reciprocity or ‘prosumption’. Lury (2004) has developed
the most sophisticated account of the development of the brand as a practice, where ‘the
establishment and maintenance of lines between a product item, a product line and a
product assortment comes to be increasingly organized in relation to brands through the
implementation of brand-name decisions, multi-brand decisions and brand reposition-
ing strategies’ (25–6). In other words, brands are ‘new media objects’ which organize the
field of production and consumption in terms of brand-identities rather than products
and consumers.
The role of visual mediation becomes more ambivalent here. The conjoining of new
media technologies, marketing strategies and the diverse activities of consumers have
created new objects, sites, processes and practices of visual consumption which are dif-
ferent from radio or television cultures of advertising. While visual representation re-
mains highly significant, it is arguably becoming more difficult to retain an ocularcentric
view of how vision operates in relation to consumption (see Julier 2000). On the one
hand, the intertwining of the visual, of information, and of production and consump-
tion through branding is producing a radical intertextual ‘immediacy’ which renders the
notion of a separate realm of representation (and of ideological manipulation) highly
problematic (Lash 2002). On the other hand, the role of materials (plastics, steel, re-
flective materials, ‘fleshy’ rubber) in the design and consumption of visual information
technologies is becoming more widely recognized. The ‘materiality of practice’, where
product images and positive images of consumption are seen as but one element in con-
sumption processes, is an important corrective to models of commodity acquisition as a
result of advertising and marketing techniques (Shove et al. 2007).

Digital Mediations
The relatively concise issue for this chapter has been how the relationships between
commodification, consumption and visuality have been dominantly conceived over the
twentieth century in the scholarly literature. In the remainder of the chapter I suggest a
number of ways in which visual consumption has become inseparable from broader pro-
cesses and debates about informationalization and digitization. There are many ways of
thinking about this, from convergences of technology and content, the conglomeration
of culture industries, to considerations of new screen-based sites of consumption and
the radical shifts in the distributive possibilities of visual materials. I am limited here to
making some brief and suggestive connections between research in these areas.
526 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Informatic Materials
To begin, in a possibly essentialist framework some have argued that we now live in
an ‘image culture’—a culture in which the image is the medium of our times (Jansson
2002; but see Julier 2000). In this sense, it is argued, consumption is more than ever
before inseparable from images. The image has simultaneously become the vehicle,
context, content and commodity in consumer culture; we live in a fully mediatized
culture (Lundby 2009) in which the economy is culturalized and cultural life is com-
mercialized (see Lash and Urry 1994; Lash 2002; Lash and Lury 2007). Emerging
work in this area—where studies of ‘ubiquitous media’ take the complexity of con-
sumption seriously—are few and far between. The key arguments emerging in this field
are that the social is increasingly displaced by the cultural in digital society (Lash and
Lury 2007; Poster 2006), that cultural processes are increasingly computerized whether
we know it or not (Manovich 2001), and that an increasingly commodified yet par-
ticipatory culture is emerging through Youtube, Flickr and a variety of platforms for
user-generated visual content (Matrix 2006; Poster 2006; Thrift 2005). The argument
here also concerns how increasing numbers of material commodities are ‘image loaded’
(Jansson 2002) or ‘mediated’ (Lash and Lury 2007) such that the distinction between
objects and (visual) media becomes largely obsolete (e.g. iPhone). The development of
multidirectional and multifunctional media is clearly central here, distancing these tra-
jectories from those of mass media through radio and television.
Of course, we might initially say that this is somewhat similar to the argument
advanced by Baudrillard (1981) and Jameson (1991) where in a sense products only
refer to other products in a generalized system of symbolic exchange. But, accord-
ing to recent work on informationalization, such theoretical propositions have be-
come materially tangible in everyday life, partly as an outcome of ongoing processes
of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1990) and the emergence of new kinds of visually
saturated informational commodities such as smart phones which simultaneously
‘act’ as things, spaces and networks (Thrift 2005). While some of the focus in this
area has continued to stress ‘dematerialization’—where consumers are thought to
encounter only signs rather than ‘concrete’ commodities—for others it is precisely
the emergence of ‘lively’ materials with high visual content that characterizes the
present information culture. There are also a number of developments which ren-
der consumption processes and practices more complex, and at times, far less vis-
ible. Indeed, the routine invisibility of informational restructuring—in this case of
marketing, consumer profiling and organizing of consumption spaces—is arguably
one of the most significant developments of our time (Gane, Venn, and Hand 2007;
Lyon 2003).

Co-creation, Reciprocity and Prosumption

In reflexive capitalism, the creation of value is becoming a matter of ‘co-creation’. That
is consumers are being ‘put to work’ so to speak in producing brand identities and
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 527

products through affective and immaterial labour (Arvidsson 2005; Holt 2004). This
can also be seen as a matter of ‘McDonaldization’; in this case, of the outsourcing of con-
sumer activity in brand value creation. This has taken the form of consumers producing
advertisements for producers, often as a response to online competitions. We might also
include here the phenomenon of blogging, which offers the possibility to marketers to
find and appropriate ‘cool’ via the cultural competence of consumer discourses.
In a different vein, we can see the voluntaristic production of visual culture by con-
sumers occurring on a global scale if we think of the blogosphere again, the highly
significant YouTube phenomenon (Burgess et al. 2009), the rise of online mapping tech-
nologies such as user-generated Google Maps, and the unfathomable amount of online
photographic images uploaded in Flickr. Indeed, one of the major issues today arising
from both the image-as-information and changes in the apparatus of image making is
the redistribution of production and consumption in relation to digital images (Beer
and Burrows 2007; Taylor and Harris 2005). This relates to changes in the hardware
and software industries, the rise of branded environments, and the reciprocal activities
of consumers (Ardvisson 2005). There are a number of important aspects to this. Firstly,
the boundaries between amateur and professional image making appear increasingly
porous, for example between photo-sharing Web sites and the official domains of stock
photography (Frosh 2003). Secondly, the development of practice-orientated software
applications such as Microsoft’s Photosynth which purports to be shaped by the prac-
tices of consumers in creating new image-objects and environments. Thirdly, digitiza-
tion allows for the individualization of the image-making process whereby consumers
arguably become ‘pro-sumers’ or ‘craft-consumers’, which is having particularly signifi-
cant implications in the domain of journalism and news reporting (Campbell 2005;
Leadbeater and Miller 2004; Sennett 2008).
Of course, the dynamics of consumption or prosumption practices are likely to have
different kinds of impacts upon historically constituted trajectories of production and
consumption. Moreover, the possibilities of variability appear exaggerated in the present
where digital cultural objects as mediators are not only highly distributed but more or
less designed to facilitate multiple interpretations and uses. In other words, the emer-
gence of digital technologies linked to the Web are ‘inscribed’ with open-ended ambiva-
lence in symbolic, practical and material ways. Current digital information technologies
are mobile, additive and adaptable, designed to be active (Kuchler 2008).

Mobilities, Screens and Applications

In terms of the digital image we now have a situation of infinite variation rather than
infinite reproduction, with clear implications for the notion of ‘aura’, originality and au-
thorship. Often it is unclear ‘who’ produces, consumes or owns an image or an identity.
But the field of intellectual property and copyright has become the key site for main-
taining older or establishing newer modes of authorship in digital capitalism. Secondly,
the fixity of the photographic image has become the mobility of the digital image, where
528 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

images can circulate at greater speed and with broader reach (Jenkins 2006). Thirdly,
while images have always been manipulated, the manipulation of digital images is im-
plied as a defining characteristic of digital photography (Mitchell 1992). Moreover, the
manufacture and proliferation of technologies associated with image production and
consumption (cell phones, laptops, Web applications, CDs, USBs and so on) represent
a dramatic extension in the parameters of visual content, storage, use and exchange.
Each of these dimensions raises important issues for larger social, economic and political
debates about visual communication, ownership and interpretation (Frosh 2003; Lury
2004).
The new screen-based ‘social media’ such as Facebook are generating their revenues
not from advertising but from commercially developed applications. The conjunction of
hand-held screen, visual applications, and flows of commercially significant consumer
data represents a novel trajectory in the field of visual consumption. Some of these de-
velopments are likely to be approached under a broader rubric of the rethinking of the
relations between technology and culture across the social sciences. For example recent
work which aims to rethink what counts as political economy in light of digitization and
new spatialities (Thrift 2005), plus influential accounts of digital brand environments
(Lury 2004; Moor 2007) and current interdisciplinary approaches to media and tech-
nology found within science and technology studies and material culture (Latour 2005;
Shove et al. 2007). The flows of digitally encoded visual information through suites of
object-screens represent a proliferating materialization and informationalization of vi-
sual culture, working via the mobility of bodies. As Lash (2002) and others have argued,
it is much more difficult to conceive visual culture to be a field of representation in light
of these processes.
Many have argued that the characteristics of Web 2.0 applications are truly in-
novative and novel (O’Reilly 2005). It is clear that social networking sites, wikis and
the like enable vast amounts of user-generated visual content to be uploaded, often
in the form of private or personal images placed in the public domain. In contrast to
the idea that such digital visual creativity is the outcome of technological innovation,
this needs to be seen in terms of a quickened form of reciprocity—between consum-
ers and media, between practices of participation and the adoption of media which
enable such forms of participatory consumption to be distributed in new ways. In
tandem with such active forms of consumption, the information produced and cir-
culated now restructures actual geographic territories (city, neighbourhood) through
automated classification systems such as neighbourhood profiling, Google maps, GPS
systems, loyalty cards, Public Wi-Fi and so on (Burrows and Gane 2006). The flows of
information produced through ordinary practice (made visible in online data as ‘con-
sumption patterns’) are invisibly classified by software. Instead of searching for our
preferences in the marketplace, we are presented with our preferences as the result of
algorithmic assessment of previous interests or purchases. As individual consumers we
are increasing ‘socially sorted’ (Lyon 2003) into differentiated life-style categories and
at the same time encouraged to ‘sort ourselves out’ in terms of consumption orienta-
tions and preferences.
Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption 529

Conclusion
This has not been an exhaustive review and analysis of scholarship in visual consump-
tion. The modest task here has been to simply point towards some of the dimensions
and trajectories in the field with a view to providing concise summaries of significant
debates. Given the dual argument that in the global north social actors are addressed
as consumers in almost all walks of life, and that we live in image-saturated societies,
the terrain of ‘visual consumption’ might literally encompass all activities that involve
watching, looking and seeing, alongside processes of visual interpretation, handling,
manipulation and so on. In terms of substantive topics for research, the possibilities
are almost infinite. In a more considered vein, this chapter has highlighted the domi-
nant ways in which research in visual culture which specifically addresses consumption
has unfolded. The line of argument throughout has been that, in essence, the potential
diversity and nuance of consumption practices have been neglected in visual culture
research. The tendency has been to reproduce critical theories of commodity fetishism
developed in response to the advent of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century­capi-
talist forms of production and mass-mediated promotional cultures. There is much
merit to this of course, but it has resulted in a skewed agenda shaped by issues of
commodification and its assumed effects rather than actual consumption processes. I
am suggesting here that the terrain of visual consumption is moving towards a more
nuanced consideration of the ways in which images are acquired, interpreted, used
and increasingly co-created by situated consumers, in relation to historically and so-
cioeconomically defined contexts. The second line of argument has privileged some
of the new digital technologies of visual consumption that have been emerging over
the last twenty years or so. The coming together of these technologies and new modes
of production, consumption and distribution offers, in my view, some exciting new
trajectories for interdisciplinary research in this field, especially in terms of exploring
lived practices of visual consumption beyond the productivist/consumerist dichotomy
and towards the consideration of new kinds of sociotechnical ‘agents’ shaping the vi-
sual field.
From this point of view, visual culture, increasingly circulates as information. The ‘ar-
chitectures of participation’ underpinning co-creative and voluntaristic forms of visual
production such as YouTube and Flickr does, at the very least, blur the boundaries be-
tween cultural production and consumption (Beer and Burrows 2007). It appears that
trends in prosumption are being made explicit through new technologies, multiplying
the possibilities for information-driven visual reflexivity. Visual culture can no longer be
externalized as ideological, symbolic or representational. This arguably conjoins design,
production, distribution and consumption in new ways with as yet unforeseen con-
sequences. Important questions arise in terms of north-south power relations, of how
global consumption patterns are both visually anchored around life-style-orientated­
imaginaries of the ‘good life’ and also made visible to others, and of how we need to
think though questions of visual ontology in relation to the embedded machineries of
lived consumption practices.
530 Practices and Institutions of Visual Culture

Finally, it is worth stressing the point that moving away from research focussed pri-
marily upon issues of representation and commoditization is not only a matter of chang-
ing theoretical fashions. It is as much to do with the changing practices of consumers,
perhaps most acutely so in the field of visual cultural prosumption, and how these
changes are inextricably tied to the rematerialization of culture in digital terms.

Further Reading
Lash, S. and J. Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage.
Lury, C. 2004. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge.
Schroeder, J. 2002. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge.
Shove, E., M. Watson, M. Hand and J. Ingram. 2007. The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford:
Berg.

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 Editorial Introduction

All of the chapters in Part Five in different ways explore innovations and challenges
inspired by recent developments in the field of visual culture. A common theme run-
ning through these chapters is the emergence of more performative, practice-based and
reflexive methodologies in contemporary visual studies (what might also be called ‘the
new visual studies’).
Gillian Rose introduces her chapter by using the work of the theorist Mieke Bal
to pose basic questions about the status of method, critical practice and reflexivity in
visual culture studies. The chapter is designed to remedy the lack of reflection on is-
sues of method and methodological debate and to suggest methodological strategies
that are powerful enough to approach visuality as an event and performance rather
than a static structure (text) or background resource (culture). By criticizing well-
established cultural studies perspectives and text-based models—and what she help-
fully calls their ‘implicit methodology’—she makes a strong case for other paradigms
of meaning and interpretation based upon situated practices, active audience reception
and context-sensitive hermeneutics.
Reframing visuality as ‘located social, affective and economic events’ leads to a much
more dynamic (as well as pragmatic) approach to analysis. Rose urges her readers to
abandon all forms of detached ‘connoisseurship’ in order to become much more reflex-
ive about their own assumptions and active engagements in acts of reading and inter-
pretive analysis. To this end the idea of situated ‘practices of looking’ is commended as
a more useful approach to visuality as a field of occasioned practices. Rather than turn to
traditional art-historical approaches or decontextual semiotics we might learn how to
analyse visual practices from work carried out in sociology and discourse analysis (along
the lines developed by Foucault and others).
The new methodological frontier would thus place the following concerns high on
the agenda of future visual research: the situated or occasionality of things visual, the
536 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

performativity of visual practices, the social, ethical and political consequences of interpre-
tive seeing, and the embodied and reflexive involvements of all agents within the field of
the visual (producers, observers, users, analysts and so on). Here future interdisciplinary
research will need to abandon the artificial distance assumed by ‘connoisseurs’ and turn
towards action-based performative research methodologies. At this point there is a con-
vergence between Rose’s critique and the empirical schema of action research formulated
in the chapter by David Gauntlett and Fatimah Awan as well as the ethnographic-based
claims for a more multimodal approach to sensory experience in David Howes’s chapter.
Rose has not only theorized such a ‘performative’ and ‘reflexive’ turn but has em-
pirically explored the possibilities of using visual material (e.g. in work on family pho-
tographs in her Doing Family Photography) as occasions for analysis and self-reflection.
When carried out with full awareness of its implications for both analyst and research
subject such a practice-oriented methodology leads to a much more critical and self-
critical standpoint. The aim of this renewed reflexivity is to recover the simple idea that
‘looking is a social act among humans and between humans and other things’.
Charlie Gere traces the challenges of recent visual-culture research from the per-
spective of digital media and what has been called the digitalization of everyday life. His
focus is upon the contemporary phenomenon of digital art as a challenge to traditional
analytical frameworks. He is guided in his analysis by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and
Jacques Derrida’s metacommentary on Nancy’s work on the sense of touch. Where ana-
logue culture emphasizes tactile values, the coming of digital culture leads to a world of
flowing images and simulacra promising universal interactivity (the World Wide Web),
connectivity (Facebook, Web 2.0 networks, etc), and instantaneous simultaneity of en-
counter and affect. With digitalization we move from the Heideggerian ‘world-view’ to
the total globalization of all relations. Digitalization and new media force their users to
adopt the ambivalent status of cyborgs. We no longer watch television or films but are
‘plugged into’ visual media; we no longer ‘apply’ techniques and technologies but are
absorbed into the new ecologies of cyberspace and its eco-technical apparatuses.
Where Gillian Rose urges visual-cultural researchers to employ more performative and
practice-based technologies so Gere suggests that those who study contemporary visual-
ity cannot avoid a critical encounter with new visual media. Here traditional methods
based upon a disengaged (and ‘analogue’) approach to meaning and significance—
a commitment to disinterested ‘readings’ of significant objects and artefacts—gives way
to a much more ‘connected’ and reflexively ‘wired’ view of the world. The older meta-
physical terms of ‘representation’ and mirroring language no longer operate in digi-
talized space.
This is emphatically exemplified by the production, dissemination and appropriation
of new media art forms. Here cultural worlds based upon digital art become the basis
for a new global mass culture (with digital gaming overtaking mass-production film and
television programming in commercial terms).
One of Gere’s tentative conclusions is to suggest that the exponential growth in
digital art (and related digital media) will have an enormous impact upon traditional
sensory experience and knowledge based upon analogue means. New ways of thinking,
Editorial Introduction 537

new methods and new forms of reflexivity might be expected to arise from the way in
which digitalization throws users back upon their taken-for-granted assumptions about
the senses and sensory experience. Here what used to be called ‘art’ might function in
returning audiences to a renewed encounter with the richness and diversity of the sen-
sory world, of the life and life-worlds that endure beyond the apparatuses and technolo-
gies of representation.
Roger Burrows is also concerned with implications of digitalization, but approaches
the revolution in new media and mediated culture from a sociological perspective. For
him digitalization processes are both an ‘object of inquiry’ and a ‘challenge to established
methodological practices’.
His particular theme is the impact of visualization and the ‘descriptive turn’ in con-
temporary sociology. He sets the scene by criticizing what he calls ‘epochalism’, or that
mode of thinking that represents history in terms of stages of ‘epochal’ social change.
To move beyond this way of thinking and to respect the complexity of social worlds he
explores the impact of digitalization upon empirical social research, especially in the de-
velopment of new forms of visualization and visualization methodologies.
It is well known that traditional sociology has not made a great use of visual tech-
niques and methods; this oversight or recalcitrance has become emphatic in the way
in which empirically based research has, until quite recently, ignored the vast array of
data and data-gathering machinery made available through digital means (census data,
commercial data mining, consumer-based research, state auditing, citation information
and so on). Digitalization and the information revolution have led to a radical revalua-
tion of the place of the visual in social research. For example, artefacts in contemporary
capitalism are now saturated with information, circulating as both the result and carri-
ers of ‘codes’, ‘logos’, information-tracking devices and so on (the bar-codes at the su-
permarket being an early precursor). One recent way of exploiting such coded-objects
is the ability of interested parties to ‘harvest’ and ‘profile’ information about their usage
and their users. This provides exemplary ‘pictures’ or representations of categories of vot-
ers, consumers, house-owners and the like. Here digitalization places powerful empirical
tools of visualization in the hands of corporate and state agencies. Burrows breaks new
ground in exploring the networking logics of information-carrying objects (‘spimes’) as
a vast ‘internet of things’.
Anticipating the ‘descriptive-visual’ turn in contemporary sociological research, Bur-
rows (following the recent work of Mike Savage) commends a sociological perspective
that might recover the immanent, qualitative and ‘surface patterns’ of social life. We
should forgo the speculative temptations of ‘depth’ analysis and explore the ‘lyrical’ con-
figurations of everyday social life. This becomes particularly important in extending the
cultural turn of recent social thought to televisual and media/ted culture. One exem-
plary form of this transdisciplinary approach is the creation of the television series The
Wire as both entertainment and as powerful exercises of the sociological imagination.
By exploiting the full range of visualization techniques made available by contemporary
cyber-culture Burrows anticipates a fusion of empirical and imaginative media that will
give rise to new ‘visual inscription devices’.
538 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

He concludes his chapter by briefly analysing three such ‘sociological inscription de-
vices’ that might energize the practices of contemporary sociology: recent innovations
in mainstream social statistics software that will enhance visual research and presenta-
tion of data; the beginnings of a ‘new cartography’ and related developments in Web 2.0
social software; and innovative data profiling techniques in ‘commercial sociology’ (in
particular what has been called geodemographics). All of these ‘devices’ are characterized
by an explicit concern to document social reality through the visual characterizations of
data. When these and other techniques are allied with theoretical analysis of social sys-
tems we can legitimately anticipate a paradigm shift in modes of descriptive analysis and
societal visualization. Sociology—and perhaps other social sciences—will then be forced
to follow visual studies research and enter the great debate about the emerging forms of
visual analysis and visualization methodologies.
David Gauntlett and Fatimah Awan provide a graphic example of both the increas-
ing reflexivity of descriptive research and the benefits to be gained by adopting new visu-
alization technologies in the conduct of social research. Where Burrows focussed upon
new kinds of ‘inscription device’, their central topic is the emergence of action-based
creative methods in social research.
Where traditional uses of visual methodologies were predominantly ‘object-directed’
and analytically interested—in the sense that they were concerned with the description,
analysis and, perhaps, explanation of visualizable phenomena, Gauntlett and Awan are
concerned with methods and approaches that actively create new visual things in the
course of research.
In their terms, the emergence of a new visual sociology is characterized by researchers
who utilize visual media and materials (such as drawings, diagrams, photographs, videos
and the like) that invite interpretations on the part of social agents, that actively inter-
vene in social life, and invite participants to formulate their practices and reflect upon
their social positions and life-worlds.
Action-based sociological research thus encourages the use of visual materials and vi-
sualization techniques on the part of research participants as ways of generating ‘thick de-
scriptions’ and reflective accounts of members’ worlds. They illustrate these innovations
with research involved in the making of drawings and diagrams, the creative use of photog-
raphy as ethnographic tools, the use of video diaries as instruments of self-representation
and identity formation, personal narratives and reflective practices of editing.
Drawing upon Gauntlett’s own work Video Critical (1997), they describe the ways in
which research participants have created their own original visual ‘texts’ (videos, films,
etc) in the study of children’s interpretations of media events and environmental issues.
Giving video cameras to children or allowing participants to record and analyse their
own ‘worlds’ is thus not only a rich source of sociological data but also something like a
‘life-transforming experience’.
They also describe recent research in the use of visual metaphors by participants and,
more particularly, research on the ways in which children actively build metaphorical
models of their ‘sense of self ’ using Lego bricks. Gauntlett has argued that as these tech-
niques enable researchers to visualize identity formation as a complex process, mediated
Editorial Introduction 539

by actions and practices, it might be extended to more complex representations of ‘invis-

ible’ and ‘intangible’ phenomena (such as emotions and relationships).
Their chapter concludes by stressing the myriad ways in which metaphor-mediated
forms of seeing and action-based techniques of representation might be extended to eth-
nographic and qualitative research in other fields and disciplines.
John Onians and his colleagues and co-workers Helen Anderson and Kajsa Berg
explore the relationships between trends in visual culture and visual studies and neuro-
science. Their central claim is that contemporary neuroscience provides powerful tools
in the understanding of the visual world as well as providing a ‘new dimension to visual
culture’.
Recent technological developments in brain-scanning (itself a particularly impor-
tant visual technology) and recent theories of the modular and ‘neural plasticity’ have
increased our knowledge of the importance of pattern recognition and ‘aesthetic’ expe-
rience in everyday brain functioning. Onians’s own work is centrally concerned with
creating a framework of concepts that he calls neuroarthistory designed to explore the
dynamic interfaces between aesthetics and neuronal activity. The first part of their chap-
ter explores the origins and diversification of this ground-breaking work in areas such as
neuroaesthetics, neurosculpture, neuroarchitecture, neuromarketing and neuromuseol-
ogy (‘the use of neuroscience to understand the history and role of museums’).
After detailing current thinking about the origins and functions of the brain in neu-
roscience, the authors apply these findings to visual culture, noting that much theoriz-
ing about the information society has itself drawn its concepts from ‘parallels between
the human nervous system, the social, economic and technical systems of the modern
world and the system of the art scene and visual culture’. Today these analogies and par-
allels have themselves influenced both the content and form of popular visual culture.
In her contribution to this chapter, Helen Anderson explores the theme of neural
plasticity, the view that the brain is a dynamic and modular system which changes and
transforms itself in interactions with its relevant environments. Understanding how this
plasticity—particularly the plasticity of the visual cortex—works might shed light on
the changing forms of visual experience and perception. More particularly her conten-
tion is that this knowledge should prove central to a more scientifically informed ap-
proach to art production and reception. One example of the interaction between neural
plasticity and environment is the use of different neuronal formations to explain con-
trasts between different styles of painting in the Renaissance. Perspective was a particular
concern of Florentine painting (reflecting predominantly geometrical and planar struc-
tures associated with that city) while Venetian art was more focussed upon ‘repeated
experience of light reflected from water and of the similar effects produced by polished
coloured marbles, gold glass mosaic and oriental silks’ (Onians 1998: 15). Similar mech-
anisms might be applied to the emergence of later art forms and styles.
Kajsa Berg introduces the important concept of neural mirroring, the outcome of
mirror neurons, neural systems linked to interpersonal and emotional responses (neurons
that ‘fire not just when someone makes a movement, but when that person sees some-
one else making the same movement’). These ‘empathy’ neurons suggest a link between
540 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

the activities of viewers and artistic objects. Berg documents a range of voices that have
posited this empathetic relationship, culminating in important research into the neu-
rological functions of mirror neurons in the 1990s. The intriguing thought is that the
dynamics (or ‘plasticity’) of mirror-neuronal activity can illuminate the history of art
appreciation and artistic production: in clarifying the roots of mimesis and representa-
tion, in suggesting explanations for how spectators ‘identify’ with figurative works, in
introducing embodiment and movement as central problems of aesthetics, as well as in
more active applications to performance art and installations (the use of neuroscience
in the work of Amy Caron is cited in this context). Neuroaesthetics will play an impor-
tant role in making implicit reliance upon neuronal structures and dynamics explicit re-
search topics. The future for neural-based aesthetics is both exciting and daunting. One
field that the authors single out is the renewed appreciation of ‘synaesthesia’ and a much
more multisensorial approach to the interaction between human beings, their environ-
ments and artefacts. Neuroarthistory might thus complement and extend the work of
phenomenology and poststructuralist approaches to embodied experience: ‘As images
of the brain become both more familiar and more accessible, the words of philosophers
will lose their preeminence as the primate gateway to the mind, being joined, if not re-
placed, by visual culture’.
The task of moving beyond a narrow word-based and textual understanding of visual
experience, of rethinking phenomena like synaesthesia and affective empathy, and de-
veloping an explicitly multisensorial philosophy of concrete experience also informs the
chapter by David Howes. Howes is a cultural anthropologist who has written extensively
about the relationships between ethnographic work, sensory experience and culture. He
argues that while visual techniques and methods have been central to traditional anthro-
pology (with its emphasis upon direct observation, field work, ethnographic representa-
tion through field notes and so on) this has led to a paradoxical situation in which the
‘implicit’ visual bias has gone unnoticed and unquestioned and the emphasis on visual
devices has sidelined and occluded the role of the other senses and nonvisual experience
in anthropological work.
Following the work of Anna Grimshaw (The Ethnographer’s Eye), Sarah Pink (The Fu-
ture of Visual Anthropology) and others, he proposes a multisensorial ‘revisualization’ of
ethnographic research.
While the use of visual techniques plays a seminal role in nineteenth-century an-
thropology the visual turn in anthropology dates back to the 1990s as a reaction against
the textual models of ethnographic representation in both classical and more reflexive
frameworks. The recent revisualization of the discipline was stimulated by Anna Grim-
shaw’s 2001 work The Ethnographer’s Eye; among a series of other studies Grimshaw
tried to recover the work of W.H.R. Rivers (1864–1922) and his use of photography in
providing ‘thick descriptions’ of traumatized soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Howes
describes Rivers’ famous Torres Strait expedition which aimed to explore the sensory
and perceptual life of native peoples. While their findings were mixed and problematic
this study represented an early effort at ‘sensualizing anthropology’. This would later be
Editorial Introduction 541

taken further by the use of film and documentary techniques (described in Part II of The
Ethnographer’s Eye).
Building on these insights Howes argues for an explicit and reflexive multimodal ap-
proach to capture the complexity and contextual detail of sensory experience. Advances
in this direction have been compiled in his edited collection, Empire of the Senses: The
Sensual Culture Reader (2004) as well as his anthology The Sixth Sense Reader (2009).
The future of such a multisensorial ethnography is one that will incorporate multi-
ple technical observation instruments, different methodological directions and explicit
forms of interdisciplinary cooperation (e.g. between artists, filmmakers, new environ-
mental sciences and so on).
Against the background of radical conceptual changes in our sociological under-
standing of culture and in particular visual culture Barry Sandywell attempts to for-
mulate the burgeoning field of new visual studies in seven basic arguments or ‘theses’.
He suggests that taken together these theses outline the emergence of something like
a reflexive ontology of image experience and a critical-reflexive paradigm for visual culture
research.
While being interdependent, each of these theses aims to condense empirical and
theoretical developments into their generative or ‘deep’ structure and to provoke further
elaboration and concrete application of the various ‘turns’ towards a more transdisci-
plinary approach to visual culture that will openly acknowledge its social, cultural and
political assumptions and implications.
As the seven theses are also proposed as provocations as much as epistemological di-
rectives they can only be schematically outlined here: the historicity thesis (detailing the
complex history or historicity of acts of seeing); the artefactuality thesis (underlining
the fabricated, socially constructed and revisionary character of all visual objects and
the importance of practice-oriented situational analysis in understanding processes of
construction and reconstruction); the language thesis (emphasizing the radical inter-
dependence between visibility and visualization and the wider realms of conceptuality,
discourse and language); the technopoiesis thesis (that all visual phenomena are medi-
ated, shaped and transformed by technological devices); the sociocultural thesis (drawing
attention to the grammar of social relations and power implicated in the visual field);
the political thesis (positing the dialectical relationship between regimes of visibility and
ethical and political formations in society and history); and the reflexive praxis thesis (the
claim that visual practices and institutions are agencies of self-reflection and transforma-
tive change in society).
Finally Barry Sandywell provides a comprehensive overview and mapping of the
current literature in visual-cultural studies including disciplines and perspectives that
have been highly influential in shaping the current field of visual inquiry. The chapter
has been constructed to help readers find their way around this rapidly growing field, to
construct their own reading and research programmes, and to encourage the formula-
tion of more experimental, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching agendas in
visual culture.
 23

The Question of Method:

Practice, Reflexivity and
Critique in Visual Culture
Studies
Gillian Rose

Mieke Bal’s essay ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’ is a rigorous
commentary on what Bal calls ‘the primary pain point’ of visual culture studies (Bal
2003: 6). Bal argues that visual culture studies are founded on the specificity of their ob-
ject of study, but at the same time are unclear about exactly what that object is. Hence
their ‘pain’, inflicted on Bal at least by the range of ‘unquestioned assumptions’ and even
‘blatant nonsense’ that substitute in visual culture studies for careful consideration of
that object (Bal 2003: 11, 12). Bal offers her own analgesic, suggesting that the proper
object of study for visual culture studies should in fact be a nonobject: ‘visuality’ itself.
For Bal, visuality becomes an object of study in moments of seeing, or ‘visual event[s]’
(9), when, in an encounter between a human subject and another entity, something
emerges as ‘a fleeting, fugitive subjective image accrued in the subject’ (9). Her inter-
est is therefore as much in ‘performing acts of seeing’ as in ‘the materiality of the object
seen’ (11).
This chapter uses Bal’s argument to consider what Bal calls ‘the question of method’
(Bal 2003: 23). In her essay, Bal claims that ‘methodological reflection cannot be avoided
at this time’ (23), and, indeed, ‘method’ is central to all of her work (as the collection of
her essays edited by Norman Bryson attests (Bal and Bryson 2001)). It is therefore en-
tirely typical that she should introduce her concern with the ‘visual event’ and with ‘per-
forming acts of seeing’ in the form of a question serving to generate particular sorts of
evidence: with methodology, in other words. Her question is this: ‘what happens when
people look, and what emerges from that act?’ (Bal 2003: 9). And her essay is struc-
tured such that its arguments culminate in a section entitled ‘The Question of Method’;
‘methodology’ is also a key word of her essay.1
The Question of Method 543

Yet, of the seven essays published in response to Bal, only three engage with the
question of methodology, and that only very briefly: for example in Griselda Pollock’s
passing and approving reference to ‘modes of analysis’ that ‘reframe Art History’s pre-
cious authored objects as texts and theoretical practices’ (Pollock 2003: 259). I want to
make three points in relation to this apparent uninterest in questions of methodology
by Bal and her respondents. Firstly, I think Bal is correct to place so much importance
on methodology, and I hope it will be obvious by the end of the chapter why this is
the case. Secondly, though, it seems to me that the uninterest in questions of method
shown by the responses to Bal’s paper is symptomatic of a much wider uninterest in
questions of method across the field of visual culture studies more generally (which is
hardly surprising, since all of her respondents have been extremely influential in vi-
sual culture studies). Thirdly, this lack of interest in discussing questions of method-
ology seems to be caused by the hegemony of an implicit methodology. So for all the
talk of interdisciplinarity and what can be done differently by working across estab-
lished research boundaries, visual culture studies, I suggest, has remarkably little inter-
est in methodological discussion or experimentation. So, for example Pollock’s refusal,
quoted above, to consider art objects as objects denies the relevance to visual culture
studies of a body of work which does indeed treat artworks (and other sorts of visual-
ized materials) as objects, and also precisely as a means of avoiding questions of pre-
ciousness, authorship, aesthetics and connoisseurship. I am thinking here of work in
anthropology, inspired in different ways by the work of Alfred Gell (1998) and Arjun
Appadurai (1986), among others, in which art is seen as less a matter of textual mean-
ing and much more as a matter of social doing. In this work, artworks, and other visual
objects, are conceptualized as visual objects possessing agency which, when encoun-
tered, produce compressed performances with social effect (e.g. Myers 2001; Pinney
2003, 2005; Poole 1997; Thomas 1991).2 Yet this anthropological work is rarely re-
ferred to in visual culture studies (one exception being Bal herself ).3 Nor does the well-
established field of audience studies (see Gillespie 2005) make much of an appearance
in discussions of visual culture.
This current lack of methodological debate has certain consequences for what vi-
sual culture studies can do. The first part of this chapter sketches the characteristics of
the implicit methodology that dominates visual culture studies, as I see it, and exam-
ines what sort of criticism it produces, what sort of objects of study, and what kind of
critic. I should say at once though that my aim is not to dismiss these critical positions
and projects in any way. As Pollock says, ‘there have to be sites of critical contestation
of what is at stake in the ideological investments in high culture and the global capi-
tal investments in popular culture’ (Pollock 2003: 259); and any site, using whatever
methods, that achieves such contestation—as so much excellent work in visual culture
studies has already done—is surely to be valued. However, particular methods achieve
particular ends. And while the implicit methodology of so much visual culture stud-
ies to date has been very effective at certain forms of critique, it is perhaps time to ask
whether that methodology alone remains fully adequate to addressing visual culture in
all its richness and complexity. In particular, it seems to me that if visual culture needs
544 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

to explore the rather different territory of visual events and performances of seeing—as,
following Bal and others, I think it must—then different methodologies may well be
required.
So in the second section of the chapter, I build on aspects of Bal’s own methodol-
ogy. But this chapter is not absolutely faithful to Bal’s position (if such a thing were
possible). This is partly because her own methodology has already been elaborated by
Norman Bryson (2001), and there seems little point in repeating his remarks. More sig-
nificantly, though, as Bryson notes, Bal’s methodology is based on examining the logic
of ‘discourse, enunciation and voice’ as ‘they are focalized or embedded in the actual dis-
cursive situation’ (Bryson 2001: 19). If visual culture studies is fully to engage with the
consequences of Bal’s move towards performance and event, this chapter suggests that
it also needs some methodological resources to enable it to say more than Bal can about
the ‘actual situation’ emergent upon specific acts of seeing. These resources, I suggest,
would focus less on the logic of ‘discourse, enunciation and voice’, and more on the log-
ics of discourse, practice and place. In other words, I am suggesting that if visual culture
studies is to look more closely at visuality as an event, it would benefit from being able to
ask questions about the particularities of events as they take place in different locations
with diverse human and artefactual actants.

The Implicit Methodology of Visual Culture Studies:

Another Kind of Connoisseurship?
To attempt to describe the taken-for-granted methodology of visual culture studies is
clearly fraught with difficulties. Works that might count as visual culture studies are nu-
merous, diverse and spread far and wide; and the field has not been, and is not, without
any methodological discussion whatsoever. My strategy here is to take just a couple of
examples of visual culture criticism, and to suggest what is typical about their critical
methodologies. The examples come from an influential textbook and a body of criticism
addressing one sort of visual object.
The first example is a highly respected textbook on visual culture: Practices of Looking,
written by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001). As its title suggests, this book
argues strongly that visual objects, in and of themselves, carry little inherent meaning;
‘one of the central tenets of this book is that meaning does not reside within images, but
is produced at the moment that they are consumed by and circulated among viewers’
(Sturken and Cartwright 2001: 7). That is meaning is made through social practices.
Hence the title of their second chapter, ‘Viewers Make Meaning’. But here their argu-
ment slips. It moves away from the viewers and their making, and towards the interpre-
tation of images’ meanings as conducted by the critic. This happens because Sturken and
Cartwright argue that there are in fact three sites at which the meaning of an image is
reached—through its viewers’ interpretations, but also through the meanings it carries
itself, and the context in which an image is seen—and it is the critic’s task to unpack ‘the
complex social relationship’ between these three sites in relation to a variety of media
and genres of visual images (45).
The Question of Method 545

In making this claim, Sturken and Cartwright undoubtedly offer a nuanced and
critical account of visual culture. Their account has three features, though, that deserve
emphasis. Firstly, they focus heavily on the question of meaning. Producers’ meanings,
viewers’ meanings, dominant-hegemonic, negotiated or oppositional meanings, ideolog-
ical meanings . . . This search for the meaning of visual materials is indeed at the heart of
most visual culture studies, and Sturken and Cartwright (2001: 45–71) helpfully point
out where this methodology comes from: Stuart Hall’s 1974 essay on the coding and
decoding of meanings, in which semiology and Foucauldian discourse analysis sit rather
uneasily side-by-side (Nightingale 1996). I agree that the theoretical roots of visual cul-
ture studies’ implicit methodology do indeed lie in a usually unproblematized confla-
tion of a watered-down semiology with a thinned-out version of discourse analysis. The
second feature of Sturken and Cartwright’s (2001: 45–71) account that is characteristic
of visual culture studies more generally is their slip from viewers making meaning to
the critic’s interpretive role. For while viewers in their account make meaning in theory,
actual viewers are given very little say in their book. The subtle audience ethnographies
undertaken by scholars such as Valerie Walkerdine (1990) or Marie Gillespie (1995),
for example are nowhere to be found in their account.4 The third feature is also an
­absence: that of the visual culture studies critic. For surely there are actually four sites of
meaning-­making, the fourth being the critic who interprets the ‘junctures and articula-
tions of visual culture’ (Bal 2003: 21).
These three aspects of visual culture studies’ methodology—a focus on meaning and
interpretation, the absence of actual audiences, and a certain invisibility on the part of
the critic—are accompanied by a fourth, which again is a legacy from Hall’s version of
cultural studies: a search for critique. This is particularly evident in my next example,
which is a body of work addressing public art.
I’ll begin with a quotation from a book chapter written by Patricia Phillips, a distin-
guished writer on public art (Phillips 2003). She is discussing a mosaic in a subway sta-
tion in New York called Oculus. Two artists photographed eyes of schoolchildren in the
city, and made mosaics from the photos. Here is what Phillips says about the mosaic:

Historically, eyes have been endowed with symbolic significance. They are windows
to the soul, the centre of individual identity. The eyes—in fact, hundreds of pairs of
individuals’ eyes—offer compelling information about gender, race and ethnicity as
physical attributes and social constructions. The eyes of the city’s children are poi-
gnant representations of its vigorous diversity. Clearly, the gaze can be intrusive and
aggressive, but Oculus sensitively demonstrates that it can also be compassionately
connective. The project is a moving and generous image of the multiple dimensions of
contemporary public life. (Phillips 2003: 125)

Innocuous enough. But this quote seems to me to share the methodological

­approach of Sturken and Cartwright (2001). Clearly, Phillips too is concerned about
the meaning of this artwork. In explicating its meaning, she is typical in the way she
discusses a number­ of different aspects of the work located at one or other of Sturken
546 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

and Cartwright’s three sites: its formal qualities and historical references, its institutional
context and its critical reception. In this particular example, I’d point to phrases like
‘historically, eyes have been endowed with symbolic significance’, which demonstrates the
critic’s knowledge of historical scholarship and cultural context. The effects of these sites
are integrated (implicitly) via the critic’s theoretical apparatus, with the phrases ‘gender,
race and ethnicity as physical attributes and social constructions’ and ‘representations
of its vigorous diversity’ both implying the work of the critic in placing Oculus in rela-
tion to a specific kind of cultural theory and politics. As a consequence of this analysis
of the work’s meaning, the reader is then told what the effects of this work of art are.
‘Oculus sensitively demonstrates that the gaze can also be compassionately connective’;
‘the project is a moving and generous image of the multiple dimensions of contempo-
rary public life’. Once again, there is no discussion of what other viewers (subway users,
for example) might be making of it, and no reflection on the critic’s method of reaching
her conclusions.
In this example, it is also particularly clear that public art is being judged on the
grounds of its political effect. In this case, Phillips claims that the mosaic represents
public life as vigorously and multiply gendered and racialized, and assumes that this is
a good thing. As Grant Kester points out in his book Conversation Pieces (2004), one
criteria that dominates most (modernist) art criticism methodology is precisely whether
an artwork resists ‘dominant meanings’, howsoever defined. The most highly valued
artworks produced by much art criticism are those which are seen to resist the produc-
tion of hegemonic meaning, to refuse to reproduce discourse, to destabilize the power-
knowledge nexus. Critics expect that ‘the work of art should challenge or disrupt the
viewer’s expectations about a given image, object, or system of meaning’ (Kester 2004:
17). This expectation is very much at work in discussions of what constitutes good pub-
lic art, and, I would argue, in visual culture studies more generally. So, take just three
examples, Phillips (1994: 61) says that public art ‘can be a form of radical education that
challenges the structures and conditions of cultural and political institutions’, Suzanne
Lacey (1995: 13) claims that it should imply or state ideas about social change, and Jane
Rendell (1999: 4) says that public art should provide ‘moments, places and tools for
self-reflection, critical thinking and radical practice’. In similar fashion, visual culture
studies’ implicit methodology also praises critique in the objects it sees. The objects that
it valorizes are those that pull their viewers out of their ordinary values and perceptions,
and that is its fourth characteristic.5
Now, clearly such criticism is a valuable skill for building those ‘sites of contestation’
demanded by Pollock and many other visual culture critics. However, we should per-
haps be more aware than we are of some of its implications. One implication in particu-
lar deserves more attention, I think, which is the way in which this methodology enables
its particular sort of critic to ignore what Toby Miller (2001) calls the ‘occasionality’ of
‘visual events’, in all their extraordinary variety. By ‘occasionality’, Miller means ‘the
conditions under which a text is made, circulated, received, interpreted, and criticized,
taking seriously the conditions of existence of cultural production’ (306). I would em-
phasize the importance of where a particular visual event takes place in particular: the
‘same’ object may participate in quite different visual events when it is in a family album
The Question of Method 547

and when it becomes part of mass media discourse of grief and blame (Rose forthcom-
ing). Yet the semiological-discursive methodology of visual culture studies makes the oc-
casionality of visual events difficult to explore. The focus on meaning and interpretation
tends to lead to a methodological focus on the formal qualities and discursive context of
visual objects; the uninterest in audiences leads to art objects in particular being read as
if where they were (not) seen was irrelevant; and the uninterest in the specific conditions
and processes in which the critic is working produces claims about the meaning inher-
ent to visual objects which ignores the particular conditions under which that claim is
made. As Miller (2001: 307) notes, film theorists, for example never discuss what dif-
ference it makes to their interpretation of ‘the’ meaning of a film that they watched it
on a DVD player, repeatedly, on their own, in an office or study—rather than seeing it
once, on a large screen, at a packed multiplex on a Saturday night. Finally, the urge to
see things as critical means that vast swathes of visual events have simply never made it
onto the visual studies agenda.
But if we think of an installation in an art gallery, or a family photograph album,
or the latest blockbuster at a multiplex, and think of them, not solely in terms of
their formal properties and philosophical implications, but also as located social, af-
fective and economic events, then we will produce a rather different account of them:
an account that can consider the importance of institutional context, of the people
who funded, installed and looked at them, of the corporeal and discursive gestures
and comportments by which they happen. We then start to have a rather different
sense of such objects and how they are visible: not simply as objects to be interpreted,
but as remarkably complex objects that came into being only through the participa-
tion of numerous actors, both human and nonhuman. We might then also be more
inclined to consider the critic as one of those actors, and reflect more carefully on
his role.
In contrast to this approach to visual culture—which I will develop in the next
section—I’d like to name visual culture studies’ implicit methodology as a newer kind
of conoisseurship. ‘Conoisseurship’, in its traditional sense, involves detecting the influ-
ences of other artists on a particular artwork, through the deployment of what Irit Rog-
off (1998) has called ‘the good eye’. As Rogoff says, this eye does its work mysteriously,
apparently intuitively evaluating the provenance and quality of an artwork. What I have
been describing in this section might be described as the effect of ‘the good theory’,
which is mobilized in an equally unreflexive manner to produce an equally perceptive
critic who can reveal the meaning and critical effect of visual materials. The creation of
this critical position is surely in part at least a consequence of visual culture critics’ un-
interest in methodology. Visual culture critics tend to write as if their judgement was
self-evident, the only one possible, as if their account of a visual work is a process of de-
scription or revelation rather than construction. It isn’t of course, as I’m sure if directly
asked they would readily admit—it’s a result of years of training in disciplinary conven-
tions (particularly the ‘textualist and historical side to the humanities’ (Miller 2001:
305)), of archival research, of teaching and being taught, of conference going and so on.
And there have been some worries recently that, if you like, too much work has to be
brought to bear on a visual object to work out what it means. Sometimes this expresses
548 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

itself in a concern that images end up merely illustrating theoretical accounts (Pinney
2003; Bal 2003: 23); sometimes it takes the form of various worries that visual things are
all too rarely allowed to exceed or escape interpretive frameworks (Holly in Cheetham,
Holly and Moxey 2005; Farago and Zwijnenberg 2003; Mitchell 1996); sometimes a
frustration at how the rich diversity of actual visualities keeps on being straightjacketed
into a limited conceptual language (Maynard 2007). And with this suggestion that some
methodological debate in visual culture studies has not been, and is not, nonexistent,
the next section returns to Mieke Bal’s work.

Towards a Methodology for Performing Acts

of Seeing
So far, I’ve suggested that the implicit methodology of visual culture studies is produc-
ing a certain sort of approach to visual culture. It is an approach that values objects that
critique the dominant power relations in that context and that privileges only the critic’s
interpretations of object and context. Productive as that methodology is, there are other
ways of thinking about visual events and the objects entangled in them, that allow us to
see other things and occupy other critical positions. This section develops this sugges-
tion, returning to some of Bal’s insights but taking them in a rather different direction.

Practice
As should be obvious by now, I find Bal’s concern with visual events and ‘the practices
of looking invested in any object’ (Bal 2003:11) very productive. In particular, her use
of the term ‘practice’ can open up a rather different approach to visual culture studies,
different both from its implicit methodology but also rather different from Bal’s own ap-
proach. Here, I want to suggest that the social sciences might have something to offer vi-
sual culture methodologies. In particular, the current interest in ‘practice’ among a range
of social theorists offers some ways of approaching the occasionality of visual events.
In the social sciences, the notion of ‘practice’ has a complex theoretical genealogy.
Importantly, it is not opposed to discourse: indeed, Foucault’s work might be read as
an extended meditation on practices as power (Laurier and Philo 2004). However, the
current interest in practice certainly draws on more than just Foucault for its theoretical
underpinnings: Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Appadurai, Ingold and a group
of science studies writers including Latour and Serres all make their appearance in dis-
cussions of practice (for a review see Reckwitz 2002). A succinct definition of practice is
offered by Theodore Schatzki (1996: 83), who describes a social practice as a cluster of
‘doings and sayings’. Andreas Reckwitz (2002: 249) elaborates:

A ‘practice’. . . is a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements,

interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities,
‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-
how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.
The Question of Method 549

A practice, then, is a fairly consistent way of doing something, deploying certain objects,
knowledges, bodily gestures and emotions. It is through practices that social relations
and institutions happen, and through practices that subject positions and identities are
performed. From this, it becomes possible to see how Miller’s ‘occasionality’ might be
pushed from his cultural-materialist account of ‘context’ to a rather more radical ac-
count of how seeing happens. For now we can suggest that different ways of seeing are
bound up into different, more-or-less conscious, more-or-less elaborate, more-or-less
consistent practices. Visualities are one practice among many, and in their routinization
and place-specificity they make certain sorts of things visible in particular ways.
There are two things to emphasize here. Firstly, practices are always embedded in
specific places. The different visualities mobilized in a shopping centre (Becker 2002;
Degen, DeSilvey and Rose 2008) are not the same as the visualities in an art gallery
(Heath and vom Lehn 2004) or a train (Bissell 2009) or an expo (Jansson 2007a), be-
cause the practices in those sorts of place are not the same. There are two dynamics here
(see also Jansson 2007b). Firstly, particular locations usually invite quite specific perfor-
mances of seeing (which include specific modes of bodily and other sensorial comport-
ments). Sitting in a cinema seat, the etiquette of where to put coats and bags, what to
eat and drink there and how, when you can talk and when you shouldn’t, the specific
kinds of gazes given to films (as opposed to invited by them, about which we know
a lot)—all these things are peculiar to cinemas, and vary between different cinemas.
Anna McCarthy’s book Ambient Television (2001) demonstrates the place-specificity of
practices of looking in a different way, by unpacking the different modes of visuality
structuring television programmes made for specific locations, such as airport lounges,
hospital waiting rooms and checkout queues. Her study explores the co-constitution of
nondomestic TV genres and the places in which they are shown very effectively (though,
typically, she doesn’t say much about how the people in these places practice the TV).
Secondly, though, it is the practices undertaken in those places which reproduce them as
those sorts of spaces (or not). If everyone started to wander in and out of all the cinemas
in a multiplex just like they wander in and out of galleries in a museum, strolling down
a side aisle, along the front and up the other side, inspecting the walls all the while, it
would no longer be a cinema. Practices of looking, then, are also about the practising
of places.
This emphasis on place is not simply a question of the spaces in which visual events
take place, however. The sorts of geographies practically constituted through such events
may well exceed the immediate location of their event. Divya Tolia-Kelly’s (2004) work,
for example on how diasporic identities are mobilized through various decorative ob-
jects in migrants’ houses, tells of an intimate imbrication of certain domestic and global
spatialities. Thus the space performed by practices, including visual practices, is not nec-
essarily a simple question of location (an altarpiece in a church versus an image of that
altarpiece on a tourist Web site). It might also entail all sorts of other geographies, of
various geometries and modalities.
Secondly, the performativity of practice. That is (following Butler 1990), prac-
tices produce the entities that are claimed to preexist the practice. While both, say, a
550 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Caravaggio painting and a gallery visitor (Bal 1996: 117–28), or an on-line game and a
gamer, may seem to exist prior to their mutual encounters, they do not; they constitute
each other as they interact (and such interactions are not only visual, of course). Hence
practices are relational. ‘Performing acts of seeing’ produce both seer and seen (Bal
2003: 11, 14). And as performative, practices both discipline these positions but slip-
pages in their reproduction also occur. Bal has in fact offered examples of both of these
possibilities, in the organization of New York’s museum district which inscribes a racial-
ized distinction between Nature and Culture in the separate buildings of the American
Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bal 1996:15–36),
and the relation between two paintings and their apparatus of display in one corner of
a gallery (Bal 1996: 117–28).
What this broad approach means for visual culture studies is significant, I would
argue. Firstly, it changes the basic question from ‘what does this visual thing mean?’ to
something much closer to Bal’s formulation, ‘what happens when people look, and what
emerges from that act?’ (Bal 2003: 9). Further, in suggesting that visualities themselves
are practices, it immediately raises the question of the location of those practices. In an
age when images are increasingly mobile across different media and sites of display, this
becomes a pressing question to be able to ask. And, thirdly, a whole range of social actors
make an appearance. This includes the visual culture critic, as the next subsection elabo-
rates. But it also includes, I would argue, all those other folk who encounter all sorts of
visual things, in all sorts of ways, in everyday ways, and it suggests that their ways of see-
ing are just as central to a visual event as those of the critic. In short, ‘practice’ can turn vi-
sual culture studies closer to the sites and inhabitants of the everyday (Highmore 2002).

Reflexivity
Bal’s argument has a certain version of reflexivity at its heart, and, like her emphasis on
practice, this also has significant implications for the work of critical interpretation typi-
cal of so much of visual culture studies. Simply, reflexivity is central to Bal’s position
because visual culture critics are also people doing specific kinds of looking in particular
places. The critic is not exempt from, or outside of, Bal’s understanding of visuality as
practice. Hence the work of critics must also be considered as embodied, located, rela-
tional and performative. Critics cannot simply apply their critical-theoretical tools onto
objects understood as existing prior to the moment of criticism. Instead, objects are
brought into particular forms of being through the act of criticism.

The so-called empirical object does not exist ‘out there’ but is brought into existence
in the encounter between object and analyst, mediated by the theoretical baggage each
brings to that encounter. This transforms the analysis from an instrumentalist ‘appli-
cation’ into a performative interaction between the object (including those aspects of
it that remained invisible before the encounter), theory and analyst. In this view, pro-
cesses of interpretation are part of the object and are, in turn, questioned on the side
of the analyst. (Bal 2003: 23–4)
The Question of Method 551

The analyst brings certain questions and theories to bear on her object of study, and,
Bal argues, the object often answers back, offering a particular and productive version
of itself in this exchange from which the critic should learn (and hence Bal notes that
‘some specificity for material objects must be retained’ (Bal 2003: 15)). This understand-
ing of the critic as essentially entangled in what she is studying is very different from the
distanced analytical stand offered by connoisseurs of visual culture. It places the analyst
much more in the midst of things, a participant in visualities rather than their detached
observer.
Given this entanglement, Bal argues that an ‘element of self-reflection is indispens-
able’ to critical work (Bal 2003: 24). But Bal has quite a specific understanding of reflex-
ivity. Reflexion, for Bal, means thinking of interpretive practices as both ‘method and
object of questioning’ (24). This sort of self-reflection is central to several other accounts
of performative research methodologies (see for example Gregson and Rose 2000; Pratt
2000; Latham 2003). Aspects of methodology are paused over, examined, rehearsed and
revised, as the research process proceeds and things are learnt from the research objects.
No longer simply passing a verdict in the mode of a ‘colonising humanist’ (Pratt 2000:
639), the critic is now required to work through the process of reaching that verdict,
demonstrating that it was attained through a series of specific interactions rather than
from a series of cumulative revelations.
In my own work on what a particular group of mothers did with their family pho-
tos, for example I interviewed women in their houses, looked at lots of their photos
with them, and then worked with interview transcripts and notes. Eventually I made
a number of claims about the effects of family photos for these mothers, one of which
depended on just such a moment of self-reflection. It wasn’t until I’d been working with
the transcripts for a couple of months that I suddenly realized that, in all the hours of
conversation poring over thousands of photos, one topic was hardly ever discussed:
what the children pictured so often felt about being photographed. It wasn’t, it seemed,
a pressing issue for the mothers taking the photos—and nor, significantly, had it been
for me, as their interviewer, as a researcher working with interview material and also a
mother myself. Reflecting on my complicity with this absence, I concluded that our
shared uninterest in how children felt suggested that the real subjects of the photos
weren’t in fact the children at all, but the mothers, and what taking and looking (and
holding) photographs of their children meant to them. Questioning the range of my
research questions allowed me to begin to explore why it is that, despite their predict-
able and banal content and its construction of traditional notions of ‘the family’, com-
mented on by so many visual culture critics, family photos are intensely valued by so
many mothers (Rose 2005).
Another implication that needs teasing out from Bal’s methodological position is
that understanding research in terms of performative practices also makes the conclu-
sions of research rather more provisional. This is not because—as some versions of reflex-
ivity abroad in the social sciences would claim—every person is differently positioned
and therefore sees things differently (although in certain circumstances and in specific
ways this may well be important). Rather, it is because performances may in principle
552 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

always be performed differently; there is always the possibility that looking again might
change what is seen and unseen. Interpretation is of the moment in which it was under-
taken (Latham 2003: 2005). Elsewhere, Bal (1999: 10) argues that this challenge to the
epistemic authority of the critic should be central to visual culture studies, and that it
can come both from the ‘exposed object’ and the reader/viewer.

Critique
So far, I have argued that understanding visual culture research as a practice demands
a certain reflexivity from the researcher. It does so because it entangles the researcher as
much as anyone else in practices and performances of looking. This is already a form
of critique, I think; it offers a critique of those analytical positions that assume they are
outside such social practices. It makes the ‘third person’ approach to visualized objects
(Bryson 2001: 5) much harder, if not impossible, to sustain, and thus challenges those
pronouncements, discussed earlier in this chapter, about what an image definitively
means. But what of social critique? I suggested earlier that much visual culture studies
are critical in the sense that they claim to discover the meaning of a visual entity, and
then assess whether that meaning supports or criticizes hegemonic discourses. But what
happens when critique focusses on event rather than meaning—on what happens rather
than what is signified? And when the critic places herself in the midst of that happening
rather than assuming a position exterior to it? What critical tools does ‘practice’ offer?
One tool has already been mentioned: performativity. To repeat the familiar argu-
ment once more, if something is performed it can always be performed differently. It is
an argument that’s difficult to disagree with. It’s also an argument that makes the critic
rather passive, though, simply waiting for practices to be done in a more just or lib-
eratory way. As well as this, I wonder if the observational mode of visual culture stud-
ies explored here might be able to offer a rather more active, interventionist form of
critique.
Many who have engaged in practice-focussed research do indeed describe their mode
of critique as interventionist. Critique as intervention works, not with notions of con-
text and depth, but rather with action and surface. It suggests the need to examine
what’s going on, what’s happening, with great care, and then place what is there into
different alignments and combinations, reflexively, with a certain critical aim in mind.
Cathrine Egeland describes this approach thus:

Critique as intervention can thus be conceived of as a strategy aimed at describing, re-

describing, combining and recombining elements of knowledge that may have critical
effects. (Egeland 2005: 269)

Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, for example note ‘the surplus of detail provided by actual
events at hand’ (Laurier and Philo 2004: 431) and advocate pushing description to such
an extent that surfaces become troubled by what is already there but often not noticed,
‘things lying in plain view, open to everyone, yet all too often unexamined’ (430). This
The Question of Method 553

is a strategy of critique that’s not about going behind or beyond what others (‘people’)
might see, but about working with what is there and changing its emphasis, intensity,
relationality. Similarly, although from a Deleuzian direction, Patricia Ticineto Clough
(2000: 286) has talked about ‘cutting out an apparatus of knowing and observation
from a single plane or for differently composing elements of an apparatus with the aim
of eliciting exposure or escaping it, intensifying engagement or lessening it’. That no-
tion of ‘cutting out’ again suggests a strategy of placing things in different arrangements
rather than revealing what they really mean. Such estrangements and realignments are
what produce a critical effect.
John Allen and Michael Pryke (1993), for example in a study of the spatialities of the
City of London, were particularly interested in the parallel existence of two social worlds
in the offices of the financial corporations they were studying. On the one hand, the
well-paid world of the bankers: on the other, a world of very low-paid caterers, security
guards and cleaners. The bankers’ way of seeing their everyday workplace was such that
those low-paid workers were simply invisible. They were not seen, and thus the reliance
of the bankers upon them was denied. Allen and Pryke intervened in this invisibiliza-
tion by making a series of montages of the City space—its buildings and its information
flows—into which they gradually inserted more and more evidence of the presence of
the low-paid workers. This suggests that montage—whether written or using images—is
one tactic of intervention; there are surely others (see for example Markussen 2005).
Critique, then, need not only be a matter of finding a meaning and assessing its effect in
relation to wider discursive formations. Critique can also take the form of finding what
is already there and rearranging it ‘to witness the world into being in quite different . . .
ways’ (Dewsbury 2003: 1908).

Conclusion
One of the aims of this chapter has been to spell out rather more clearly than is usually
the case what the implications are of the implicit methodology that dominates a great
deal of visual culture studies. For implications it certainly has, both in the kind of critic
it creates, and in the kinds of accounts of visual objects it produces. It focusses almost
entirely on the meaning of visual things, it ignores the places in and the subjectivities
through which visual events happen, it neglects the particular positioning of the critic,
and is desperate to find critique. The work that it does is nonetheless valuable, I would
insist. It is important to have engaged and sustained readings of cultural texts that push
at superficial understandings and offer new ways of thinking and seeing. I do not want
to advocate any one method as inherently ‘better’ than the other. I simply want to em-
phasize that methodologies have effects, and that if visual culture studies is to come of
age as a truly innovative interdisciplinary subject, it needs to pay much more attention
to the consequences of its current implicit methodology, and to explore the interpretive
possibilities offered by a range of other methodological strategies.
For there are indeed other ways to engage with those things which can help us
by grounding them, not in semiotic or discursive systems of meaning, but in the
554 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

constellations of practice that bring certain ways of doing things together with certain
objects to produce specific subjective and social effects. Images do not happen on their
own, ever. Their production, circulation, display and disposal are always in conjunction
with people, in places, in mutually constitutive relations. This theoretical understanding
of visualities and visual objects underpins my advocacy here of another methodology
for visual culture studies. My argument is that visual culture studies should be plunging
much more often into those encounters between humans and what surrounds them, ex-
ploring what becomes visible, and in what ways. And from this perspective, the kind of
critical work dominating visual culture studies becomes just one quite specific practice
among many other kinds, one that produces a particular kind of critic and a particular
version of the visual material being studied.
To focus on the practices through which visual events happen is to go detailed. It is
to look carefully at bodies, comportments, gestures, looks; to look and touch objects,
images, ways of seeing; to consider the routine, the everyday and the banal as well as the
exceptional; to consider affect and emotion as well as cognition and representation. It
is to pay attention to people’s doings and sayings and to watch what eventuates in spe-
cific places. It is to allow different modes of reflection—by both the researcher and the
researched—on those practices. It is to draw on ethnographic methods, often, and to
reflect on the way in which the critic and his methods are also and always part of what
happens. And in focussing on such details, as the thick descriptive methods of both
some anthropology and science studies shows, is absolutely not to lose sight of questions
of power. Indeed, looking carefully at how people look and what happens when they
look is to address with some specificity the highly complex and mutable visual practices
that are part of power relations, as Foucault surely taught us. If you want to know what
family photograph albums mean, sure, collect a few and take them home, study them
and work out that they present highly selective images of family life that are oppressive
to women. If you want to know what they do, though, find out what gets done with
them. How are they made (di Bello 2007), where are they stored, when are their con-
tents altered (Tinkler 2008), how are they looked at, and above all, what happens when
they are made, stored, revised and looked at (Rose forthcoming). How are those family
snaps seen, how are they caressed, defaced, cropped and ignored, what subjectivities and
relations are in the making as these things happen?
I cannot claim that this more ethnographic approach to visual events is superior to
the new connoisseurship currently dominating visual culture studies. However, in its
move away from an approach to visualities still based largely on parallels with language,
and its insistence that looking is a social act among humans and between humans and
other things, it can give us a different sense of visual culture which relies less on visual
objects and more on the processes which animate them and make them matter. Clearly
such a methodological focus on practice has its own challenges, which I have not dis-
cussed here: for example methods to access human encounters with visualized objects
are difficult to formulate, and describing what practices are happening is far from being
an innocent operation. Nonetheless, I would suggest that visual culture studies can only
be enriched by experimenting with a practice-oriented methodology.
The Question of Method 555

Further Reading
Bissell, P. 2009. Visualising Everyday Geographies: Practices of Vision through Travel-time.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34/1: 42–60.
Larsen, J. 2008. ‘Practices and Flows of Digital Photography: An Ethnographic Framework’,
Mobilities, 3/1:141–60.
Rose, Gillian. 2010. Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public, and the Politics of Senti-
ment. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Notes
1. Bal’s essay seems to use the terms ‘method’ and ‘methodology’ interchangeably. Since
‘method’ tends usually to refer to more technical questions of analytical procedure, my sense
is that she actually centres methodology in her work. However, since part of my argument
is to emphasize the more procedural aspects of method as a consequence of considering
­methodology, I too shift between using these two terms in this chapter.
2. The phrase ‘compressed performance’ comes from Christopher Pinney’s paraphrase of
­Marilyn Strathern’s work (Pinney 2004).
3. For example, in the opening pages of her 2003 essay she refers approvingly to the work of
Arjun Appadurai (1986), who is also very influential on the work of those anthropologists
I mention, particularly Thomas (1991). Similarly, in her edited collection The Practice of
Cultural Analysis (Bal 1999), she works with an essay contributed by distinguished anthro-
pologist Johannes Fabian.
4. Sturken and Cartwright seem to reference only two authors (both North American) that
have contributed to audience studies: Janice Radway and Constance Penley. There is no
­sustained discussion of the British school of audience studies initiated by people such as
David Morley, Charlotte Brunsden and Ann Gray.
5. Even in the case of ‘new genre public art’ (Lacey 1995), with its commitment to ‘com-
munity involvement’, there’s still a tendency for artists to be the ones with the ideas while
local people are simply asked to do the work. Indeed, this is the basis of Miwon Kwon’s
(2004) fairly devastating account of a major new genre public art project in Chicago a few
years ago.

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 24

Digital Art and

Visual Culture
Charlie Gere

The digital has come to define our culture in a number of different ways, including,
though by no means limited to, the material means by which that culture stores and
disseminates its productions. As such it might be compared to earlier instances of the
impact of new technologies on culture, such as that of printing, but with far greater im-
pact, spread and ubiquity, and above all far greater speed of transformation. In our ‘vi-
sual culture’, the overarching topic of this book, the digital is ubiquitous. Almost every
magazine or advertising or printed image, increasingly large amounts of television and
film, as well as of course images on the World Wide Web and in computer games will
be digital (as will books, music and almost every conceivable media phenomenon). In
this chapter I look at the question of the work of art in the digital age (to use a well-
worn, Benjaminian formulation), though, rather than Walter Benjamin, I take the work
of Jean-Luc Nancy as my guide, particularly in relation to the question of the hand. I
am concerned with what digital art, as opposed to the more general realm of digital
visual culture, can offer. In particular I am interested in how it is differentiated or dis-
tinguished from the wealth of rich visual experiences now available on the Web and
through other digital visual media.
I start with what appears a rather obvious point, that the word ‘digital’ can mean dif-
ferent things, that might even seem to contradict each other. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary the word ‘digital’ has a number of meanings, including ‘[O]f, per-
taining to, using or being a digit’, meaning one of the ‘ten Arabic numerals from 0 to 9,
especially when part of a number’, and also ‘designating a computer which operates on
data in the form of digits or similar discrete data . . . Designating or pertaining to a re-
cording in which the original signal is represented by the spacing between pulses rather
than by a wave, to make it less susceptible to degradation’ (the word for data in the form
of a wave being ‘analogue’).
560 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

But the dictionary also defines ‘digital’ as ‘[O]f or pertaining to a finger or fingers’
and [R]esembling a finger or the hollow impression made by one’. Obviously the other
meaning of digital is directly related to fingers and therefore to our capacity to count,
but flesh-and-blood fingers and hands nevertheless do seem curiously at odds with sup-
posedly cold, inhuman digital technology. But of course it is with the hands, and par-
ticularly the fingers that we grasp and use tools and also with which we touch, and
there are long, parallel traditions within Western thinking, one of which privileges the
hand with its relation to tool use as a marker of humanity, and another which privileges
touch as the primary and most important sense. The former is found in writings from
St Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century ce, through to the twentieth-century palaeo-
anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan while the latter can be traced from Aristotle who,
in De Anima and elsewhere, describes touch as the primary sense, through to Aquinas
and onto Heidegger in the twentieth century.
Touching is central to our very conception of our humanity. In On Touching—Jean-
Luc Nancy Derrida analyses what he describes as a ‘humanualism’ (humainisme) that
pervades much Western thinking. He takes as an example the essay ‘Sur l’influence
de l’habitude’ by the late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth-century philosopher Maine de
Biran, in which he finds the teleological hierarchy that privileges the human hand over
the grasping organ of other animals. ‘Humans are the only beings who have this hand at
their disposal; they alone can touch, in the strongest and strictest sense. Human beings
touch more and touch better’ (Derrida 2005: 152). Even de Biran’s comments about
the grasping and manipulating capacity of the elephant’s trunk, which seems to fulfil
‘approximately’ the same set of functions, are revealed as humanualist by his qualifica-
tion by the word ‘approximately’ (153). But, writing about Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, Der-
rida declares that the ‘ “question of the hand,” which is also a history of the hand, as we
know, remains—should remain—impossible to dissociate from the history of technics
and its interpretation, as well as from all the problems that link a history of the hand
with the hominizing process’ (154). In a footnote linked to this sentence Derrida alludes
to his own Of Grammatology, as well as to the work of Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Ber-
nard Stiegler, in particular his Technics and Time (381).
Works of art are traditionally the products of handiwork, of grasp and touch, and
they are also objects that can, in theory be touched. Yet, in the gallery, the traditional
work of art is not to be touched. In the gallery or museum it is in a vitrine, behind glass
or rope, bordered by dowling on the floor or protected by infra-red beams, alarms and
guards. At the same time the work of art is highly tactile, haptic, tangible; the contours
of sculpture or the surface of paintings seem to invite touch, while at the same time
making it impossible (for eminently practical reasons to be sure, to do with security and
conservation). In terms of affect we are also ‘touched’ or even ‘moved’ by a work of art.
We can even say that works of art can be sticky, refusing to let us go from their presence,
even as they refuse to be touched. One can of course see this perhaps as a reflection of
their perceived fragility and their value, but it also can be seen as something more inter-
esting and complex, a sense of their auratic untouchability, which in turn denotes some-
thing about their status as art.
Digital Art and Visual Culture 561

By contrast, digital media attempt to present us with visual and other experiences
that appear far from discrete. They are part of a fluid stream, a flow, a continuum of
data, with which we interact and become part of, a milieu, that precisely does not allow
for the separation of the work of art, its sequestering behind glass or rope. Digital media
by contrast encourage apparently seamless connectivity; virtual reality and new forms of
3-D cinema aim to immerse the spectator, as do interactive games and environments,
while social networks make communication and networking both immediate and de-
materialized. The more distant and dematerialized our media is, the more it seems to
engage in interactivity, and to encourage a sense of touching and grasping. Thus it can
be suggested that the work of art in the digital age can be thought of in terms of a chias-
mus in which the analogue work of art is distinguished by its digital discretion, whereas
the digital work is characterized by its apparent analogue continuity.
This is where art may have some interesting things to say. Artists started to experi-
ment with the artistic possibilities of new technologies such as computers as early as
the 1960s, when artists such as Nicolas Schöffer in France and Roy Ascott in Britain
began to be interested in techno-scientific ideas such as Cybernetics. In the mid 1960s
the first computer art shows were mounted, in Germany and the United States. These
were followed by exhibitions and events such as 9 Evenings at the Armory in New York,
staged by Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg’s group Experiments in Art and Tech-
nology (EAT) in 1966. EAT was founded to foster collaborations between artists and
engineers.
In the years that followed a number of major exhibitions involving new technologies
were held, including The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at MOMA
in 1968, which was accompanied by a show of work commissioned by EAT, Some More
Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum. In the same year the legendary exhibition Cyber-
netic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt, was held at the ICA in London. A year later
Event One took place in London (the latter organized by the Computer Arts Society).
In 1970 critic and theorist Jack Burnham organized Software: Information Technology,
Its meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum in New York. Like Cybernetic Serendipity this
show mixed the work of scientists, computer theorists and artists with little regard for
any disciplinary demarcations. Also in 1970 Kynaston McShine curated Information
at MOMA, which dealt with the issues and possibilities of new technologies, but only
featured the work of artists. In 1971 the results of Maurice Tuchman’s five-year Art and
Technology programme were shown at the Los Angeles County Museum.
Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s digital art was regarded as out of the
mainstream of the art world, and even marginalized. A number of artists, including Jef-
frey Shaw, Stelarc, Roy Ascott and others, continued to work with new technologies,
but perhaps the most important event in terms of digital art practice in recent times was
the development of the first user-friendly Web browser in 1994. The World Wide Web
had been developed as a result of the pioneering ideas of Tim Berners-Lee, a British sci-
entist at the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) in Switzerland. Berners-Lee
was interested in using the Internet to allow access to digital documents. To this end
he developed a version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) used in
562 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

publishing, which he called Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. This would allow
users to make texts and, later on, pictures, available to viewers with appropriate soft-
ware, and to embed links from one document to another. The emergence of the Web
coincided almost exactly with the collapse of the Soviet Union and it was the new-found
sense of freedom and the possibilities of cross-border exchange, as well as funding from
the European Union and nongovernmental organizations such as the Soros Foundation,
that helped foster the beginnings of net art in Eastern Europe, where much of the early
work was done. When ‘user-friendly’ browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape came out
in the early to mid 1990s the possibilities of the Web as a medium were seized upon by
a number of artists, who, in the mid 1990s, starting producing work under the banner
of ‘net.art’. This meant work that was at least partly made on and for the Web and could
only be viewed on-line. The term ‘net.art’ was supposedly coined by Vuk Cosic in the
early 1990s to refer to artistic practices involving the World Wide Web, after he had re-
ceived an email composed of ASCII gibberish, in which the only readable element was
the words ‘net’ and ‘art’ separated by a full stop.
In some senses the pioneering work of net.artists in exploring the possibilities of the
World Wide Web as a medium has been overshadowed by more commercial visual expe-
riences, many of which are highly sophisticated and extremely beguiling, without exactly
being art. Given the extraordinary proliferation of such material on the Web, it is perhaps
interesting to ask what artists may be able to offer. In 2005 Google released Google Earth,
a program enabling the user to view satellite images of almost any part of the earth. It is
an almost perfect expression of the panoptic or even pan-haptic ambitions of networked
digital media. The impression is given of the possibility of total access to the entire world.
The default view when the program is started shows an image of the earth suspended in
space. In this it seems to be a direct descendent of the various representations of the Earth
from space that abounded before and after the early Apollo missions, and which helped
foster and support a vision of global community and connecitivity. Google Earth indeed
seems to encapsulate many of the capabilities of and desires for digital imagery in a net-
worked culture. As the Web site puts it, ‘Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to
view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the
canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places
and share with others.’ Google Earth is the realization of a fantasy of, as the narration to
Thomson and Craighead’s film Flat Earth, puts it, ‘the age old dream; to look down from
above’, as well as ‘the dream of flying; the dream of transcendent mastery’.
Jean-Luc Nancy could have had Google Earth in mind when he wrote, in his book
The Creation of the World, or, Globalization, ‘How are we to conceive of, precisely, a
world where we find only a globe, an astral universe, or an earth without sky’. For Nancy
the world has lost its capacity to ‘form a world’ and seems instead only capable of pro-
liferating the ‘un-world’ (immonde), and destroying itself as if permeated with a death
drive. He suggests that

A world ‘viewed’, a represented world, is a world dependent on the gaze of a subject of

the world . . . A subject of the world . . . cannot itself be in the world . . . Even without a
Digital Art and Visual Culture 563

religious representation, such a subject, implicit, or explicit, perpetuates the position

of the creating, organizing, and addressing God . . . of the world. (2007: 40)

For Nancy a ‘world is never in front of me, or else it is not my world . . . As soon as a
world appears to me as a world, I already share something of it: I share part of its inner
resonance’. He continues that ‘It follows from this that a world is a world only for those
who inhabit it.’ Thus ‘the meaning of the world does not occur as a reference to some-
thing external to the world’ and the experience of the world consists in traversing ‘from
one edge to the other and nothing else’.
In his essay ‘Being Singular Plural’ Nancy proposes the following. ‘Let us say we for
all being, that is, for every being, for all being, one by one, each time in the singular of
their essential plurality’ (2000: 3). For Nancy it is this that makes meaning. ‘There is no
meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first
signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of
Being. Meaning begins where presence is not pure presence but where presence comes
apart . . . in order to be itself as such. This “as” presupposes the distancing, spacing, and
division of presence’ (2). ‘Everything, then, passes between us . . . The “between” is the
stretching out . . . and distance opened by the singular as such, as its spacing of meaning.
That which does not maintain its distance from the “between” is only immanence col-
lapsed in on itself and deprived of meaning’ (5).

From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proxim-
ity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens
up. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation;
moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other. Contact is beyond
fullness and emptiness, beyond connection and disconnection. If ‘to come into con-
tact’ is to begin to make sense of one another, then this ‘coming’ penetrates nothing;
there is no intermediate and mediating ‘milieu’. (2000: 5)

Nancy writes of singular bodies, the ‘deported, massacred, tortured bodies, extermi-
nated by the millions, piled up in charnel houses . . . the bodies of misery, the bodies of
starvation, battered bodies, prostituted bodies, mangled bodies, infected bodies, as well
as bloated bodies, bodies that are too well nourished, too “body-built”, too erotic, too
orgasmic’. There are already five billion bodies and soon there will be eight billion. ‘Six-
teen billion eyes, eighty billion fingers: to see what, to touch what?’ (2008: 83).

Our billions of images show billions of bodies—as bodies have never been shown
before. Crowds, piles, melees, bundles, columns, troops, swarms, armies, bands,
stampedes, panics, tiers, processions, collisions, massacres, mass graves, commu-
nions, dispersions, a sur-plus, always an overflowing of bodies, all at one and the
same time compacted in masses and pulverizing dispersals, always collected (in
streets, housing projects, megapolises, suburbs, points of passage, of surveillance,
of commerce, care and oblivion), always abandoned to the stochastic confusion of
564 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

the same places, to the structuring agitation of their endless, generalized, departure.
(Nancy 2008: 39)

Nancy warns us not to pretend that this discourse of bodies is archaic, because ‘Capi-
tal means: a body marketed, transported, displaced, replaced, superseded, assigned to a
post and a posture, to the point of ruin, unemployment, famine, a Bengali body bent
over a car in Tokyo, a Turkish body in a Berlin trench, a black body loaded down with
white packages in Suresnes or San Francisco’ (2008: 109–10). In Corpus Nancy develops
the logic of partes extra partes, a phrase used by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe the
way in which, in Ian James’s words, ‘material bodies exist in a relation of exteriority to
each other, and the way in which the components or constitutive parts of bodies likewise
exist outside of each other, never occupying the same place, and are thus able to articu-
late themselves as bodies and come into relation or contact with other bodies’ (James
2005: 143). ‘Where are the bodies anyway?’ asks Nancy, and replies that they are going
to work, are hard at work. They are ‘partes extra partes combining with the entire system
through figures and movements, pieces and levers, clutches, boxes, cutouts, encapsula-
tions, milling, uncoupling, stamping, enslaved systems, systemic enslaving, stocking,
handling, dumping, wrecks, controls, transports, tires, diodes, universal joints, forks,
crankshafts, circuits, diskettes, telecopies, markers, high temperatures, pulverizings, per-
forations, cablings, wiring, bodies wired to nothing but their minted force, to the sur-
plus value of capital collected and concentrated there’ (Nancy 2008: 109).
Thus the sharing of embodied sense which gives us a world takes place in Nancy as
an ‘originary technicity’ , comparable to Derrida’s notion of archi-écriture, but also al-
lowing a far greater engagement with the constitutive effects of embodiment, and the
distance and contingency of biological and technical bodies. As Ian James explains it in
his book on Nancy ‘when I drive a car, speak into a mobile phone, or type into a laptop
computer I am not just “using” technical apparatus; I am connected or “plugged into”
them in a way which more fundamentally reveals a certain manner of being or existence
and a certain experience or constitution of world-hood’ (2005: 145). The word Nancy
uses for this is ‘ecotechnics’, in which our world is ‘the world of the “technical”, the
world whose cosmos, nature, gods, whose system, complete in its intimate jointure, are
exposed as “technical” ’ (2008: 89).
In an essay written in response to the first Gulf War Nancy employs ‘ecotechnics’ as
the name of a single network of reciprocity of causes and effects referred to under the
‘double sign’ of respectively ‘planetary technology’ and ‘world economy’, which is ‘with-
out end’ in terms of millions of dollars, yen, therms, kilowatts, optical fibres, mega-
bytes. Inasmuch as it ‘damages, weakens, and upsets the functioning of all sovereignties’
(except those that coincide with its power) ecotechnics ‘gives value to a primacy of the
combinatory over the discriminatory, of the contractual over the hierarchical, of the net-
work over the organism, and more generally, of the spatial over the historical [and] to a
multiple and delocalized spatiality over a unitary and concentrated spatiality . . . Either
significations are spread out and diluted to the point of insignificance in the ideolo-
gies of consensus, dialogue, communication, or values (where sovereignty is thought to
Digital Art and Visual Culture 565

be nothing but a useless memory), or a surgery without sutures holds open the gaping
wound of meaning, in the style of a nihilism or aestheticizing minimalism (where the
gaping wound itself emits a black glow of lost sovereignty)’ (Nancy 2000: 135–6).
There can no longer be an observer of the world, a point Heidegger realized, in ex-
posing the end of the age of the world picture (Nancy 2000: 135–6). ‘A world outside
of representation is above all a world without God capable of being the subject of its
representation’ (Nancy 2000: 135–6). Nancy suggests that the world is thus neither ‘the
representation of a universe (cosmos) nor that of a here below (a humiliated world, if
not condemned by Christianity), but the excess . . . of a stance by which the world stands
by itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to
any given principle or to any determined end’ (2000: 47). He compares this to ‘the rose
grows without reason’ of the mystic Angelus Silesius. According to Nancy there is how-
ever a capitalist version of the ‘without reason’, which ‘establishes the general equivalent
of all forms of meaning in an infinite uniformity’. The ‘without reason’ is that which
makes modernity an enigma in that it can take the form both of capital and of the mys-
tic’s rose (2000: 47).
Nancy distinguishes between ‘globalization’ and ‘world-forming’, both of which
can be expressed by the word ‘mondialization’ in French. Following Marx he makes
the claim that the processes of globalization, concerned as they are with the extortion
of the value of work, can, in turn, lead to ‘world-making’ inasmuch as it reverses the
global domination of such extortion. As he puts it ‘commerce engenders communica-
tion, which requires community, communism’ (2000: 37). Globalization is however ‘the
suppression of all world-forming of the world’, inasmuch as it concerns the production
of absolute values without remainder. But the market that produces such values also
produces a wealth of knowledge and signification, a growing order of symbolic wealth.
Nancy thus proposes a fragile hypothesis involving an inversion in which the ‘produc-
tion of value’ becomes the ‘creation of meaning’ (2000: 49). Nancy is well aware that
the term ‘creation’ is charged with theological meaning and implications, and must be
grasped ‘outside of its theological context’. It is the exact opposite of ‘any form of pro-
duction in the sense of a fabrication that supposes a given, a project, and a producer’
(2000: 51). As ‘mystics of three monotheisms but also the complex systems of all great
metaphysics’ have elaborated, creation is ‘ex nihilo’, meaning not that it is ‘fabricated
with nothing by a particularly ingenious producer’ but that it is ‘created from nothing’,
nothing grows to become something, the ‘genuine formulation of a radical material-
ism, that is to say, precisely, without roots’ (2000: 51). As Nancy hinted earlier this is
not contrary to monotheism but in fact its outcome and the outcome in particular of
the ‘deconstruction of monotheism’ (which produces not an atheism or a theism but an
‘absentheism’). Indeed Nancy alludes to the Lurianic kabala in which ‘God annihilates
itself . . . as a “self ” or as distinct being in order to “withdraw” in its act—which makes an
opening of the world’ (2000: 70). The nothing from which creation grows is the ‘with-
out reason’ of the world.
This might be compared to the idea of Chora, which Derrida took from Plato’s Timaeus
to describe ‘the spacing that is the condition for everything to take place, for everything
566 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

to be inscribed’ (Derrida and Eisenman 1997: 3). Derrida suggests that Chora ‘is a ma-
trix, womb, or receptacle that is never offered up in the form of presence, or in the pres-
ence of form’ (Derrida 1978: 160). The conjunction of ‘matrix’ and ‘womb’ is a reminder
of the derivation of the former from ‘mater’, meaning ‘mother’. In ‘Faith and Knowl-
edge’ Derrida describes Chora as ‘nothing (no being, nothing present)’. It is ‘desert in
the desert’ (Derrida 2002: 59), ‘there where one neither can nor should see coming what
ought or could—perhaps—be yet to come. What is still left to come’ (47). This desert is
the ‘most anarchic and anarchivable place possible’ and ‘makes possible, opens, hollows,
infinitizes the other. Ecstacy or existence of the most extreme abstraction’. The ‘abstrac-
tion’ or ‘desertification’ of this ‘desert without pathway and without interior’ ‘can . . .
open the way to everything from which it withdraws’ and ‘render possible precisely what
it appears to threaten’ (47). Derrida connects the desert not just to Chora, but also to his
conception of the ‘messianic, or messianicity without messianism’, meaning ‘the open-
ing to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without ho-
rizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can
only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and
death—and radical evil—can come as a surprise at any moment’ (56). In that it both
has no material existence and it is based on pure difference the ‘digital’ is something like
Derrida’s Chora. Graham Ward observes that ‘Cyberspace is the realization of a meta-
phor used repeatedly by Derrida . . .—the Khora, the plenitudinous womb, dark, motile,
and unformed from which all things issue’ (Ward 1997: xvi).
In her essay ‘Read_me, run_me, execute_me; Code as Executable Text: Software
Art and Its Focus on Program Code as Performative Text’ Inke Arns explicitly describes
such work in terms derived from J. L. Austin’s concept of the performative (Arns n.d.).
Arns makes an important distinction between ‘generative art’ and ‘software art’, the lat-
ter allowing ‘for a critical reflection of software (and its cultural impact)’ and as involv-
ing projects that use ‘program code as their main artistic material or that deal with the
cultural understanding of software’ and not as ‘a pragmatic-functional tool that serves
the “real” art work, but rather as a generative material consisting of machinic and social
processes’ (Arns n.d.). In describing the ‘performativity of code’ Arns claims that this is
‘not to be understood as a purely technical performativity, i.e. it does not only happen in
the context of a closed technical system, but affects the realm of the aesthetical, the po-
litical and the social’. In that it has ‘immediate, also political consequences on the actual
and virtual spaces (amongst others, the internet), in which we are increasingly moving
and living: it means, ultimately, that this coded performativity mobilizes or immobilizes
its users. Code thus becomes Law, or, as Lawrence Lessig has put it in 1999 “Code (al-
ready) is Law” ’ (Arns n.d.).
Digital media, artefacts inscribed with material representations of digital data, may
exist but the digital itself does not exist. ‘There is no there there’. In whatever form or
medium it may be materialized it is itself nothing but difference. It has, in William
Gibson’s words, ‘infinite plasticity’ (Gibson 1999: 71). In her book The Future of Hegel:
Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic Catherine Malabou derives the ‘plastic’ from the
Greek plassein, to model or mould, thus meaning to be ‘susceptible to the change of
Digital Art and Visual Culture 567

form’, ‘malleable’, but also ‘having the power to bestow form’. (For Malabou plasticity is
the best description for Hegel’s theory of temporality and offers a way of understanding
him as a far more dynamic and open-ended thinker than has traditionally been the case.)
‘Plasticity’ thus means being at once capable of both receiving and giving form. It is thus
a term connected to art, and in particular, sculpture, the art of touch.
Inasmuch as software art involves both the plasticity of data and the touch of the
hands on the keyboard it is a kind of sculpture, an art of touch as well. Of course bound
up with creation is destruction. Malabou reminds us that ‘Plastic’ is also a term for an
explosive material, with a nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose base, which can lead to the
annihilation of form (Malabou 2005: 8). One of the most famous, or notorious ex-
amples of software art is the so-called forkbomb, in which a piece of code recursively
clones itself until it saturates and eventually disables an operating system. Mclean won
the software prize at the 2002 Transmediale Festival for his thirteen-line forkbomb,
though Jaromil’s 2002 forkbomb is regarded as the most elegant example: The entire
code, which runs in Unix is as follows; :(){ : |:& };:. In their work ‘www.jodi.org’ Joan
­Heemskerk and Dirk Paesens, known collectively as Jodi, present what appears to be
meaningless chaos on the screen. However the source HTML turns out to be in the
form of a diagram of how to build a nuclear bomb. Thus, against the mainstream use of
digital media, to present us with an apparently endless stream of visual and other expe-
riences, concealing the social, political and cultural antagonisms underlying our global-
ized society, some digital art acts to explode this continuum in order to reveal the various
codes underneath.
For Nancy the world has lost its capacity to ‘form a world’ and seems instead only
capable of proliferating the ‘un-world’ (immonde). He declares that ‘our task today is
nothing less than the talk of creating or forming a symbolisation of the world’.

To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible strug-
gle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice against
the background of general equivalence. But this means to conduct this struggle pre-
cisely in the name of the fact that this world is coming out of nothing, that there is
nothing before it and that it is without models, without principle and without given
end, and that it is precisely what forms the justice and the meaning of a world. (Nancy
2008: 54)

He continues that it is art ‘that indicates the stakes by exceeding all submission to an end
and exposing itself to remaining without end’ (54).
In his essay ‘Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One’ Nancy investigates the
plurality of arts and the supposed singularity of ‘art’. The ‘singular plural’ of art, of the
arts and the tension between the singular art and the multiple arts is a ‘tension between
two concepts of art, one technical and the other sublime’, or, in other words, an under-
standing of the arts from the perspective of different techniques on the one hand, and of
art from the perspective of some essence that exceeds any plurality (Nancy 1993: 2–3).
This is closely connected to the modern distinction between art and technics. ‘A careful
568 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

examination would, no doubt, show that a formula of the type “art and/or technics”
could in its own way condense the enigma of our times.’ This is traced back to a divi-
sion first mooted by Plato between the mode of production, teckhnē, and the product,
poiēsis (1993: 5).
It is here perhaps that Nancy’s ideas have the most direct relevance to the question
of visual art in a digital age. Following what he describes as a ‘scenario . . . in three acts’
involving Kant, Schelling and Hegel, Nancy shows that the difference between the arts
has been understood in terms of the difference between the senses (1993: 8). Decon-
structing the common-sense presumption that the division of the arts follows the divi-
sion of the senses, Nancy proposes that in fact the latter is produced by the former. ‘In
a word, the distribution or distributions of the senses, rather than sensibility as such,
would themselves be the products of “art” ’ (1993: 10). Nevertheless Nancy also points
out that the arts do not correspond to the traditional five senses, and in particular
touch, ‘established by a very long tradition as the paradigm or even as the essence of the
senses in general’, ‘does not open onto any kind of art’ (he excludes sculpture as ‘an art
of touch’ in that it ‘exceeds touch’) (1993: 11). He points out that ‘the heterogeneity of
the senses is impossible to decide’ and ‘considerably exceeds the five senses’ and also that
any such abstraction partition must always accede to a sensuous unity, especially given
the minute percentage of sensory information that is actually put to work by the brain.
Nor is it any point appealing to a putative ‘sixth sense’ that would unite the other five at
a higher level, as this is either supersensory metaphysics or it fails to overcome the physi-
cal nature of sense (1993: 13).
Claiming that ‘neither the senses as such nor their integration are either conditions
or models of the arts’ Nancy finds a solution in the work of Freud, who writes that ‘It
seems probable that any part of the skin and any sense organ—probably, indeed any
organ—can function as an erotogenic zone’, a fact which is ‘exposed by the primacy of
touch’ (1993: 16). ‘Touch is nothing other than the touch and stroke of sense altogether
and of all the senses . . . Touch is the interval and the heterogeneity of touch. Touch is
proximate distance. It makes one sense what makes one sense (what it is to sense): the
proximity of the distant, the approximation of the intimate’ (1993: 17).
Thus for Nancy ‘art touches on the sense of touch itself: in other words, it touches at
once on the “self touching” inherent in touch and on the “interruption” no less inherent
in it . . . it touches on the immanence and transcendence of touch . . . on the transimma-
nence of being-in-the-world . . . Art does not deal with the “world” understood as a sim-
ple exteriority or milieu, or nature. It deals with being-in-the-world in its very springing
forth’ (1993: 18). But it also touches in the sense of shaking up, disturbing, destabilizing
or deconstructing a world that ‘in the final analysis is less a sensuous world than an intel-
ligible world of markers, functions, uses and transitivities’ or in other words, a ‘milieu’.
‘Art isolates or forces there the moment of the world as such, the being-world of the
world, not as does a milieu in which the subject moves, but as exteriority and exposition
of a being-in-the-world, exteriority and exposition that are formally grasped, isolated
and presented as such’ (1993: 18). In this way the ‘irreducible plurality of . . . the world’
is made to appear through the zoning of the differential distribution of the senses. There
Digital Art and Visual Culture 569

would be no world without the discreteness of these zones, and it is only this discrete-
ness that allows the thing to be what it is in itself.
Thus the plurality of the arts isolates a sense to break down the living unity of per-
ception and action, and forces it ‘to be only what it is outside of signifying and use-
ful perception’. Art ‘forces a sense to touch itself, to be this sense, that it is’, and, in
doing so, to become not visual or sonorous, but pictorial or musical (1993: 21). Art
‘disengages the world from signification and that is what we call “the senses” ’ (1993:
22–3). This idea of the sense of the world as a suspension of signification is ‘touch it-
self ’. Nancy produces a wonderful list, a corpus, of the proliferating differences pro-
duced by the ‘dis-location’ by art of the ‘common sense’ of ordinary ‘synaesthesia’,
not just between the sensorial registers but across them as well, including colour, nu-
ance, paste, brilliance, shadow, surface, mass, perspective, contour, gesture, movement,
shock, grain, timbre, rhythm, flavour, odour, dispersion, resonance, trait, duction, dic-
tion, articulation, play, cut, length, depth, instant, duration, speed, hardness, thick-
ness, vapour, vibration, cast, emanation, penetration, grazing touch, tension, theme
and variation et cetera, that is, multiplied touches, ad infinitum (1993: 22).
Returning to the problematic question of art and technics with which he begins the
essay, for Nancy ‘the arts are first of all technical’, not in the sense that they are first a
technical procedure followed or capped by a final, artistic part. They are technical in that
‘technique means knowing how to go about producing what does not produce itself by
itself ’. Technique is ‘a—perhaps infinite—space and delay between the producer and
the produced, and thus between the producer and him—or herself ’ (1993: 25). Nancy
quotes Thierry de Duve, ‘to make art is to judge art, to decide, to choose’ who in turn
quotes Duchamp’s famous dictum that ‘to make something is to choose a tube of blue, a
tube of red, to put a little on one’s palette, and always to choose the quality of the blue,
the quality of the red, and always choose the place in which one is going to put it on the
canvas, it is always to choose’ (1993: 25).
In his essay ‘Painting in the Grotto’ Nancy describes the beginning of art in the hand
prints made twenty-seven to twenty-nine thousand years ago in the Cosquer caves in
France, the earliest known paintings. (On the French government Web site describing
the caves as well as fifty-five of these hand prints these are called ‘digital markings’.)
For Nancy these markings are the point where ‘Man’ confronts the strangeness and es-
trangement of his own humanity, and presented and figured it to himself. He is homo
monstrans, before he is homo sapiens. It is ‘the spacing by which man is brought into the
world, and by which the world itself is a world: the event of all presence in its absolute
strangeness’ (1993: 70). These hand prints, with their open gestures, like an impossible
or abandoned grasp, are described as the first self-portraits. Moreover the ‘image praises
the thing as detached from the universe of things and shown to be detached as is the
whole of the world. (The whole of the world is detached from self: it is detachment)’
(1993: 73). Nancy asks us to imagine the first imager, his hand advancing into a void,
hollowed out at that very instant, which separates him from himself, and in doing so
makes him a self. He touches the wall not as a support or an obstacle, but as a place,
in which is opened up a ‘distance that suspends the continuity and the cohesion of the
570 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

universe, in order to open up a world’ (1993: 75). Thus art is always-already digital, and
the digital is art, in that art is the means by which the synaesthetic continuity of the mi-
lieu is interrupted, where its spacing, contiguity and contingency allows the world in its
plurality to be revealed, and where things are shown to touch but never to penetrate.
This brings us back to Google Earth. In 2007 new media artists Thomson and Craig-
head released a seven-minute video entitled Flat Earth which they described as a desktop
documentary, which takes the viewer on a seven-minute trip around the world so that
we encounter a series of fragments taken from real peoples’ blogs. These fragments are
knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative. One of the consequences
of war waged through such means is that the human suffering it entails is concealed
from the public and thus from the volatility of public opinion. We are allowed to forget
that there are humans below the bombs, with voices and stories to tell.
This is exactly what Thomson and Craighead’s Flat Earth achieves as it elegantly alters
Google Earth, by linking a bomb’s-eye view of the lives of those in the places observed,
as recorded in blogs. We get glimpses of the lives of US and Japanese teenagers, an Af-
rican villager, a London policeman and, perhaps most poignantly, a woman in Tehran,
anticipating future US bombing. Thomson and Craighead take some of these themes
further in their next work, Short Films about War, a double-screen projection of a seven-
minute film. On the left hand screen images and short animated sequences are shown,
the former consisting of downloads from Flickr and the latter of zooms into Google-
Earth–style representations of parts of the world. On the right hand screen a scrolling
list indicates the source of the images and of the blogs from which the voice-over nar-
rations are taken. In giving us these glimpses Flat Earth and Short Films about War act
as vital correctives to the ocular imperialism of Google Earth and, by extension, of the
Internet in general, which is concealed from us by its counter-cultural credentials.
This is perhaps what digital art (as opposed to the more general realm of digital
representation) can offer; a reminder of the lives behind the endless images of bodies,
lives that are disavowed or effaced in our digital, virtual culture. It allows us to touch
and touch upon those discrete existences with which we share this planet. It does so by
breaking up the illusion of seamless interactivity and communicativity by interrupting
the synaesthetic continuity of the milieu, and revealing, through spacing, contiguity and
contingency the world in its plurality.

FURTHER READING
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’ in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The
Texts of Jacques Derrida. Edited by John Sallis. Chicago, London: University of Chicago
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1993. ‘Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?’ in The Muses. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Nancy Jean-Luc. 2000. ‘Being Singular Plural’ in Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body. New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press.
Digital Art and Visual Culture 571

References
Arns, Inke. n.d. ‘Read_me, run_me, execute_me’, in Code as Executable Text: Software Art and Its
Focus on Program Code as Performative Text. www.medienkunstnetz.de, http://www.medien
kunstnetz.de/themes/generative-tools/read_me/, accessed 1 May 2009.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques and Peter Eisenman. 1997. Chora L Works, eds. J. Kipnis and T. Leeser. London:
Monacelli Press.
Gibson, William. 1999. All Tomorrow’s Parties. New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons.
James, Ian. 2005. The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. New York
and London: Routledge.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Muses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World, or, Globalization. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press.
Ward, Graham, ed. 1997. The Postmodern God. London and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
 25

Digitalization, Visualization
and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ in
Contemporary Sociology
Roger Burrows

Epochalism/Digitalization
Epochalism is rife within much contemporary social theory. As Savage (2009a: 218)
views it, much sociological discourse attempts to construct ‘a distinctive narrative con-
ception of temporality which cleanly separates out a past and present’. It does this by
suggesting that ‘we used to live in industrial/capitalist/modern society’, whilst ‘now we
live in post-industrial/disorganized/post-modern/post-Fordist/globalized/detraditional-
ized/individualized/risk/network etc. society’. ‘Delete as appropriate’ he adds in a light-
hearted footnote. Certainly, such modes of theorizing are very readily apparent within
many recent discussions of social change that foreground the active role of digital tech-
nologies in invoking transformations of one type or another. Dodge and Kitchin (2004:
209), for example characterize the emerging role of digital code in social life as ‘the life-
blood of the network society, just as steam was at the start of the industrial age’. For
them ‘[c]ode, like steam, has the power to shape the material world; it is able to produce
space’. A slightly more subtle characterization of the social role of digital code is articu-
lated by Thrift and French (2002: 309), but still with a strong inflection of epochalism,
when they argue that the ‘technical substrate of . . . societies . . . has changed decisively as
software has come to intervene in all aspects of everyday life’. For them, the increasing
ubiquity of code is altering social ontology creating a ‘new and complex form of auto-
mated spatiality . . . which has important consequences for what we regard as the world’s
phenomenality’. The cultural theorist Scott Lash (2006; 2007a) concurs, arguing that
social associations and interactions are no longer just being mediated by software and
code but are becoming increasingly constituted by it. In his terminology, ‘[w]hat was a
medium . . . has become a thing, a product’ (Lash 2007a: 18). Information is no longer
just epistemological, it is becoming increasingly ontological. Information is now not
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 573

only a means by which we come to understand the world; it is an active agent in con-
structing it (Lash 2006: 581).
Epochalism, as Savage (2009a: 220) argues, is generally an unproductive mode of
sociological theorizing:

‘Disorganized capitalism’. . . , ‘post-Fordism’. . . , ‘individualization’. . . , ‘reflexive (or

late) modernity’. . . , the ‘risk society’. . . , globalization . . . , neoliberalism . . . , the ‘net-
work society’. . . , have all waxed and waned over little more than a decade. Yet the ar-
rival of such ‘new’ conditions is no sooner announced then they are replaced by yet
newer epochal claims . . . Why should we become especially interested in scrutinizing
the particular characteristics of one account of epochal change when we can be pretty
confident . . . that this will be replaced by a new schema for understanding another
epochal change in a little while? . . . What does it mean for the credibility of social sci-
entific knowledge itself when it seems to so readily embrace a culture of inbuilt obso-
lescence, where announcements about the arrival of fundamentally new conditions are
no sooner made than they are dissipated by the next version?

However, it must be recognized that it is often difficult to register the significance of

altered circumstances without lapsing into the discursive construction of such epoch-
alistic binaries. Such is the case with theorizing the social significance of the increasing
ubiquity of digital code. In this chapter rather than exploring how best we might theo-
rize social life under conditions of increasing digitalization our focus will be on the im-
plications of such processes for the conduct of empirical social research. It is again in the
recent work of Savage (2009b) that we find a useful framing of this issue. He argues that
in order to circumnavigate modes of sociological discourse with a fetish for epochalism
we need to reinvigorate our engagement with new and innovative forms of methodology
better able to capture the complex patterns of continuity and change that characterize
all societies. He argues that this will best be done by encouraging a nascent ‘descriptive
turn’ in the discipline in response to the onslaught of ubiquitous digitalization processes.
From the point of view of this volume, this is of interest because he further argues that
this reorientation will likely involve a revitalization of visualization methods, moving
them from the periphery of the discipline towards a position more centre-stage (Savage
2009b).

Digitalization and the Coming Crisis

of Empirical Sociology
There is also an overriding sense in the literature that empirical sociology is in some sort
of crisis (Adkins and Lury 2009; Savage and Burrows 2007; 2009). The precise contours
of this crisis need not detain us here, other than to note that they are not unconnected
with (but neither are they entirely due to) the ubiquity of digitalization processes. So-
ciology has been sluggish to respond to the implications that digitalization has for—to
574 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

repeat the terminology of Thrift and French—‘what we regard as the world’s phenom-
enality’. This sluggishness of response to changed circumstances is not an inherent char-
acteristic of the discipline. Indeed, for much of the postwar period the discipline was
as successful as it was because it possessed a remarkable capacity for methodological in-
novation that allowed it to glean privileged access to the study of the ‘social’. As Savage
(2010) has detailed in his recent history of social science research methods, Identities
and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method, what we now take to be
very mundane techniques of sociological inquiry—the in-depth interview, the sample
survey and so on—were, at the time of their invention, remarkable innovations. Indeed,
it can be argued, pace Abbott (1988), that it was precisely these kinds of innovations in
methodology that provided sociologists with their claims to jurisdiction over the study
of social relations that they required in order to construct themselves as a profession
distinct from other social scientists. Between about 1950 and 1990 sociologists could
confidently claim a series of distinctive methodological tools that allowed them to claim
privileged points of access to social relations. However, in the twenty-first century digi-
talization processes have resulted in social data becoming so routinely gathered and dis-
seminated, and in such myriad ways, that the role of academic sociologists in generating
data is become increasingly unclear (Savage and Burrows 2007).
The enmeshing of digital code and software with social structures and practices is
clearly significant; whether it means we now confront a radically altered social ontology,
as some would suggest (Lash 2007b), is a moot point, but the implications for the so-
cial sciences are certainly profound. Many everyday practices now leave behind a digital
trace: applying for a social security benefit; purchasing an item from a shop; download-
ing music; playing a computer game; watching digital TV; making a phone call; being
screened for a medical condition; searching for an item on the Internet; or—as UK
MPs recently discovered—making an expenses claim.1 The possibilities afforded by such
transactional digitalization have been leapt on by commercial interests, the state and
hobbyest (Hardey and Burrows 2008) but less so by the academy. For Savage (2009b),
thinking through how we might begin to better describe such data to analytic ends, by
means of radical methodological innovations designed to re-enchant the sociological
imagination, is of crucial importance if the academy is to regain its position as an obliga-
tory point of passage (Latour 2005) for the hordes of actants who now claim legitimate
interest in ‘knowing’ the ‘social’ (Thrift 2005).

Digital Data
We are all aware of the increasing capacity of commerce and the state to use various
types of digital transactional data to produce new forms of knowledge of use to them—
knowledge that is largely a by-product of a huge number of mundane commercial or
administrative transactions that leave a digital trace. Consider, for example the dramatic
possibility that the next UK Census in 2011 could be the last. Every ten years the British
state undertakes a Census of the population where every household is expected to com-
plete a census return, and whose results have been used to monitor population change.
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 575

Such data has not only been at the heart of the UK policy and planning system it has
also been a fundamental part of demographic and social scientific research. For the next
Census, in 2011, the process of running the data collection will be subcontracted to a
private contractor.2 However, alongside this ‘privatization’ of a previously unambigu-
ous function of the state, a parliamentary committee (House of Commons 2008) has
suggested that the Census should be replaced by data collected via linked administra-
tive data records, which it thinks will provide more accurate accounts of the population
(Savage and Burrows 2009: 762). So rather than having to collect data using a specific
tool of data collection (the census return) data would be collected which is a digital by-
product of the ongoing interaction the citizen has with the administrative apparatus of
the state. The technical challenges to developing such a system are, of course, huge, but
the aspiration of having a ‘real-time’ record of population change—the ability to ‘track’
and ‘trace’ individuals through time and space as a result of their episodic interactions
with state agencies is one that will almost certainly come to fruition.
It is an aspiration that has already been operationalized in various ways, often to dra-
matic effect, in much of the commercial sector. Tesco, the supermarket chain, through
its work with subsidiary company dunnhumby3 (sic), for example is able to manipulate
huge amounts of data collected through its Tesco Clubcard scheme in order to provide
rapid and detailed analysis of consumer behaviour. Experian, the credit referencing and
data brokerage company, has geo-coded every individual and household in the UK (and
much of the rest of the world) into distinct types of consumer by means of its Mosiac
geodemographic systems (about which more below) constructed from a huge range of
commercial and official transactional data sources (Burrows and Gane 2006; Parker et al.
2007). Internet-based operations such as Amazon and iTunes use the purchasing pat-
terns of all consumers to make ‘recommendations’ to individual consumers. In academia
Google Scholar does much the same thing by using citation practices as a means of de-
termining which academic articles are the most ‘similar’ in order to recommend ‘related’
articles based upon high degrees of concordance between the citations.
Hitherto these processes have largely been concentrated on the development of rela-
tional databases where data entry is by means of routine transactions between the state,
the citizen, commerce and the consumer. However, with the advent of Web 2.0 (Beer
and Burrows 2007) and the recent explosion in ‘user-generated content’, we have wit-
nessed the emergence of a new hybrid actor—the prosumer (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2009);
ontologically neither a ‘pure’ producer nor a ‘pure’ consumer, these are actors who freely
labour (or perhaps playbour?) in order to provide ‘free’ content. Such sites as Facebook,
Wikipedia, Flikr and the rest all provide data ‘freely’ given by users. However, we are also
at the cusp of another means by which the ubiquity of the digital tracking and tracing
of social data will enter a phase shift. As Katherine Hayles (Hayles in Gane et al. 2007:
349) expresses it, if relational databases (be they derived from by-product transactional
data or that actively provided by Web 2.0 prosumers) are the ‘brains’ behind digitaliza-
tion, then they are about to get ‘legs’ as a plethora of new objects begin to enter our so-
cial worlds able to gather data on all manner of activities on a scale hitherto unimagined
(Hayles 2009).
576 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

A Typology of Digital Objects

These objects have been very usefully typologized by Dodge and Kitchen (2009: 1348).
We have, over the years, become increasingly familiar with what they call peripherally
coded objects in which ‘the presence of code is merely adornment . . . a gas cooker might
have a digital clock embedded in it, but if this timer ceases to function the cooker will
continue to cook food’. Such objects have software embedded within them, ‘but such
code is not essential to their use’. However, in recent years we have seen the emergence of
what they term codejects—categories of objects ‘dependent upon code to function—the
object and its code are thoroughly interdependent’. They further subdivide these objects
into three main types differentiated ‘on the basis of their programmability, interactivity,
remembering capacity, their ability for anticipatory action in the future based on previ-
ous use, and relational capacities’. First, hard codejects ‘rely on code to function, but are
not programmable and therefore have low levels of interactivity’—a USB memory stick
is an example. Second, unitary codejects, which ‘are programmable, exhibit some level
of interactivity . . . [but] . . . do not record their work in the world’. Examples of closed
codejects would include some ‘audiovisual equipment such as radios, and CD and DVD
players’. In these examples code ‘is vital to the functioning and performance . . . but
the object executes its task independently of the world around it’. Sensory codejects, on
the other hand—objects such as digital central heating control units or programmable
washing machines—‘have some awareness of their environment and react automatically
to some kind of external stimulus’. Third, and crucially, Dodge and Kitchen (2009:
1348) register the increasing presence of what they term logjects—the putative ‘legs’ of
digitalization processes to which Hayles refers. Logjects are objects:

which have an ‘awareness’ of themselves and of their relations with the world and
which, by default, automatically record aspects of those relations in logs that are
stored and reused in the future. Logjects often have high levels of inter-activity and
multifunctionality.

Permeable logjects create a log of use but do not form a constant connection with
networks, the information they hold can only be obtained when it is connected into
such networks. It therefore holds this information unless the user makes the effort to
connect the device with a wider network that might then extract the information. An
MP3 player, for example will only give up logs when docked into a networked com-
puter which may then communicate this information about its use to external bodies.
Compare this, however, with networked logjects which like the permeable variety retains
information about the use and history of the object, but which differ in one vital regard
in that rather than being self-contained units that may intermittently connect into a
network they are, instead, fully networked and thus able to communicate this recorded
information when required. Examples include satellite television boxes, home security
monitoring systems, and, critically, mobile telephones. These devices then are constantly
communicating information or are open for information to be harvested when required.
We can clearly place the now networked versions of mobile music devices in this second
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 577

category of logjects; these devices are now wireless enabled and can therefore operate as
networked devices which log and communicate information about their usage. Thus we
can begin to see such objects as harvesting ever more detailed transactional data about
us. The volume of such data will increase as and when such devices come to be used
more routinely for paying for goods and services.4
The result is that the ability of these logjects to store and communicate information
about their use means that things like the music or radio we listen to, the videos and
TV shows we watch, the locations we move through, the photos we take and so on, are
now becoming increasingly trackable and traceable as logjects are activated in everyday
practices. With ever more networked logjects coming on the market—the Apple iPhone
3G being perhaps paradigmatic—we can begin to glimpse the possibility of the arrival
of another new object likely to be a central concern of much future social scientific
analyses—the spime (Burrows and Beer 2010).

Spimes
Spimes (a neologism of space and time) are the thought ‘invention’ of former cyberpunk
author Bruce Sterling (2005). Although he uses a different terminology, Sterling is inter-
ested in what is likely to result as networked logjects become ubiquitous. He sees them
as the central feature of a newly emergent technoculture. Sterling identifies a number of
prior technocultures: a pre-1500 culture of Artefacts; a post-1500s technoculture of Ma-
chines; a post-1800s technoculture of Products; and a Gizmo technoculture which began
around 1989 and which we still (just) inhabit. Although still mass produced, a Gizmo
device in the hands of its user will not necessarily be the same item that left the factory.
They are increasingly user-alterable, upgradeable and unstable and require extensive in-
formational support systems to function (hence the ubiquitous ‘software updates ready
to install’). Sterling’s vision for the next technoculture is the spime; a theoretical image of
future production, consumption and cultural practices. Sterling foresees a future based
around ‘trackable’ objects. Every object produced will be assigned a unique identity.
Radio frequency identification devices (RFID), or ‘arphids’ as they are known in the
literature, may perhaps be viewed as a prefigurative of this (Bleecker 2006; Crang and
Graham 2007; Gane et al. 2007; Hayles 2009).
As with the networked logject, as the spime moves through space and time it gener-
ates a log of activity—when and where it was made, where it was sent to, who has owned
it, when it is used, whether it is functioning correctly, whether it needs repair and a whole
myriad of other information. In so doing, it also records data about the things it comes
into contact with. Sterling suggests that spimes will still be manufactured objects, but ob-
jects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are
best regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end
as data. They are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means and precisely tracked
through space and time throughout their ‘earthly sojourn’ (Sterling 2005: 11). Such en-
tities will, of course, be ‘eminently data-minable’ (Sterling 2005: 11) to the extent that
their value will more often than not be in the extractable information they contain rather
578 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

than in the object itself. In Sterling-speak: ‘in an age of spimes, the object is no longer an
object, but an instantiation’ (Sterling 2005: 79). This then is a brave attempt to grapple
with the consequences of the eminent trackability and traceability of objects; of the so-
ciological consequences of what is rapidly becoming an ‘Internet of things’.

Dealing with Data Inundation: Towards a ‘Lyrical

Sociology’ or towards the Development of More
Mundane Inscription Devices?
So the challenge for sociology is how best to deal with this inundation of digital ‘social’
data from administrative and commercial transactions; from Web 2.0 and the Internet
more generally; and from the new categories of objects and/or logjects able to track and
trace human conduct through time and space. Savage (2009b) is quite clear that what is
required is a radical reappraisal of the analytic role of description contra causal modes of
sociological analysis. He points out that outside of the academy:

Market researchers profile different types of consumer, thus allowing firms to position
their products and brands in a competitive marketplace. The security services profile
criminal types by a process of association, linking a series of ‘suspect’ characteristics
together so that the search for the perpetrators can be narrowed down. Government
departments construct, and are themselves judged by their ability to meet, welters of
‘indicators’ . . . The medical sciences proliferate scanning devices which allow doctors
to describe what is inside people’s bodies, so allowing diagnosis to be anchored to in-
spection. (Savage 2009b: 155–6)

Such processes may, of course, be thought of as fundamentally asociological in the

sense that they run counter to the well-established Weberian dictum that sociologists
should be striving to provide ‘explanations’ of social phenomena that are adequate both
at the level of cause and at the level of meaning. In none of the examples cited above by
Savage (2009b: 156) ‘is it deemed essential to understand why someone is doing some-
thing or why something is happening’. Rather the aim seems to be ‘to associate actions
with other actions, leading to a concertina-like process of ever more elaborate descrip-
tion’ (Savage 2009b: 156). It is also asociological in another perhaps even more pro-
found sense. Hitherto the majority of sociologists have been

wedded to a ‘depth model’, whereby they were able to order the social by separating
the ‘wheat’—in the form of deep, causal or structural processes, usually linked to the
‘master’ variables of class, gender, nation, etc.—from the chaff of superficial, contin-
gent observations. (Savage 2009b: 157)

The ‘descriptive turn’ potentially undermines this possibility, implying instead a soci-
ology that foregrounds a concern for the complex articulation of surface patterns. Savage
(2009b) attempts a symptomatic reading of a diverse range of contemporary sociologists
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 579

in an attempt to reveal their nascent recognition of the necessity to re-enchant the dis-
cipline with a new concern with the ‘descriptive’. In the work of the Chicago-based
sociologist Andrew Abbott in particular he finds a range of innovative strategies de-
signed to confront the issue. Although Abbott is sympathetic towards a range of quasi-
­mathematical and visualization tools for ordering and sequencing data of various types
in the end he views the best option for sociology as being the development of what
he terms a ‘lyrical sociology’ (Abbott 2007). This is an approach to sociology that is
explicitly opposed to narrative—by which Abbott intends both standard quantitative
variable-centred sociology and qualitative forms of sociology that take a narrative and
explanatory approach to the study of the social. He defines ‘lyrical sociology’ as

an engaged nonironic stance towards its object of analysis, by specific location of both
its subject and its object in social space, and by a momentaneous conception of social
time . . . [It] typically uses strong figuration and personification, and aims to commu-
nicate its author’s emotional stance towards his or her object of study, rather than to
‘explain’ that object. (Abbott 2007: 67)

Now, it is difficult to identify forms of contemporary academic sociology that meet

anything approaching this definition. However, there are other manifestations of the
contemporary sociological imagination that clearly do. For, it is not just the methods of
sociology that have seeped out of the academy to become a ubiquitous part of the in-
frastructure of ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift 2005); the cultivation of a distinctively so-
ciological sensibility has also become a far more generic aspect of our (popular) culture
than perhaps we have hitherto realized (Beer and Burrows 2010). And it is often this
sensibility outside of the academy that possesses the more ‘lyrical’ quality that could per-
haps feed a more descriptive form of sociology. As C. Wright Mills (1959: 19, note 2)
observed over fifty years ago, when he spoke of the ‘sociological imagination’ he was not
referring to ‘merely the academic discipline of “sociology” ’; indeed, he was highly dis-
paraging of much of what passed for academic sociology at the time—the ‘grand theory’
of Parsons and his acolytes, and the ‘abstracted empiricism’ of Lazarsfeld and his (Mills
1959: chs. 2 and 3).5 Rather Mills located such a sensibility as residing within different
regions of cultural production.6 Clearly, the regions of cultural production have become
far more diverse and complex in the past fifty years and it is no longer just in text-based
cultural practices—journalism, fiction and history—that we can now locate such a sen-
sibility (Osbourne et al. 2008).7 Indeed such a lyrical sociological sensibility is now per-
haps most likely to be found within our visual culture—televisual culture in particular.
A paradigmatic instance of this has been the much-discussed HBO TV series The
Wire (Penfold-Mounce et al. 2011; Potter and Marshall 2009; Sharma 2009)—other
examples might include The Sopranos or Generation Kill. All are strong on characteriza-
tion, social space, social time, figuration, personification and affect but relatively weak
on traditional narrative. The Wire premiered in the USA on 2 June 2002 and ended on
9 March 2008, with sixty episodes airing over the course of its five seasons. All sixty epi-
sodes were finally shown on BBC2 in the first half of 2009. Set in Baltimore, Maryland,
580 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

USA it has a huge cast of over three hundred characters. The ‘star’ of the show is, how-
ever, the city—a simulated postindustrial every town—within which the interactions
between the drugs economy, race, the criminal justice system, the polity, globalization
processes, the changing class structure, the education system and the (new and old)
media are examined in minute detail. It has been widely critically acclaimed not just as
a complex piece of ‘entertainment’ but also as a profoundly ‘sociological’ piece of TV
(Potter and Marshall 2009)—as a form of social science fiction?8 The eminent Harvard
sociologist William Julius Wilson, for example very publicly proclaimed the following at
a seminar held at Harvard on 4 April 2008; he opened proceedings with the following
statement, which is worth quoting at length:9

The Wire’s exploration of sociological themes is truly exceptional. Indeed I do not hesi-
tate to say that it has done more to enhance our understandings of the challenges of
urban life and urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publication,
including studies by social scientists . . . The Wire develops morally complex characters
on each side of the law, and with its scrupulous exploration of the inner workings
of various institutions, including drug-dealing gangs, the police, politicians, unions,
public schools, and the print media, viewers become aware that individuals’ decisions
and behaviour are often shaped by—and indeed limited by—social, political, and eco-
nomic forces beyond their control.

Such lyrical, visual forms of the sociological imagination are, however, likely to be
few and far between and do not, at any rate, directly tackle the issue of data inunda-
tion. They are, in fact, a way of the social sciences finding solace in the humanities; an
attractive form of visual sociological dérive giving the illusion of an ability of being able
to analyse totalities—cities in the instance of The Wire—by recourse to lyrical, artistic,
cultural and political visual sensibilities. We should all celebrate the arts and the hu-
manities; doubly so when they invoke such a strong sense of the sociological imagina-
tion. However, such forms of descriptive sociology only provide a context to, rather than
being at the heart of the ‘descriptive turn’; for this we need to seek out methodological
innovations in techniques of visualization rather than visual prowess in the presentation of
fictional sociological data. Obviously both can invoke the sociological imagination but we
need to be clear that visual and fictional creativity per se—however brilliant—is in the
end no substitute for the establishment and perpetuation of more mundane sociological
inscription devices able to take on the realities of digital data inundation. Where might
we begin to look for such devices?

Visual Inscription Devices for the Descriptive Turn?

We end this chapter by pointing to a range of rather disparate methodological devel-
opments which, taken together, might begin to prefigure the development of a set of
new sociological inscription devices able to underpin the ‘descriptive turn’ in sociol-
ogy. We point, first, to very recent changes in mainstream social statistics software
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 581

(Uprichard et al. 2008) that will potentially revitalize exploratory and visual tech-
niques, the development of which had earlier (in the late 1970s and early 1980s)
been stymied. Next we examine the emergence of the ‘new cartography’ (Hardey and
Burrows 2008) and associated developments in Web 2.0-based social software (Beer
and Burrows 2007). Finally, we briefly examine practices in ‘commercial sociology’
(Burrows and Gane 2006)—geodemographics in particular—that increasingly rely
upon the representation of social complexity by way of strongly visual characteriza-
tions of data.

Back to the Future? From SPSS to PASW

For many years SPSS—the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences—has been a staple
of the majority of sociological educational diets. However, a visit to www.spss.com
soon makes it clear that this particular piece of iconic software has been profoundly
changed by a number of the issues we have noted above. The corporate history sec-
tion of the Web site makes it very clear that, although SPSS ‘stood for the Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences’ (emphasis added), it is now no longer an acronym but
the name of the company. The site no longer functions in order to interpellate ‘social
scientists’; rather it now hails those seeking ‘business solutions’. Even the software
itself—SPSS version 18.0 and beyond—has been rebranded as PASW—predictive
analytics software. These developments are a culmination of the development of the
brand since about 1997 when it began to take over a number of different software
companies. Instead of acquiring products similar to the ones that had long been at
the core of SPSS as a piece of ‘social science’ software, the products that were sought
were ones that offered ‘data mining’, ‘business intelligence’, ‘Web analytics’, ‘online
analytical processing’ and ‘text mining’. This strategic shift was, of course, a commer-
cial response to the profound processes of social digitalization that we have already
noted. SPSS quickly caught on to the implications that the increased digitalization of
data implies—even if the academy did not—and it has successfully established a mar-
ket segment in, what it terms (and as we have seen) ‘predictive analytics’ (Uprichard
et al. 2008). Although the advent of ‘predictive analytics’ in SPSS might seem like an
uneventful turn of events it is emblematic of a new methodological ethos in quantita-
tive methods that is beginning to reflect aspects of the ‘descriptive turn’. The data in-
undation that has resulted from the digitalization of routine transactional operations,
the ubiquity of the Web, the emergence on networked logjects and so on, offers the
empirical basis for changes in the fundamental ‘nuts and bolts’ of quantitative sociol-
ogy (Uprichard et al. 2008). Newly emergent forms of quantitative sociology involve
a move from an explanation of how variables work together towards an exploration
and description of different kinds of cases, and ultimately tentative predictions based
on the depictions of those cases. This requires a focus on exploring and describing em-
pirical data—a radical return then to Tukey’s (1977) extensive work on exploratory
data analysis (EDA), as well as Tufte’s (1983, 1991, 1997) various efforts towards the
visualization of quantitative data.
582 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

The New Cartography and Web 2.0 Social Software

As important as changes in social statistics have been, the recent cross-disciplinary fore-
grounding of cartography is probably of more importance for debates about sociologi-
cal visualization. Why have ‘maps’ of various sorts suddenly come to such analytic and
popular prominence? The answer, of course, is nowhere better articulated than in the
writings of Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson over a quarter of a century ago. In
what was to become a seminal statement Jameson (1984: 89) called for the development
of ‘an aesthetics of cognitive mapping’ designed to deal with what he viewed at the time
as ‘the incapacity of our minds . . . to map the great global multinational and decentred
communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’
(Jameson 1984: 84). Of course this radical call for a new cartographical imagination
presaged the emergence of the technologies able to underpin it by about two decades.
But as Holmes (2006: 20) has pointed out, Jameson possessed a profound sense of what
was needed. He clearly saw the necessity for ‘[e]pistemological shifts, pushed forward by
the use of sophisticated technical instruments . . . paralleled by the deployment of radi-
cally new visual vocabularies’. The ‘mapping impulse Jameson foretold’ (Holmes 2006:
20) has now arrived. As Abrams and Hall (2006: 12) express it in their programmatic
statement concerning the emergence of the new cartographies:

Mapping has emerged in the information age as a means to make the complex acces-
sible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable. As we struggle to steer through
the torrent of data unleashed by the Internet, and to situate ourselves in a world in
which commerce and community have been redefined in terms of networks, mapping
has become a way of making sense of things.

This new cartography takes many forms, but the paradigmatic instance has been Google
Earth (http://earth.google.com/), launched in 2005 and the associated Google Maps. They
have a simple interface, provide easy access to terabytes of high-resolution geographic in-
formation and, crucially, have the capability for users to add ‘layers’ of additional data. The
significance of the new digital mapping resources cannot be underestimated. The conver-
gence of such cartographic technologies with networked logjects, such as the Apple iPhone
3G, has already begun to transform our visualization, and thus understanding of, urban
space (Hardey 2007). At the heart of this new popular cartography is the possibility of al-
lowing people to ‘play’ using open source applications. One form of play—that of produc-
ing mashups—is particularly interesting as a potentially prefigurative form of descriptive
sociology (Hardey and Burrows 2008). This term—mashup—has been appropriated from
pop music where a DJ takes, for example a vocal track from one song and combines it with
the instrumental track of another in order to produce an emergent sound derived from
both sources. Within the context of the new cartography a mashup can be thought of as
the result of using an application that combines content from more than one data source
into an integrated, usually visual, representation. Mashups utilizing maps are then essen-
tially a form of a Web-based ‘Do-It-Yourself’ geographic information system (GIS).10
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 583

Mashups, however, are just one of a number of Web 2.0 applications (Beer and Bur-
rows 2007) that provide forms of what we might begin to think of as infotainment that
allow users to ‘play’ with data and visualizations of social phenomena. The wonderful
Web site flowingdata.com/ is a particularly useful source for developments in this area.
Interestingly the site is headed with a quote from the social statistician and advocate of
EDA, John Tukey: ‘The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what
we never expected to see.’ This surely is a simple statement of the necessity for the re-
enchantment of sociology via a radical turn not just to description but to visualization as
well; a re-enchantment that the rest of the FlowingData site amply illustrates via myriad
graphics and stunning innovations in the presentation of the ‘surface patterns’ of social
life. As the site expresses it: ‘Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.’ This
is an aspiration that the Obama administration in the USA appears to be taking very
seriously. It has launched Data.gov, which although it has all the features and ‘feel’ of
any other Web 2.0 application, is in fact giving analysts and members of the public un-
precedented access to ‘high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive
Branch of the Federal Government’. It provides a host of relatively easy-to-use tools for
data analysis and visualization. Such applications, alongside others such as the brilliant
www.gapminder.org/—which produces stunning dynamic visualizations of patterns of
social inequality—and www.worldometers.info/—which produces numerical visualiza-
tions of world social and cultural statistics updated in ‘real-time’—demonstrate tech-
niques by which even the most innumerate social scientist might be drawn into thinking
about how we might better describe our data, and in ways that are engaging to a range
of different publics.

Geodemographics
This concern to describe complex social data sets by way of innovative techniques of
visualization has, of course, long been a concern of ‘commercial sociologists’ (Burrows
and Gane 2006). Although many rely upon graphical visualizations of their data, oth-
ers have developed ways of describing their data that rely upon emblematic montages of
images able to capture symbolically the complexities of the social phenomena they are
seeking to describe. A prime example of this can be found in the manner in which data
are used to characterize neighbourhoods. From the mid 1970s onwards the availability
of postcoded data of various sorts made possible a new way of describing differences
between neighbourhoods—what came to be known as geodemographics (Burrows and
Gane 2006). It came to recognized by some in the academy that the clustered nature
of the social ontology of towns and cities could be increasingly well described by ap-
plying emerging techniques of statistical cluster analysis to the myriad forms of post-
coded social data that were emerging. So, crudely, the clustered differentiated ‘reality’
of ‘ground truth’ could be modelled using algorithms which, it was hoped, could pro-
duce homologous statistical constructs (see Uprichard et al. 2009 for a fuller account).
The skill of the commercial geodemographers was not only to apply these techniques
to data in which case was the postcode, but also to possess the cultural insight, literary
584 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

flair and visual sensibility which enabled the production of rich qualitative narratives
able to effortlessly translate dull statistical output to compelling ideal typical charac-
terizations of neighbourhoods and the people that animated them (Phillips and Curry
2002) and then to produce convincing visualizations of them. With the advent of wide-
spread processes of digitization and the routine production of huge amounts of post-
coded transactional data the informational base for the production of ever more subtle
forms of geodemographic neighbourhood differentiation has continued apace (Savage
and Burrows 2007). The most widely used system is currently the Mosaic classifica-
tion owned by the global data corporation Experian (Burrows and Gane 2006; Parker
et al. 2007; Uprichard et al. 2009). The most recent Mosaic system—released in July
2009—classifies each of the UK’s 47 million adults, 24 million households and 1.78
million postcodes into 141 different person-types, 67 different households types and
15 groups. The broad outline of the technical details of how Mosaic is built is simple
enough; it is a form of weighted cluster analysis applied to 440 different data elements.
Some 38 per cent of these items are sourced from Census current year estimates, but
the majority, 62 per cent, derive from other sources such as the electoral roll, life-style
survey data, consumer credit records, the shareholders register, house price and council
tax data and so on (digital transactional data for the most part). Once the initial clus-
ters have been derived from these variables their ‘accuracy’ is validated ‘on the ground’
by way of extensive qualitative fieldwork and observation. Each cluster is then subject
to a detailed characterization. It is at this level of characterization that the role of visu-
alization comes into play.
The claim is that these sixty-seven ideal typical clusters can mutually exclusively and
exhaustively ‘map’ all of the residential postcodes in the country; that the neighbour-
hood differentiation we can all observe around us can, in fact, be reduced to sixty-seven
different types of place. In a more sociological argot we might think of these sixty-
seven clusters as being ideal typical attempts to socio-spatially codify differences in ha-
bitus (Burrows and Gane 2006; Parker et al. 2007)—the embodied often nondiscursive
tastes, preferences and practices that form the social basis for many types of distinction
in a culture (Bourdieu 1984). What is perhaps of most interest here is the manner in
which the combination of variables that have been fused together to form each clus-
ter is characterized via the production of a detailed description aimed at producing a
sense of the ‘sort of people’ who reside within the postcodes so classified. This involves
a process of what Curry (2002) terms ‘discursive displacement’, in which a discourse
based on what he calls the ‘topographic’—the statistical clusters—is translated to one
about the ‘chorographic’—an ideal typical descriptive map of a place—and then, in the
end, to one about actual ‘physical’ places—a particular street for example. The mechan-
ics by which this process occurs is clearly an iterative one. The clusters are mapped, a
sample of ‘real’ places within the cluster are visited, images are taken, streets are trod,
statistics are reexamined, people are spoken to, focus groups are organized, narratives
and characterizations are recalibrated and then visualizations of the localities are con-
structed: pictures of houses (e.g. ‘Victorian Terraces’); their occupants, wearing particu-
lar clothes, with particular styles of hair and particular types of names (e.g. mid-aged
Digitalization, Visualization and the ‘Descriptive Turn’ 585

couples called ‘Tom’ and ‘Kate’ wearing clothes from The Gap and Hobbs with state-
educated school aged–children); the cars they drive (e.g. Volvo); the newspapers they
read (e.g. The Guardian); the technologies they have a predilection towards (e.g. iPhones
and Apple Mac computers); the shops they favour (e.g. John Lewis) and so on. The out-
come of this process is a detailed qualitative, quantitative and visual codification of each
particular habitus. In the case of the UK Mosaic Types this takes the form of numerous
dense pages of text, photos, graphs and charts that summarize the ‘ideal typical’ char-
acter of each cluster. These are detailed rich descriptions—visualized at a level of detail
unheard of within mainstream sociology. These are not designed to be used for ‘causal
modelling’—as within variable-centred approaches to research—but simply to provide
an understanding of the particular patterns of associations that exist between persons,
objects, symbols, technologies and so on; associations that are obviously not random,
but which come together as specific spatial melanges of sociocultural accoutrements
recognizable as a distinct habitus (e.g. middle-class, provincial, urban, university-based,
white liberals).

Concluding Comments
Of course each of these developments in the descriptive visualization of social
phenomena—predictive analytics and the move back to visualization in social statis-
tics, the new cartography and associated Web 2.0 innovations, visual montages de-
signed to represent amalgams of ‘variables’ in the geodemographics industry—are not
yet well established as inscription devices in sociology. However, if the discipline is
going to take seriously the implications of digitalization processes as both an object
of inquiry and as a challenge to its established methodological practices, then the in-
novations in sociological description that this will inevitably necessitate will mean
that we will have to take visualization methodologies far more seriously than we have
done hitherto.

Further Reading
Abbott, A. 2007. ‘Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology’, Sociological Theory, 25/1:
67–99.
Abrams, H. and P. Hall, eds. 2006. Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Ter-
ritories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Burrows, R. and N. Gane. 2006. ‘Geodemographics, Software and Class’, Sociology, 40/5:
793–812.
Hardey, M. and R. Burrows. 2008. ‘Cartographies of Knowing Capitalism and the Changing Ju-
risdiction of Empirical Sociology’, in N. Fielding, R. M. Lee and G. Blank (eds), Handbook
of Internet and Online Research Methods. London: Sage, 507–18.
Savage, M. 2010. Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press.
Tufte, R. 1997. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire,
CT: Graphics Press.
586 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Notes
1. See, for example http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/.
2. One of the candidates being the arms contractor Lockheed Martin. For details see http://
censusalert.org.uk/.
3. See http://www.dunnhumby.com/.
4. See http://www.1800mobiles.com/mobile-commerce.html.
5. One rather suspects that, were he alive today, Mills would be at least as disparaging of
the contemporary instantiations of this academic binary: perhaps with Deleuzian-in-
flected vitalism standing in for Parsons and autistic forms of econometrics applied to
social issues standing in for Lazarsfeld (though Mills, in actuality, misrepresented him
somewhat)?
6. He wrote: ‘In England . . . sociology as an academic discipline is still somewhat marginal,
yet in much English journalism, fiction, and above all history, the sociological imagination
is very well developed indeed’ (Mills 1959: 19, note 2); whilst in France he notes that: ‘both
the confusion and the audacity of French reflection since World War Two rests upon its
­feeling for the sociological features of man’s fate in our time, yet these trends are carried by
men of letters rather than by professional sociologists’.
7. As Osborne, Rose and Savage (again) have recently argued: ‘Whilst some professional soci-
ologists may claim a monopoly on the right to speak truthfully in the name of society, they
are not the only people who investigate, analyse, theorise and give voice to worldly phenom-
ena from a ‘social’ point of view. In fact, today more people speak this social language of
society than we might imagine . . . Not just statisticians, economists of certain persuasions,
educationalists, communications analysts, cultural theorists and others working in the acad-
emy who tend to use broadly “sociological” methods but also journalists, TV documentary-
makers, humanitarian activists, policy makers and others who have imbibed a social point
of view. In many cases it may be that these agents of the social world actually produce better
sociology than the sociologists themselves’ (Osborne et al. 2008: 531–2).
8. It is also, contingently, the case that one of the substantive themes of The Wire, amongst many
others, is the impact of digitalization and the use of metrics on social and ­organizational life:
drugs gangs; the police; systems of surveillance and tracking; the logistics industries; the
education system and so on. Thus sociological appeal of The Wire is both substantive and
methodological.
9. A video of the event can be found at http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Multimedia-Center/
All-Videos/The-HBO-Series-The-Wire-A-Compelling-Portrayal-of-an-American-City.
A slightly different version of this quote and a more detailed justification for it can be
found in Chadda et al. (2008: 83).
10. There are numerous illustrations available but the collection at http://googlemapsmania.
blogspot.com/ is particularly good.

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 26

Action-based Visual
and Creative Methods
in Social Research
David Gauntlett and Fatimah Awan

Much of the work in Visual Culture or Visual Studies is—to state the obvious – to do
with analysis of things that we can see, and that already exist. In this chapter, we will be
discussing a relatively new branch of sociological methodology which is somewhat dif-
ferent in that it involves participants creating new visual things, as part of the research
process. This work is not necessarily or intrinsically connected to the emergent field of
Visual Culture; it has perhaps developed more from the frustrations of some visually ori-
ented researchers wanting to explore the social world in a different way.
Traditionally, in the social sciences, qualitative research with humans has been con-
ducted through language-based events: in particular, through focus groups and interviews
where participants are expected to be able to generate more-or-less immediate verbal ac-
counts of their feelings and experiences. But alongside this, in recent years, there has been
a growing interest in creative and visual research methods, in which participants are asked
to make things such as videos, collage, drawings or models, to express their feelings or
impressions. These methodologies often, in fact, come back to language at some point,
as it is usually considered necessary to access the participants’ own commentary on the
thing that they have produced. Nevertheless, it is argued that by asking research partici-
pants to go through a reflective process, taking time to consider an issue and to create a
visual response, we receive more carefully thought-through responses which can offer rich
insights into what a particular issue or representation really means to an individual.1

The Emergence of Visual Sociology

The rise of interest in visual research methods is reflected in a small but growing body
of literature on visual research methods produced by sociologists and anthropologists
(Prosser 1998; Emmison and Smith 2000; Banks 2001; Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001;
590 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Pink 2001, 2003; Knowles and Sweetman 2004). Indeed, the cause of visual sociology
has been promoted for more than a quarter of a century through the activities, confer-
ences and publications of the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA), estab-
lished in 1981. The founders of the IVSA were primarily photographers, who took their
own photographs to record aspects of social life that would otherwise go unremarked
and unrecorded. In these early days of visual sociology, the idea of the researcher hand-
ing over the camera, or other tools, to research subjects or participants had not really
dawned. More recently, however, a new generation of researchers has started to join the
IVSA and fostered some diversity of methods.
Visual research, as the books listed above typically note, is not an independent, self-
contained approach; rather it is methodologically and theoretically diverse, utilizing a
variety of analytical perspectives (for example anthropology, sociology and psychology)
to study a broad spectrum of issues. Thus, visual research methods are regarded as com-
plementary to existing approaches and, as Christopher Pole (2004) has suggested, have
‘the capacity to offer a different way of understanding the social world’ (7). However,
despite the potential value offered by visual research methods, the approach remains rea-
sonably marginal within existing qualitative practice.
In his discussion of image-based research, Jon Prosser (1998) claimed that the lim-
ited status of images within social research at that time was attributable to the employ-
ment of ‘scientific’ paradigms, as well as established qualitative strategies which give
primacy to the written word. His study of ethnographic and methodological texts found
that visual methodologies were given minimal coverage; rather, he says, they tended to
suggest that ‘images were a pleasant distraction to the real (i.e., word-orientated) work
that constituted “proper” research’ (98). Furthermore, Prosser argues that in instances
when images are included, the manner and tone of their use is revealing. In terms of
manner, he claims that a limited range of images are presented within texts, taking the
form of black-and-white photographs or line drawings, which predominantly serve as
illustrations of researchers, participants or objects under investigation. With regard to
tone, Prosser maintains such texts suggest that images are constructed subjectively, dis-
torting what they aim to represent, and therefore render objective analysis problematic.
Thus, he proposes that the role of visual imagery within research is considered credible
only in its supportive function to written accounts, and ‘are unacceptable as a way of
“knowing” ’ (99) due to the perceived partial nature of their production making them
unsuitable for effective analysis. Prosser suggests that methodological discussions typi-
cally give little credence to strategies to resolve such difficulties, and fail to emphasize
how similar criticisms can be levelled against word-orientated research.
In this chapter we will discuss a selection of key studies, looking at studies which
have used drawings and diagrams, photographs and videos. We will then focus, to some
extent, on work in our own area—media ‘audience’ studies—considering studies which
have asked participants to write news stories, edit video, produce video or use a range of
methods including diaries and scrapbooks. Then we will consider the use of visual meta-
phors in social research—a potentially fruitful new dimension. But first we will consider
the philosophical and ethical rationale for using such methods.
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 591

Why Use Creative Methods?

The use of any particular methodological approach follows, of course, from philosophi-
cal or ideological beliefs as well as more pragmatic insights. In the case of visual creative
methods, this may be a confluence of various things: perhaps a commitment to a quali-
tative, reasonably ethnographic desire to understand the meanings of people’s lives as
they experience them for themselves; frustration with language-based approaches; an
interest in the possibilities of visual communication; and an ethical interest in enabling
participants to get their own feelings and interests onto the research agenda as much as
possible.
As noted above, qualitative methods typically require participants to produce im-
mediate descriptions of their views, opinions or responses, in language. This may seem
entirely natural to the kind of highly educated and more-or-less articulate people who
become academic researchers, but it may be unrealistic to expect that diverse citizens
will find it simple or straightforward to generate instant, verbal accounts of their feel-
ings and experiences. Creative visual methods give participants a process to go through,
during which they may be able to contemplate and assemble certain insights, and for-
mulate some of their ideas more coherently. (Critics might argue that such considered
responses are less ‘real’ than the spontaneous utterances demanded by focus groups or
interviews; but researchers using creative techniques would say that their experience
does not support this view: statements which emerge from a process of reflection are,
we would say, of more value than the immediate, less considered responses required by
other methods.)
Such processes therefore offer a different way into a research question—not neces-
sarily ‘better’ in all cases, but facilitating a different route into discussion of a topic, and
stimulating different parts of the brain to foster outputs which are different from those
produced when the mind is focussed on immediate language production (Gauntlett
2007). Operating initially on the visual plane may also be of value when considering
places, media, emotions and other experiences which are not primarily language-based.
These approaches can also be seen to have been influenced by the feminist critique
of traditional research methods, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s
(see for example Roberts 1990; Reinharz 1992; Hesse-Biber and Yaiser 2003; Letherby
2003). This critique was not merely a preference for qualitative over quantitative meth-
ods. Rather, these critics criticized both qualitative and quantitative researchers for their
tendency to use participants as mere suppliers of data. Traditionally, research has been
(more or less) a one-way street where an investigator prepares his or her questions, and
then encounters ‘subjects’ and takes ‘data’ away. Participants are usually not involved in
the research development, are not consulted about the style or content of the process—
apart from in the moment(s) in which they supply data—and do not usually get an
opportunity to shape the agenda of the research. The process usually involves little real
interaction, or dialogue.
Creative and visual methods do not inherently or necessarily avoid this, but they pro-
vide more opportunities for participants to shape the content of the enquiry, to bring
592 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

in issues and questions which the researcher may not have considered, and to express
themselves outside of boundaries set by the researcher. Of course, researchers remain all-
powerful as they subsequently preside over the interpretation and analysis of data. Nev-
ertheless, these approaches hopefully foster an ethical stance where the participants’ own
interpretations are given, at least, significant weight.

Making Drawings and Diagrams

Researchers have typically asked participants to create visual material in order to access
thoughts or feelings which they would not be likely to express in language. An early in-
stance of this was the ‘draw and write’ technique, first presented by Noreen Wetton in
1972, which was originally developed as part of a project to explore emotional literacy
in seven- to eight-year-old children. This work established that although children could
express particular emotions visually—using both drawing and writing—they lacked this
ability when relying solely on written or spoken words:

It became apparent that the children experienced and empathized with a wide range of
emotions including anger, frustration, despair, remorse, guilt, embarrassment and re-
lief as well as delight, enjoyment, excitement. The children differed only from adults in
that they did not have the vocabulary to express themselves. (Wetton and McWhirter
1998: 273)

Wetton and her colleagues argue that this approach can reveal how children concep-
tualize particular issues, in areas such as health and safety, and that the combined process
of drawing and writing enables researchers to access aspects of children’s knowledge that
eludes conventional techniques.
More recently, also within the field of health research, Marilys Guillemin (2004) em-
ployed a similar strategy with adults in order ‘to explore the ways in which people un-
derstand illness conditions’ (272)—specifically, women’s experience of the menopause,
and of heart disease. Participants were asked to ‘draw how they visualised their condi-
tion’ (276). They were often reluctant at first, but eventually drew an image, ‘sometimes
hesitatingly and at times with such intent and force that I and they were taken aback’
(276). The researcher asked each participant to describe and explain her drawing. The
study revealed the many and diverse ways in which the women experienced these condi-
tions. For example menopause was represented as a life transition (such as one part of a
staircase, or as ‘a sun setting and the moon coming up’), or as a lived experience (often
chaotic), or as loss and grief.
These studies have highlighted how the use of drawings can be used to elicit a broader
and richer range of data than would have been possible through traditional word-
orientated approaches. Other projects have also confirmed the value of asking partici-
pants to generate visual material. For instance, Lorraine Young and Hazel Barrett’s study
of Kampala street children (2001) adopted similar strategies in an attempt to under-
stand the children’s ‘socio-spatial geographies in relation to their street environments
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 593

and survival mechanisms’ (142). Young and Barrett recognized that existing methods are
not devised to provide an accurate reflection of the child’s perspective, and fail to allow
the child any influence on the research design and process. Therefore, Young and Bar-
rett specifically aimed to develop procedures which fostered a high degree of child-led
participation in order to produce ‘research “with children” rather than research “about
children” ’ (144). They therefore utilized a range of visual methods. One group of chil-
dren was asked to draw their own mental maps of Kampala, showing places that were
important to them, and the ‘depots’ where they slept. In another activity, children were
asked to produce three drawings of their everyday experiences, and in another, a large
group worked together to produce symbols of daily activities and to place them on a
timeline showing a typical day. Another group of children were asked to produce a
‘photo diary’, taking pictures of activities and places they visited over a 24-hour period.
(Photographic methods like this are discussed in the following section.) The discussions
about the maps, the drawings, the photographs and the timeline—during and after their
production—were a crucial part of the process, eliciting valuable information. The
researchers note that their engaging, nonthreatening, and action-oriented methods
resulted in a high level of participation by the children (151), and meant that the chil-
dren were able to communicate what was important to them, putting at the heart of the
study material ‘that would have been overlooked by an adult’ (151).

Making Photographs and Videos

Enabling research participants to take photographs obviously provides an opportunity for
physical environments and social events to be recorded, but perhaps more important of-
fers a set of images which can be subsequently considered and discussed—by the people
who created them, and others—and used as prompts for reflection on the emotional and
meaningful nature of people and places. For instance, Michael Schratz and Ulrike Steiner-
Löffler (1998; see also Raggl and Schratz 2004) used photographic images produced by
children in an attempt to evaluate the ‘inner world’ of school life from the pupils’ stand-
point. Participants were invited to photograph what they ‘liked or disliked’ about the
school environment (1998: 235), and these images were used as the basis for group discus-
sions. Significantly, the pictures instigated a dialogue amongst pupils and teachers about
issues which had not formerly been discussed, including personal reflections of schooling.
A study by Alan Radley, Darrin Hodgetts and Andrea Cullen (2005) asked homeless
adults to photograph places and activities of personal significance, in order to ‘collect a
series of glimpses of the city as seen through their eyes’ (276). The researchers then dis-
cussed the images produced with the participants, leading to insights into homeless life.
The photographs did not constitute an object of study in themselves, but served to en-
gender communication, which itself became intrinsic to the analysis:

We used photography in this research so that homeless people could show us their
world as well as interpret it. Rather than see the photographs as bounded objects for
interpretation, they are better understood as standing in a dialectical relationship with
594 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

the persons who produced them. Their meaning does not lie in the pictures, except in
so far as this is part of the way people talk about them. To talk about the photographs
one has taken is to make claims for them—to explain, interpret and ultimately take
responsibility for them. (278)

Hence, Radley, Hodgetts and Cullen claimed that this kind of interview can be con-
ceptualized as a dialogic relationship between researcher and participant, through which
meaning is produced in a dialectic process, and therefore not imposed by either party.
Still photography, then, has proved to be valuable as a research tool (and see also
Harper 1998; Prosser and Schwartz 1998; Banks 2001; Collier 2001; Bolton, Pole and
Mizen 2001; Wright 2004). In keeping with these principles, video production has also
demonstrated the advantages of combining discussion and visual work (e.g. Dowmunt
1980, 2001; Pink 2001, 2004; Noyes 2004). For example in a study conducted between
1998 and 2000, Ruth Holliday’s (2004) exploration of queer performances employed
video diaries in order to evaluate their potential ‘for capturing some of the complex nu-
ances of the representation and display of identities’ (1597). This was enabled by lending
video cameras to participants and requesting them to detail how they represented them-
selves in differing everyday environments—‘work, rest (home), and play (the scene)’
(1598)—both verbally and visually. Holliday specifically achieved these aims by encour-
aging respondents to film themselves in the appropriate settings whilst wearing, discuss-
ing and commenting upon the suitability of their typical clothing for each occasion. In
doing so, she maintained that this approach allowed her to ‘chart the similarities and
differences in identity performances’ (1598). Significantly, Holliday established that the
use of video diaries helped amass information on ‘identity performances’ in ways that
are unique to this method. On the one hand she suggested that, as opposed to a tape-
recorded interview which can only express what the participants say, the videos provided
a visual illustration that allowed for a more ‘complete’ image of self-representation; on
the other, the act of making a video not only generated a visual representation, but these
were also supported by the individual’s own narrative. Moreover, Holliday stated that
the process of video-making permitted participants to choose, alter and refine their pre-
sentations of self, thus affording them a more reflexive role within the research process:

Against other methods that focus on ‘accuracy’ or ‘realism’, then, this approach affords
diarists greater potential to represent themselves; making a video diary can be an active,
even empowering, process because it offers the participant greater ‘editorial control’
over the material disclosed. (1603, original emphasis)

Telling and Editing Stories

In the area of media audience studies, creative methods have been used to explore mem-
ories and preferences, and even the power of the media itself. For instance, the Glasgow
Media Group devised a research technique which it called ‘the news game’ in which ‘re-
search participants were actively engaged in trying to write and criticize a media report’
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 595

(Eldridge, Kitzinger and Williams 1997: 161; and see Kitzinger 1990, 1993; Philo
1990). Participants were provided with materials such as news photographs and head-
lines, and asked to write an accompanying text that could take the form of a newspaper
report, news broadcast script or a headline. These studies claimed to find that although
participants apparently presented their own perspectives on these issues, in practice they
replicated the ideological discourses predominant in the initial news reports. (However,
it seems possible that when participants reproduced dominant ideological discourses in
their own media texts, they did so not because they agreed with these ways of thinking,
but because they may have thought that this was what they were being asked to do.)
In Kitzinger’s study ‘Understanding AIDS’ (1993) participants were given thirteen
photographs around which they produced a news report on AIDS that then became
the focus of a group discussion. In these reports it was found that the participants re-
produced the terminology and attitudes circulated by the mainstream press, such as
‘promiscuous, irresponsible drug users or gay people’ and ‘innocent victims’ (277). Kitz-
inger’s analysis also highlighted the forcefulness of visual representations in the partici-
pants’ understandings of AIDS: ‘television and newspaper representations are, for many
people, the lens through which they view the reality of AIDS’ (Eldridge, Kitzinger and
Williams 1997: 163).
In a development of this idea that research participants should ‘get to grips’ with
media materials, Brent MacGregor and David Morrison’s study (1995) of audience re-
sponses to coverage of the 1990–91 Gulf War sought to bring ‘respondents into closer
contact with the text . . . enabling them to articulate their response in an appropriate
manner’ (143). This was achieved by asking participants to edit existing audiovisual
news footage to create ‘a report that you would ideally like to see on TV, not what you
think others would like to see, not what you think journalists would produce’ (146,
original emphasis).
MacGregor and Morrison noted that prior to editing the footage, participants all
claimed that they aimed to produce ‘an ideal, impartial, neutral account’ (146) by select-
ing what they considered to be the more reliable material. Importantly, the researchers
observed that although there was considerable similarity between participants’ com-
ments made before and after editing, crucial nuanced differences were noted as a result
of the editing process itself: ‘Positions articulated in discussion which would have been
reported as definitive in focus groups were modified as a result of the active engage-
ment with the text’ (147). For example MacGregor and Morrison note that participants
described one text as having ‘an undesirable emotional tone’ (147) but were unable to
identify why this was the case. However, on engaging in the editing process, the partici-
pants were able to suggest how this feeling had been created by presentation techniques.
Therefore, the employment of this method seems to have enabled MacGregor and Mor-
rison to access more significant and meaningful results than would have been made
available by traditional methods. The researchers state that this method is ‘not a meth-
odological solution looking for a research problem, but a real tool capable of producing
significant results in any situation where tangible viewer contact with the text can un-
lock new insights into the dynamic of how audio-visual texts are read’ (148).
596 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Video-making as Audience Research

In an attempt to move further beyond the reliance on interviews and focus groups in
qualitative research, David Gauntlett’s Video Critical (1997) aimed to evaluate audi-
ence responses to mass media material by engaging participants in the creation of their
own original texts, rather than merely modifying or discussing existing sources. For this
project, Gauntlett worked with groups of children aged seven to eleven, from seven pri-
mary schools, in which they used video equipment to make documentaries on the issue
of ‘the environment’, over a period of several weeks each. In the first meeting, a focus
group style discussion identified that for children at that time, television was the pri-
mary source of information and commentary on environmental matters (96–7). It also
appeared to show that, in each group, children were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about
‘green’ issues—but significantly, the research process over subsequent weeks would re-
veal that this was only patchily the case.
The study recorded the children’s conception of the impact of environmental issues
on their lives, and facilitated an understanding of how these beliefs were informed by
media messages on this topic. The method enabled the researcher to amass a substantial
amount of ethnographic data through observation and discussions with the partici-
pants throughout the video production project, in addition to the completed videos
themselves—which Gauntlett states should be read as ‘constructed, mediated accounts
of a selection of the perceptions of the social world held by the group members’ (93).
In line with the principles proposed by MacGregor and Morrison, Gauntlett high-
lights that initial discussions with participants were not necessarily indicative of their
more deeply felt attitudes or beliefs, but rather they ‘represented a kind of “brain dump”
of potential interests and concerns, which in subsequent weeks were sifted and filtered to
reveal the more genuinely-felt opinions’ (150, original emphasis). The researcher suggests
that the video-making process constitutes a significant departure from more traditional
techniques, which often confined the participants within a predetermined structure that
only allowed for limited responses. Video-making enabled the participants to influence
the research process itself: participants were able to construct a free and open response to
the research brief which Gauntlett encourages as a productive strategy, stating that ‘the
video project researcher celebrates their own inability to predict what will happen—a
“risk” worth taking’ (93). He also notes Stuart Hall’s observation about the value of en-
abling everyday people to produce mediated representations:

[I]t is important to get people into producing their own images because . . . they can
then contrast the images they produce of themselves against the dominant images which
they are offered, and so they know that social communication is a matter of conflict be-
tween alternative readings of society. (Hall 1991, quoted in Gauntlett 1997: 92)

In another video study, Gerry Bloustein (1998) explored how ten Australian girls
constructed their gendered identities, by inviting the participants to record what they
believed were salient elements of their lives in an attempt to investigate ‘everyday lived
experience . . . through their own eyes’ (117, original emphasis). During this work she
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 597

claimed that the film-making process facilitated an arena in which the girls were able to
experiment with the way in which they represented their identities, whilst also paradoxi-
cally revealing the restrictions and difficulties encountered in their quest to articulate
‘alternative selves’ (118). According to Bloustein then, the film-making process as well
as the actual completed videos reflected the social/cultural frameworks and limitations
impacting upon the girls’ perceptions of themselves. Indeed, she claimed that the use of
the camera empowered the participants, the camera becoming ‘a tool for interpreting
and redefining their worlds’ (117). (We should note, however, that claims that studies
of this kind are ‘empowering’ for participants are usually over-egging their value: taking
part may be interesting and enjoyable, and may offer some insights, but cannot reason-
ably be expected to be a life-transforming experience.)
Research by Horst Niesyto (2000; see also Niesyto, Buckingham and Fisherkeller
2003) has highlighted the ever-increasing proliferation of media materials in young
people’s lives and how these are integral to the construction of social worlds and self-
perception. He further noted that although there are a vast number of films that focus
on youth which have provided the basis for critical analysis, very few of these films are
produced by the young people themselves. In consideration of these factors, Niesyto
developed a method which has been utilized within a number of projects in Germany
where ‘young people had the chance to express personal images of everyday experience in
self-produced films’ (2000: 137, original emphasis). Within these studies, Niesyto ob-
served how different modes of filming revealed different perspectives of representation.
For example the ‘collage-like video films’ gave insight into emotional and ambivalent as-
pects of identity through association and metaphor (143) and this was a particularly re-
warding mode of expression utilized by the participants he described as ‘marginal’, as in
many cases their media literacy exceeded their competence in more conventional forms
of expression, such as talking and writing (144). Niesyto makes his point with gusto:

In view of media’s increasing influence on everyday communication, I put forward

the following thesis: If somebody—in nowadays media society—wants to learn some-
thing about youth’s ideas, feelings, and their ways of experiencing the world, he or she
should give them a chance to express themselves also by means of their own self-made
media products! (137)

These principles are evident and further developed in the more recent international
project ‘Children in Communication about Migration’ (CHICAM), which sought to
explore the lives and experiences of migrant and refugee children in a number of Euro-
pean countries (see www.chicam.org). This collaborative project, co-ordinated by David
Buckingham, established ‘media clubs’ in six European countries (England, Italy, Swe-
den, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece) in which a researcher and a media educator
worked with recently arrived refugee and migrant young people to make visual repre-
sentations of their lives and experiences (De Block, Buckingham and Banaji 2005). The
material was shared and discussed between the groups, over the Internet. The children
made videos, collage (with cut-up magazines), arrangements of photographs with music
598 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

and specific photo tasks (such as a photo essay on likes and dislikes, or on national sym-
bols), all of which were shared and discussed internationally via an online platform.
This method provided the researchers with a wealth of valuable data—or ‘thick de-
scription’ (Geertz (1973) 1993)—generated not only from the products produced by
the children, but also from observations, written reflections and discussions by both re-
searchers and children throughout the entirety of the project. Hence, in this formulation
verbal data are not abandoned in favour of the visual, but rather they are considered as
complementary factors. As two of the project researchers, Peter Holzwarth and Björn
Maurer, state:

In an era when audio-visual media play an increasingly influential role in children’s

and adolescents’ perceptions, it is important that researchers not only rely on verbal
approaches alone, but also give young people the opportunity to express themselves
in contemporary media forms. Audio-visual data should not be considered an alterna-
tive to verbal data but rather a source of data with a different quality. (Holzwarth and
Maurer 2003: 127)

Mixing Methods and Approaches

David Buckingham and Sara Bragg’s (2004) study of young people aged nine to seven-
teen aimed to explore their attitudes towards representations of sex and personal rela-
tionships in the media. To achieve this the researchers utilized a number of methods: the
completion of a diary or scrapbook in which the children documented their personal
responses to media representation; interviews where they expanded upon the statements
made in their diaries; group discussions that centred around a selection of video clips;
further interviews discussing extracts from tabloid newspapers and magazines; and fi-
nally surveys that extrapolated further information about their opinions and social lives
(18–19). Importantly, Buckingham and Bragg state that ‘Research is not a natural con-
duit that extracts the “truth” about a topic or about what participants “really” feel and
think about it’ (17). Rather they acknowledge that their findings would be determined
by the methods employed, the environment in which the study was conducted, relation-
ships between the participants predating and developed during the research as well as
their own chosen system of analysis. Ostensibly, although this position may appear to
limit the potential scope of the research, it may in fact broaden the range of possibilities
available to the researcher. As Buckingham and Bragg highlight, tasks were specifically
arranged so they would prompt either ‘personal’ or ‘public’ responses from the partici-
pants dependent upon the nature of the individual task, such as writing or speaking in
a group (22). Thus, by locating participants in varying discursive fields, they were more
able to elicit ‘different voices’ which facilitated a more complex and arguably more com-
prehensive understanding of the students involved.
Indeed, use of these methods meant that the researchers were able to offer a range of
findings including that young people utilize the media—particularly teenage magazines
and soap operas—as a resource for learning about love, sex and relationships and use
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 599

the media to facilitate discussion on potentially embarrassing and sensitive issues with
parents and peers; that although young people are aware of media regulation, such as
the film classification system, and use it to inform their own media consumption, they
believe they are capable of self-regulation and making autonomous judgements regard-
ing their own viewing; and that young people consider sex within the context of their
own morality and highlight the importance of trust, loyalty and respect in discussions
about sex and relationships in the media, rather than demonstrating that the media has
‘morally corrupted’ them (236–41).
In their analysis, Buckingham and Bragg ‘aimed at what Laurel Richardson (1998)
has described as a “crystal” structure or a range of viewpoints, none of which is necessar-
ily more transparent or true than any others, but where we can learn from the contra-
dictions and differences between them to develop more complex ways of seeing issues’
(2004: 22). Furthermore, as Buckingham has noted elsewhere (1993: 92), talk functions
as a social act, that is to say talk is not merely a statement of held beliefs and attitudes,
rather it is a behaviour or process which draws upon available cultural concepts to fulfil
specific functions: ‘people achieve identities, realities, social order and social relation-
ships through talk’ (Baker 1997, quoted in Buckingham and Bragg 2004: 23).
In consideration of this, Buckingham and Bragg emphasize the significant role of
reflexivity in their approach—‘that is the role of researchers in interpreting, represent-
ing and producing knowledge from the voices of research subjects’ (2004: 38)—to pro-
mote an informed understanding of how their standpoints may influence and impact
upon the research process. Noting then how their methods have moulded their work,
they assert that all research is limited by the methods applied. However, they maintain
that their methods will enable researchers to gain a greater insight into children’s under-
standings and uses of the media that are not provided by other techniques. This, Buck-
ingham and Bragg state, is due to the systematic, multifaceted and holistic approach of
their own work:

[R]eaders should be wary of the extent to which all methods necessarily constrain
what research is able to show or prove . . . We would strongly contest the idea that
qualitative research is automatically more ‘subjective’ than quantitative research, or
more subject to interpretation. The methods we have used enable us to be systematic
and rigorous, both in ensuring the representativeness of the data we present and anal-
yse, and in comparing material gathered through different methods and in different
contexts. (41, original emphasis)

Using Metaphor in Social Research

The increased focus on reflexivity within qualitative enquiry (see Denzin and Lincoln
2005) has been central to developments in visual research methodologies and, it is argued,
helps advance a fuller understanding of participants’ experiences of their social worlds.
More recently the use of metaphor has emerged within social research as an effective
means of exploring individuals’ experiences and identities. These ideas are highlighted
600 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

in Russell Belk, Ger Güliz and Søren Askegaard’s (2003) analysis of consumer desire
which engaged participants from Denmark, Turkey and the United States in a series of
tasks to investigate ‘the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and activities evoked by consum-
ers in various cultural settings when asked to reflect on and picture desire, both as their
particular idea of a general phenomena and as lived experiences’ (332). Within these ex-
ercises, a proportion of the participants were instructed to complete a journal detailing
their own accounts of fulfilled/unfulfilled desires and interviewed on the issues raised;
remaining participants undertook tasks specifically designed to provoke metaphorical
representations of desire including collage-making; drawing; and writing stories (332).
Although Belk, Güliz and Askegaard acknowledged the journals and interviews pro-
vided valuable descriptive information, they maintained that the projective tasks revealed
a greater depth of data. This is best exemplified in the collage-making activities, where
participants not only represented what they desired, but also created metaphors for de-
sire’s dualistic nature by juxtaposing abstract images (333–40). Therefore, they claimed
the combination of metaphoric expressions as well as participants’ explanations enabled
them to construct a thematic portrait of desire that exceeded constraints of language,
and would not have been possible through any one method alone:

We found the projective and metaphoric data to be very rich in capturing fantasies,
dreams, and visions of desire. The journal and depth interview material was especially
useful for obtaining descriptions of what and how desire was experienced. Although
this is useful data, especially concerning the things people desire, it also showed some
evidence of repackaging in more rational-sounding terms. Some informants found it
difficult to elaborate on their private desires or did not want to reveal those desires.
Hence, the projective measures sought to evoke fantasies, dreams, and visual imagi-
nation in order to bypass the reluctance, defence mechanisms, rationalizations, and
social desirability that seemed to block the direct verbal accounts of some of those
studied. (332)

Research by Brandon Williams (2002) on interprofessional communication in health-

care has also highlighted the usefulness of metaphors within collage-making, as a means
for developing a more complex and comprehensive understanding of individuals.
The use of visual metaphors was further developed in Gauntlett’s more recent work
(2007, see also 2006) that engaged participants in building metaphorical models of their
identities using Lego bricks. This method was a development of Lego Serious Play, a
metaphorical consultancy process developed by Lego (see www.seriousplay.com), the
Danish toy company that Gauntlett collaborated with. The approach draws some of
its inspiration from Seymour Papert’s theory of constructionism (see Papert and Harel
1991), which maintains ‘that people learn effectively through making things’ (Gauntlett
2006: 7, original emphasis), and argues against mind-body distinctions, claiming that
our perceptions and experiences of the world are mediated bodily as well as mentally
(see Merleau-Ponty (1945) 2002). Therefore physical engagement with our environ-
ment activates somewhat different cognitive procedures to those triggered by purely
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 601

cerebral activity. Thus, Gauntlett claims, by building metaphors of their identities prior
to discussion, participants are not only granted time to reflect on what they create, but
this process engages a different type of thinking about the issue itself. He suggests that
this approach can therefore avoid some of the problems inherent in approaches which
aim to elicit an immediate reaction, by allowing a considered and reflective response to
the research task.
Of course, Gauntlett readily admits, asking a participant at the start of a research
workshop to ‘build a metaphorical model of your identity in Lego’ would seem rather
baffling. Rather, participants go through a series of exercises which get them acquainted
with Lego building, and then with building in metaphors, before this ultimate task is
reached in the second half of a workshop session which is at least four hours long.
Importantly, Gauntlett says, the method allows for a more complex representation of
identity that does not presume an individual’s self is a fixed, discernable artefact which
can be described in a linear manner, but acknowledges its multifarious, amorphous and
changeable nature more suited to symbolic expression. Furthermore, he states that the
process of building a Lego model is particularly appropriate in this instance as it entails
improvisation and experimentation, hence providing diverse forms of conceptualiza-
tion. As Gauntlett explains, the process offers ‘an alternative way of gathering sociologi-
cal data, where the expressions are worked through (through the process of building in
Lego, and then talking about it) rather than just being spontaneously generated (as in
interviews or focus groups)’ (2006: 5, original emphasis). Consequently, the researcher
concludes that the method affords individuals time and opportunity to build a whole
presentation of their identity that can be presented ‘all in one go’ (2007: 183)—rather
than the linear, one-thing-then-another-thing pattern necessary in speech—and so en-
ables participants to present a rounded and satisfyingly ‘balanced’ view of their identity.
Of course, it must be remembered that this is only a selected view of what a participant
thinks of as his or her ‘identity’—but this thoughtfully selected representation is the
very focus of the study. It is a mere snapshot, not only of a point in time, but of a point
in time where the person was in an unusual research situation, making something out
of Lego to explain to other participants and a university researcher. In spite of all these
necessary caveats, however, Gauntlett maintains that the participants were presenting
something which felt ‘true’ to them, and which they uniformly asserted was a reasonable
presentation of their sense of ‘who they were’.
The findings of the study (Gauntlett 2007: 182–96) suggest that the use of meta-
phors in social research techniques can be powerful, as they enable participants to make
thoughtful representations of intangible concepts (such as emotions, identities and re-
lationships), including the fruitful additional meanings which metaphors naturally sug-
gest. In relation to how people think about their identities, the study found that there
was in all cases a degree of tension between the desire to be a distinctive individual (not
wanting to be the same as everybody else) and the desire to be a member of the com-
munity (wanting to fit in). People negotiated this in a range of different ways. In terms
of media influences, the study found that the most significant role of the media was in
circulating stories—in every form from ‘real life’ and celebrity magazine stories to news
602 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

and advertising as well as movies and TV dramas: narratives which people used as fram-
ing devices to understand aspects of their lives and their overall ‘journey’ (which was a
common metaphor).
On a similar theme, Fatimah Awan’s PhD study, Young People, Identity and the Media
(2008), sought to exploit and develop the value of metaphors in social research by di-
recting participants to create metaphorical collages on how they perceived their identi-
ties in order to examine how the media is used to shape their conceptions of self. For this
project the researcher invited 111 young people aged thirteen to fourteen—of contrast-
ing class and ethnic backgrounds—drawn from seven schools across Dorset, Hampshire
and London to produce identity collages using media materials which expressed ‘how
I see myself ’ and ‘how I think other people see me’, and to provide their own interpre-
tations of this work within unstructured interviews. From this process Awan was able
to identify a number of findings about the young people’s identities and their relation-
ship with the media. In terms of how the young people conceptualized their identities
the study revealed that whilst the participants appeared to construct their sense of self
in accordance with traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, on closer reading
their comments demonstrated that they did not wholly conform to these gendered po-
sitionings; rather, both boys and girls made forceful assertions of ‘individualism’ which
seemed to transgress any gender differences and instead aimed to articulate a unique
identity. In relation to the media, the study found that the participants’ perceptions of
ethnic minority representations were determined, to some degree, by their social worlds:
with diversity intrinsic to multicultural milieus facilitating participants’ negotiations of
media representations alongside their actual understandings of ethnic minority indi-
viduals and cultural products encountered daily in these environments; and a lack of
diversity within the predominantly white areas producing and perpetuating stereotyped
notions of ethnicity. In addition the media’s influence was most apparent in participants’
accounts of media celebrities and pop stars as role models. For the young people role
models did not exclusively perform a positive or negative function, or operate as fig-
ures whom individuals sought to imitate directly; rather role models acted as a ‘tool kit’
which enabled participants to utilize specific facets of these figures within the formations
of their self-identities, and were adapted and/or negotiated in accordance with their as-
pirations, values and social context.
Importantly, Awan notes that within the collages constituent elements of these
works functioned as metaphors to represent aspects of participants’ identities, but
the completed pictures operated as a metaphor on another plane through revealing
contradictions, relationships and patterns within the whole image. This was possible
as the task itself required participants to produce an entire visual representation of
their identity, ‘all in one go’, as Gauntlett has put it (2007: 183), with individuals’
reflections on their collages exploring each image independently whilst moving to-
wards an explanation of what was shown by the overall piece. Consequently, viewing
the collages enabled participants to consider their whole presentation of identity in
relation to their responses to the constituent parts; the metaphors providing partici-
pants with an opportunity to express and share creative interpretations of their per-
sonal and social worlds.
Action-based Visual and Creative Methods 603

Conclusions
Creative and visual research methods offer unique methodological advantages for explor-
ing sociological questions. For instance, asking Ugandan street children to create maps,
drawings and photographs, showing how they lived their lives, gave Young and Barrett
(2001) an unusual opportunity to begin to see these lives from the children’s’ own perspec-
tive. Holliday’s video diary study (2004) enabled participants to express ‘queer’ identities
on their own terms—an opportunity to tell their own stories, in their own way, which they
valued. Similarly, by asking young children to create their own videos about environmen-
tal issues, Gauntlett (1997) revealed that children were influenced by existing media cov-
erage, but could create their own stories with their own emphases. In particular, it was the
very process of the children’s active engagement in producing the videos that granted the
researcher access to more comprehensive and worthwhile data. Buckingham and Bragg’s
(2004) work on young peoples’ attitudes towards sex and relationships in the media spe-
cifically sought to draw out participants’ responses through the adoption of a variety of
methods including diaries, interviews and group discussions. In doing so, the study facili-
tated a more complex and reflexive understanding of the students’ thoughts and beliefs.
Belk, Güliz and Askegaard’s (2003) work revealed that metaphors could overcome the
limitations of language to convey ambivalent emotional and intuitive responses. In addi-
tion, Gauntlett’s (2007) more recent study, in which metaphors of personal identity were
constructed using Lego, established that this process exercises different modes of thinking
which can produce more nuanced representations of the self, and therefore give researchers
access to different kinds of data. Indeed, within social research concepts such as identity,
audiences and representation frequently form the focus of study, but as these phenomena
are abstract concepts, researchers become confronted with the difficulty of determining
how to acquire information on these matters, often resorting to methods that depend
upon individuals formulating and articulating their ideas in words. Metaphors can there-
fore provide a powerful alternative to the strictures imposed by formal language; as Bran-
don Williams (2002) has suggested, metaphors offer participants a strategy through which
thoughts and feelings can be communicated that they may struggle to put into words, and
facilitate freer and associative forms of ‘open expression’ (Williams 2002: 55).
In summary, then, these studies have started to trace a trajectory of research that em-
ploys creative and visual methods in the process of their investigations. The researchers
discussed have argued that these methodological approaches offer crucial and distinct
benefits over more traditional techniques, providing rich and varied data for analysis.
To date, these methods have been applied in a relatively small number of quite specific
research projects, and we can anticipate that visual and creative research techniques may
be put to a wider set of interesting uses in the future.

Further Reading
Buckingham, D. and S. Bragg. 2004. Young People, Sex and the Media: The Facts of Life?. Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gauntlett, D. 2007. Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences. London:
Routledge.
604 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Holliday, R. 2004. ‘Reflecting the Self ’, in C. Knowles and P. Sweetman (eds), Picturing the
Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination. London: Routledge,
1597–1616.
Prosser, J., ed. 1998. Image-based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers. London:
Falmer Press.

Note
1. This review of the literature draws, rather unavoidably, on ones we have previously written in
Gauntlett’s book Creative Explorations (2007), Awan’s PhD thesis (2008), and in a different
Handbook, the Blackwell Handbook of Media Audiences (Awan and Gauntlett 2010).

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 27

Neuroscience and the Nature

of Visual Culture
John Onians, with Helen Anderson
and Kajsa Berg

Neuroscience and Visual Culture

John Onians
The concept of visual culture has added important new dimensions to the study of
human behaviour. It has accelerated the trend within fields such as art history, archae-
ology, anthropology and within studies of culture more generally towards treating all
material expressions equally seriously and recognizing the extent to which they are al-
ways embedded in patterns of daily life. It has also drawn particular attention to the
specifically visual properties of those expressions, that is to the importance for their
production and consumption of the mediating role of the sense of sight. Both dimen-
sions have increased the urgency of involving neuroscience in that study. Not only can
a knowledge of neuroscience help directly with the understanding of all the inputs
from the eye to the brain and the material outputs that result from them, but such
knowledge also indirectly encourages the development of a framework that assumes
the equal importance of all forms of material expression, whether traditionally ‘high’
or ‘low’ in whatever medium. Neuroscience shows both how the eye is an open door
through which information relating to all these forms must travel, and how the brain,
with its myriad connections and deep memory resources, links that information to the
complete spectrum of human interests and needs from the most philosophical to the
most visceral. This is why neuroscience is now in a position to add, in its turn, a new
dimension to visual culture.
608 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Historiography
The idea of using some knowledge of the brain to understand the making and con-
sumption of art is not in itself new. Many thinkers, including Aristotle, Leonardo and
Winckelmann, speculated on the inborn roots of artistic activity and when, in the late-
nineteenth century, individual nerve cells, or neurons, became visible through the lenses
of improved microscopes, writers started to describe the processes involved in the mak-
ing of and response to art more precisely in neural terms (Onians 2007a). Robert Vischer
and Heinrich Wölfflin among others gave particular prominence to the idea of Einfüh-
lung, the unconscious empathy of the viewer with the object viewed, and argued that
such empathy meant that visual experience of anything, whether natural or man-made,
might affect artistic behaviour. But it was only with the emergence of a new knowledge
of the brain in the last decades that neuroscience has been put to more systematic use.
E. H. Gombrich was already using knowledge of the animal brain to make suggestions
about human artistic behaviour and argued that the reason that ornament was so promi-
nent worldwide was because of traits inbuilt into human biology (Gombrich 1984: xii).
His pupil, Michael Baxandall, went further, founding the theory of the ‘period eye’ pre-
sented in his book on Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, subtitled as a
Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style on the assumption that: ‘everyone . . . pro-
cesses the data from the eye with different equipment’ (Baxandall 1972: 29). Soon his
argument that the preferences of the producers and consumers of art were shaped pre-
dictably by their experiences in other fields, such as dancing, banking or barrel-gauging
became one of the founding tenets of the new fields of visual and cultural studies.
It was only in the next generation, however, that Baxandall’s hunch could be backed
up by detailed neuroscientific knowledge derived from new technologies. Functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has made it possible, since the 1990s, to monitor
blood movement in the human brain and so establish the neural areas involved in par-
ticular mental activities in real time and other techniques such as Transcranial Magnetic
Stimularion (TMS) are yielding ever more refined results. The implanting of electrodes
in monkey brains has made it possible to identify a new type of nerve cell, the ‘mirror’
neuron and now the latest electron microscopes can capture the process by which den-
drites are formed on a particular neuron as a result of it being involved in a particular
task, so illustrating one of neurons’ most important attributes, their tendency to be
shaped by experience, their so-called plasticity. The potential of these discoveries for il-
luminating artistic activity was first explored by neuroscientists themselves. Pierre Chan-
geux’s article, ‘Art and Neuroscience’ (Changeux 1994), presciently outlined a number
of ways in which the new knowledge could help in the understanding of art and Semir
Zeki’s Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Zeki 1999) argued that more re-
cent painters had often unwittingly exploited the separate parts of the visual cortex (V)
which he and others were then for the first time mapping, especially the areas dealing
with colour and motion, V4 and V5. The year 1999 also saw two other significant devel-
opments. One was a paper by V. S. Ramachandran with William Hirstein in which they
presented their eight laws of artistic experience, including the ‘peak shift’ principle, that
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 609

is the tendency for a particular visual trait to become stronger over time, which they see
as underlying many stylistic changes (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999). The other was
the launch of the online Journal of Neuro-aesthetic Theory on the Web site artbrain.org,
both founded by Warren Neidich, an ophthalmologist-turned-artist, who was the first
person to use a detailed knowledge of neuroscience to specifically address issues central
to the developing field of visual culture, such as the relation between contemporary art
and politics. A collection of his essays subsequently appeared as Blow-up: Photography,
Cinema and the Brain (Neidich 2003), an ambitious attempt to show the relevance of
phenomena such as the interconnectedness of all areas of the brain and neural plastic-
ity for an understanding of the way modern media were changing people’s experiences.
Scholars of visual culture themselves were not at first enthusiastic, being held back by
a political bias against biological explanations and a commitment to ‘social construc-
tionist’ explanations, but slowly some of their leaders abandoned these positions. Nor-
man Bryson came to see Freud, Wittgenstein and the poststructuralists as dangerously
‘clerical’ because of their shared focus on the ‘word’, and in the preface to Neidich’s
Blow-up he celebrated neuroscience as an entirely fresh ‘paradigm for thinking through
cultural history and the philosophy of the human subject’ (Neidich 2003: 11). W.J.T.
Mitchell, too, in a similar tone of recantation, when listing some of the ideas that have
‘hamstrung the embryonic discipline of visual culture’, notes that it can no longer ‘rest
content with a definition of its object as “the social construction of the visual field”, but
must insist on exploring . . . the visual construction of the social field  ’(his italics) (Mitchell
2002: 238). Neither, though, went on to develop these ideas and instead it was scholars
originally trained as art historians who found themselves turning to neuroscience be-
cause it enabled them to answer questions that had long concerned them. John Onians
was looking for a framework for dealing with all visually interesting man-made objects
worldwide, following the establishment of the first School of World Art Studies at the
University of East Anglia, and this led him to explore both the properties shared by all
human brains that made art a universal activity (Onians 1994, 1996) and the neuro-
logical principles that cause that activity to be highly varied at local and individual lev-
els (Onians 2002, 2007a). He has used his understanding of the latter phenomenon
to develop a discipline of neuroarthistory (Onians 2007a). David Freedberg’s interest
in iconoclasm had led him to want to understand the similarities in the use of images
worldwide (Freedberg 1989) and in neuroscience he found explanations for them, ex-
planations which he has elaborated through collaborations with the neuroscientist, Vit-
torio Gallese (Freedberg and Gallese 2007). Barbara Stafford had long been interested
in the way different areas of culture, and especially science and art, had influenced each
other, and in neuroscience she found a model of the mind which sheds new light on
the many processes this involved as elaborated in her rich Echo Objects (Stafford 2007).
Interestingly, all these are older scholars. One of the few mid-generation art historians
to enthusiastically enter the new field is Oliver Elbs, who set up a Web site, mapology.
org, and whose doctoral dissertation, exploiting in an original way the concepts of neu-
ral ‘maps’ and ‘shifts’, has been published as Neuro-esthetics: Mapological Foundations
and Applications (Map 2003) in 2005. The relevance of his project for the study of visual
610 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

culture is evident from the breadth of the book’s goal, which he defined as developing
a nonreductionist approach ‘to the contemplation of paintings (Newman, Rothko, . . .),
the listening to music (counterpoint, Wagner, . . .), and the watching of films in general’
(Elbs 2005: 194).
One point that emerges from this survey is that although the concept of Neuro(-)
(a)esthetics has been launched independently, in different spellings and with different
definitions, by a number of individuals, there is general agreement about its central con-
cerns, which have their origins in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, such as what
is it that goes on in our minds when we contemplate or make art and how does this re-
late to other mental activity. Neuroarthistory can be seen as a subfield of Neuroaesthet-
ics, one that uses the same knowledge to deal with particular problems in the tradition
of art history—and visual culture/visual studies—such as why did this individual or
group make, choose or use this particular visual expression at this particular time and
this particular place?
Both Neidich’s and Elbs’s publications and Web sites feature highly expressive illus-
trations of the brain and its workings, and Neidich is himself one of a growing num-
ber of artists, architects, designers and creators in other media who are involved in the
production of so-called Neuro-art, much of it growing directly out of medical imagery
and, in the case of the subfield, Neurosculpture, medical modelling. Much of this work
breaks new ground conceptually in its acknowledgement of the importance of the so-
matic, and especially the sensory, the emotional and visceral. Also concerned with the
body is Neuroarchitecture, an approach that reflects the growing interest in the impact
of buildings on their users. So obvious was the relevance of neuroscience to this issue
that the field was recognized already in 2003, when the San Diego Chapter of the Ar-
chitectural Institute of America founded the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.
The field is also acquiring a historical dimension, as in Harry Mallgrave’s The Architect’s
Brain (Mallgrave 2010), which reviews earlier neurologically founded attitudes to archi-
tecture and explores current developments.
A neuro-field which might not seem central to the study of visual culture is Neuro-
marketing, but its relevance emerges clearly from the Wikipedia definition of it as:

a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective
response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional mag-
netic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain,
electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the
brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (heart
rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the deci-
sions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it. (http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Neuromarketing#cite_note-0)

Although these enquiries are driven by the financial concerns of businesses, the infor-
mation they yield on the response to design, packaging, advertisements etc has relevance
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 611

to an understanding of the neural correlates of visual culture in many other contexts,

religion and politics, pleasure and propaganda, the public and private, the home and the
museum. Indeed, this last factor makes it an essential tool in the equipment of Neuro-
museology, the use of neuroscience to understand the history and role of museums, as
launched by John Onians at the conference ‘Art Museums Here and Now’ in Abu Dhabi
in April 2010.

Neuroscience, an Outline
The interests of Neuromarketing are important because they remind us of why we have
brains in the first place. It is easy to forget this noble organ’s humble evolutionary ori-
gins. These are well illustrated by a comparison between plants and animals. The only
difference between an animal and a plant is that an animal needs to move to feed and
reproduce and that is why it has brains, ultimately to meet the needs of its viscera, in-
cluding the genitalia. Each creature has a sensory apparatus that takes in information
relevant to these needs from the surrounding world and a motor apparatus to enable it
to make the appropriate movements in relation to it. We are no different. Although we
are used to thinking of the brain as an organ for higher activities, it only exists in order
to help us to survive. This point is particularly vital for our understanding of the func-
tions of the eye and the hand, the elements of the sensory and motor systems that are
most important for the production and consumption of visual culture. Our eyes are
principally there to gather information about potential foods/poisons in the vegetable
world, prey and predators in the animal world, potential tools in the natural and man-
made environment, and, in the social environment, information about parents and chil-
dren, and about potential friends/enemies, mates/rivals. It is to gain that information
that we attend to the visual environment, and it is to act on that information that we
have limbs, of which the most vital are our hands.
We couldn’t do either if we did not have a nervous system, centering on a brain,
where information from the senses is processed and movement is initiated. In order for
these activities to be carried out effectively the brain is composed of many physiologi-
cally discrete parts, each with a separate function. This is most clear in what is in evolu-
tionary terms the most recent part, the Cortex. Much of this is taken up by one group
of areas that take in and integrate information from the different senses (the Sensory
Cortex) and another group of areas controlling the different limbs (the Motor Cortex).
The relations between them are designed for maximum efficiency. Thus at the back of
the brain we have a region that takes in information from the eyes, which is subdivided
functionally into subareas, with V3 being most helpful for seeing shapes, V4 for seeing
colours and V5 for seeing movement. To help us to organize this information and to
act on it quickly these areas are linked to the rest of the brain by a lower ‘ventral’ and
an upper ‘dorsal’ pathway. The ventral pathway links the Visual Cortex to the Tempo-
ral lobe and the Fusiform Gyrus, where separate areas are equipped from birth to sort
forms into such vital categories as plants, animals, the human body, human faces and
612 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

places, and where visual information is linked to more information about the same ob-
jects coming from other senses, such as hearing and touch. The dorsal pathway on the
other hand is linked to the areas of the Motor Cortex controlling the movements of
the body needed to engage with these objects. We have some conscious control over
these movements through the brain’s ‘frontal’ lobes, where planning and decision mak-
ing takes place, but their selection is largely governed by two lower areas at the centre
of the brain, an upper ‘Limbic System’ containing such organs as the Amygdala, criti-
cal for emotional activation, and the Hippocampus, critical for long-term memory and
spatial navigation, and the lower ‘Basal Ganglia’ containing areas such as the Superior
Colliculus, critical for eye movements and the VTA critical for reward-learning, that is
learning what is good for one. In these areas neurochemicals play an essential role, with
dopamine, for example being essential both for the pleasure of reward-learning, and for
aversion/punishment, while elsewhere in the body adrenaline plays an equally impor-
tant role in preparing the heart, the lungs and other muscles for the life-saving fight-
or-flight response. Chemicals also play an important role in the more small-scale fabric
of the nervous system in the communication between one nerve cell, or neuron, and
another. This fabric has a bewildering complexity. The brain contains about 100 billion
neurons, each of which can have up to 100,000 connections to other neurons, and these
neurons communicate with each other when an electrical impulse associated with a dis-
charge of chemicals crosses the tiny gap, or synapse, between them. Many neurons have
a single large axon at one end and many small dendrites at the other, and the discharge
goes from axon to dendrite. The structure of these neural networks used to be thought
to be fairly fixed, but it has become increasingly clear in recent years that in many areas
of the brain it is susceptible to constant change, giving rise to the phenomenon of ‘plas-
ticity’. This is because the brain is very expensive. Half of all our nutrition goes to feed
it; so evolution has ensured that its networks grow and shrink in response to our needs.
The more a connection is used the more its conductivity improves and the more other
connections form alongside it. Similarly, the less it is used the more its connections will
die back and conductivity decline. Since all our activities, not just the sensory and motor
engagements, but feeling and thinking depend on such networks, they are highly re-
sponsive to any increase or decline in any of these activities. We experience the benefits
of this system when we start practicing a language or a musical instrument and its costs
when we stop. One of the most powerful illustrations of the long-term consequences of
the process is the massive growth of the area of the Motor Cortex controlling the little
finger of the left hand on a concert violinist. An illustration of the process’s rapidity is
the study showing the growth of connections after just one day in the brain of a mouse
reaching for a seed (Xu et al. 2009). Our actions and inactions shape our brain on both
a large and small scale.

Applications
There are many ways in which this knowledge contributes to an understanding of visual
culture. The first is that it makes us aware that it is only because seeing is so important
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 613

for our survival that we look with such intensity at any visual artefact, whether it is a
2,000,000-year-old stone tool or the latest digital video on MTV. The second, a corol-
lary of the first, is the awareness that, without us being conscious of it, that looking in-
volves not just other areas of the brain but the whole body. This means, for example that
because our memory of stones is cued by both visual and tactile attributes we cannot
look at the stone tool without appreciating its weight, coldness and so on, and because
stones are also linked to the motor actions with which they might be associated we can-
not look at it without our brain suggesting the possibilities of picking it up, using it to
strike something else, and even throwing it, as well as the possible consequences of doing
so. A more complex artefact, such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, carries many more
such associations. The MTV video carries many others, not just those associated with
the imagery, and we should remember that different areas of the cortex are going not
only to react to its content of faces, bodies, places and so on, but also to make us aware
of the background to its production, the marketing aspect, the technical aspect and so
on. We cannot watch the video without our brain sensing, even at a minimal level, both
why it was made and how. All these things might have been claimed before the recent
neuroscience cast new light on the brain, but as claims they would have evoked much
less interest than they do today, when many people have some level of knowledge of the
brain’s previously invisible properties.
The latest neuroscience sheds light on the whole history of visual culture, but
arguably it sheds most on the visual culture of today, and that is for a very simple
reason, visual culture of today is already directly and indirectly influenced by the
new knowledge. There are many aspects to this. Most obvious is the range of paral-
lels between the human nervous system, the social, economic and technical system
of the modern world and the system of the art scene and of visual culture. One el-
ement central to this is the emergence of information theory/cybernetics and arti-
ficial intelligence. Since the 1960s and 1970s people working with machines have
sought to make them more human and people working with the brain have sought
to understand it as a machine, and, in that exchange, concepts such as computation,
cognition, networking, sequential- and parallel-processing, hard-wiring, hard- and
software, implants, cloning, avatars and so on have been so often shared across the
two domains as to almost unite them. As a result people have tried to endow ma-
chines, especially computers and robots, with human properties, such as emotion,
and have treated human beings like machines, for example adding to them new spare
parts in the form of prostheses and implants. The consequent impact on visual cul-
ture has been enormous, with films such as Avatar, and the abused figures of the
Chapman brothers being joined by a growing variety of Neuroart and Neuroarchi-
tecture. Neuroscience illuminates the whole history of visual culture, but none more
than that of today.
To apply neuroscience to the study of visual culture of any place or time means being
alert to each new discovery in the field, but it also means exploiting fully those areas of
knowledge that have already emerged as helpful in this enterprise. Two of these are ‘neu-
ral plasticity’ and ‘neural mirroring’, already mentioned above.
614 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Neural Plasticity

Helen Anderson
The primary importance of neural plasticity is that knowledge of the principles by which
it is governed provides access to an important way of reconstructing the formation of
individual brains at any time in history. This is because the brain is a dynamic organ,
changing its structure throughout our lifetime, adapting to changes in our environment
and to the motor and sensory experiences through which we relate to them. As the brain
creates and strengthens, or discards and abandons synapses and neuronal pathways, our
neurons constantly take on new roles and functions. Thus, for the individual, learning a
new skill, such as playing a musical instrument (Johannson 2006), reading Braille (Han-
nan 2006) or driving a London taxi (Maguire et al. 2000) requires extensive practice,
and this practice is instrumental in changing the neuronal connections in relevant brain
regions. A recent experiment undertaken by Mithen and Parsons (2008) demonstrated
not only how the activity in neural circuitry had been modified after singing lessons of
a year’s duration, but that the acquisition of this cultural skill affected other areas of the
brain. Scans indicated increased activity in Brodmann’s areas 22, 38 and 45 (Mithen
2009: 5), areas that are involved not only with melody, pitch and sound intensity, which
one might expect, but also with language processing, speech production and emotional
responses.
In the same way, at the community level, neural plasticity means that people from
different cultures, because their different environments will be associated with different
motor and sensory experiences, will acquire differences in brain organization that will
necessarily affect their behaviour. Knowledge of the process by which this happens is an
important resource for anyone studying visual culture, since, if we know to what sorts
of environments people have been exposed, we have some basis for understanding what
factors may have influenced their activities and perceptions.

Visual Plasticity
The most revealing aspect of neural plasticity in the context of visual culture studies is
the plasticity of the visual cortex (Black et al. 1991; Dragoi and Sur 2004; Kourtzi and
DiCarlo 2006). One-third of the visual cortex is used in object recognition, but such
object recognition is not hard-wired. As we navigate our environment, the brain’s vi-
sual centres continually reorganize themselves, classifying novel features, and learning to
pick out important objects, effectively creating a changing catalogue of shapes (Låg et al.
2006). Such learning gives rise to the attribute of ‘perceptual fluency’; and research has
shown that such fluency influences a wide variety of judgements and cognitive opera-
tions (Reber et al. 1998; Reber and Schwarz, 1999; Reber et al. 2004).
Essentially, visual identification terminates in the Temporal Lobes, where neurons
respond to complex visual stimuli such as faces and objects. Object recognition requires
a system that is able to cope with changes in scale, viewing angle, luminance, contrast,
motion and other such variables, until our knowledge of the object stabilizes (Li and
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 615

DiCarlo 2008). This process relies on successive experiences of a visual object gradually
contributing to the building up of neuronal connections until the response to it can be
described as ‘view invariant’. Critical to the process is the intensity of our attention. Re-
search has shown that the more attention we give to something, the more rapidly our
sensory systems will become fluent in its perception (Yotsumoto and Watanabe 2008).
The Lateral Occipital Cortex is central to this process. Neurons in this region clus-
ter together in columns, and analysis of their spatial distribution demonstrates that cells
located close together in the cortex have similar stimulus selectivities (Tanaka 2003).
For example, cells in a column may respond to star-like shapes, or shapes with multiple
protrusions. Each cell in the column is similar in that it responds to star-like shapes,
but each cell may differ in the preferred number of protrusions or the amplitude of the
protrusions (Tanaka 2003: 94). Furthermore, neighbouring neurons are more likely to
respond to similar features (Reddy and Kanwisher 2006: 411). What this means is that
neurons that respond to a particular visual stimulus that shares properties with another
will be grouped together; particular shapes or forms can trigger the response of simi-
lar neurons. Fundamentally, we make visual associations with objects that share similar
properties.
A crucial component of perceptual fluency arises from connections the brain makes
with stored information. The brain has mechanisms that reward us for learning about
our environment; such mechanisms would have an obvious evolutionary advantage.
Food, sex and other naturally rewarding experiences release dopamine into the brain, a
neurotransmitter produced naturally in the body and central to the reward system and
the formation of emotional responses. Dopamine is not, however simply the ‘reward
chemical’ in the brain, dopamine neurons also respond to aversive events (Matsumoto
and Hikosaka 2009). A subset of neurons in the Basal Ganglia (an area directly con-
nected to the visual areas in the brain, learning and memory) actually becomes more
active with the depleted dopamine transmission produced by aversion (O’Reilly and
Frank 2006). Humans seem to learn from both reward and punishment.
In the context of visual culture studies, knowledge of the ways in which the human
visual system operates is a constructive resource, for both artist and viewer. Understand-
ing how the visual cortex is influenced by environment and experience, how we make
associations between objects that share similar properties and how the brain incentivizes
behaviour allows for a more analytical approach to art production and reception.

Historiography
The first person to use the term neural plasticity appears to have been the Polish neuro-
scientist Jerzy Konorski (1948), who proposed similar ideas to Donald Hebb, one of the
strongest proponents of an environmentalist view of brain development (1949). More
recently, a theory of how environmental input affects the organization of neural systems
was developed by Changeux (1983, 1996 et al., Changeux and Connes 1989). Chan-
geux strongly supports the view that the nervous system is active rather than reactive and
that interaction with the environment results in the selection of certain networks and
616 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

reinforces the connections between them. The study of functional plasticity in the cortex
has been advanced significantly by the development of in vivo imaging techniques, mak-
ing it possible to separate genetic from environmental effects on development.
Neural plasticity has been studied more in the Visual Cortex than any other cortical
region. The intensity of research concerning the anatomy, physiology and function of the
Visual Cortex has made it possible to study the environmental effects on development at
various levels. What has become a classic set of experiments undertaken by David Hubel
and Torsten Wiesel (Hubel and Wiesel 1959, 1962, 1970; Wiesel and Hubel 1965) sig-
nificantly expanded the scientific knowledge of sensory processing during the 1960s and
1970s, exploring how neurons in the brain could be organized to produce visual percep-
tion. Their seminal discoveries proposed that the visual system responds differentially to
lines of different orientation and that these mechanisms are genetically established in the
nervous system at birth. Only later are these resources modified by experience.
Following the discoveries of Hubel and Wiesel, research undertaken by Semir Zeki
and others (Zeki 1993; Wong-Riley et al. 1993) in the study of vision and the brain
led to the conclusion that the visual cortex possesses six different visual regions that are
functionally specialized to deal with properties of objects such as colour, form and mo-
tion. Tanaka (1993, 1996; Tamura and Tanaka 2001, Tanaka et al. 2005; Lehky and
Tanaka 2007; Yamashita, Wang and Tanaka 2010) further showed that neurons located
in the Temporal Lobe respond to complex visual stimuli and neurons with similar, al-
though slightly different responsiveness to particular features tended to cluster together
in columns. The stimulus specificity of these neurons is altered by experience, and fMRI
studies have shown that specificity can increase with stimulus familiarity (Reddy and
Kanwisher 2006: 411).

Applications
We take for granted that art is a global phenomenon, but its beginnings were local, and
the place and pace of its emergence are central concerns for archaeologists. So too is its
relation to human cognitive abilities, an issue on which neuroscience is well adapted to
inform our thinking (Anderson forthcoming).
The collection of shells as forms of personal ornamentation is one of the earliest
forms of art-related activity engaged in by modern-type humans, dating back some
100,000 years. Even this early in the archaeological record, it is most often considered
in relation to ideas of social or ethno-linguistic diversity; as evidence for trade, exchange
or cultural transmission. But our knowledge of neural plasticity can play an important
new role in our approach by helping us to think about the importance of shells in more
basic material terms. The period when shells are first visible in the archaeological record,
between c. 110,000–75,000 years ago, coincides with the movement of modern humans
into coastal environments. The skilful and successful exploitation of marine resources
was evidently becoming more widespread. Adaptation to such environments involved
mechanisms of learning and memory, and the sight of shells, which were essential for
survival, would have been associated with positive connotations.
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 617

The very act of collecting shells requires a certain visual attention or perceptual flu-
ency, and perceptual fluency can lead to perceptual preference. In communities where
the sight of shells had become a source of pleasure individuals started to collect and
show them to each other, eventually using them in personal adornment. Feasibly, this
began with the use of shells which, because they exhibited natural perforations, could
easily be strung together as ready-made beads. The act of intentional perforation oc-
curred as humans replicated the natural process, intensifying the pleasure their display
produced in the wearer and proving equally appealing to the viewer.
But shells are also inextricably tied to particular locations. Their cultural value based
not only in visual display but associated with a meaningful and rewarding environment.
The collection of shells had the potential to attach people to a particular place, becoming
a stimulus for memory. Even today we collect shells from the beach as a memento of our
visit. As we strive to understand our cognitive past, by invoking principles established by
neuroscience, we can advance our thinking concerning the importance of environment
and experience in art production and reception right up to the present.
This is exemplified in a reappraisal of Renaissance aesthetics. It is well understood
that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the artists of Florence and Venice
produced two very different styles of paintings. While Florentine artists were concerned
with linearity and perspective, Venetian artists were keenly interested in the relation-
ship between light and colour. While such distinctions have been related to cultural
influences, the underlying reasons for their importance have recently been explained in
neuropsychological terms (Onians 1998). The introduction of linear perspective that
emerged in Florence has been argued to have been inspired by visual experience of the
city’s particular built environment at the time. Florence incorporated a straight river, a
quadrilateral Roman centre and a Medieval system of straight roads lined with rectangu-
lar buildings exposing repeated horizontal lines of masonry. Only in Florence did such
geometrical and linear perspectives ensure that the neural networks of individuals expe-
riencing such an environment ‘were biologically better prepared to apply existing theory
on the geometry of optics to the representation of pictorial space’ (Onians 1998: 15). In
Venice, by contrast, neural networks were more finely tuned to the ‘repeated experience
of light reflected from water and of the similar effects produced by polished coloured
marbles, gold glass mosaic and oriental silks’ (Onians 1998: 15). There patrons would
have acquired a visual predilection for reflected light and colour, favouring oil paint
because of its capacity for ‘capturing brilliance and refulgence’ (Onians 1998: 15). The
observed differences between these two schools of paintings in Renaissance Italy are well
established and can be explained in common-sense terms. What neuroscience does is to
reveal the neurological basis for the common-sense view.
The same is true again and again in the history of visual culture, as in the case of Ma­
tisse, the instigator of the Fauvist movement. He has always been renowned for his use
of colour and his passion for decorative pattern and motifs, and although it has been
said that we know, ‘next to nothing of the visual influences that fed and shaped his imag-
ination in its formative stages’ (Spurling 1993: 463), the basis for a neurological expla-
nation has already been laid. Matisse, who was descended from a family of weavers, grew
618 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, a small town near the Belgian border, whose principal

product was textiles. Indeed Bohain was, ‘famous for the glowing colours and prodigal
variety of its luxury fabrics’ (Spurling 1993: 463). Articulated as a biographical aperçu,
understanding that Matisse grew up in a setting where colour, texture and pattern were
part of his environmental visual repertoire is enormously significant. Indeed, Spurling
goes on to suggest that, ‘A child growing up there would have been familiar from infancy
with the sound of clacking shuttles and the sight of weavers loading and plying coloured
bobbins, hunched over their work like a painter at his easel’ (Spurling 1993: 463). Our
knowledge of neural and visual plasticity makes tangible Matisse’s preoccupation with
colour and elaborate pattern in his painting, and indeed corroborates the author’s specu-
lations. Recognizing the extent to which neural networks respond to and are configured
by environment and experience can help us both to support current explanations and
to develop new ones.

Neural Mirroring

Kajsa Berg
The principles of neural mirroring can illuminate the behaviours and responses of both
the artist/maker and the viewer/consumer. Mirroring is essential in order to understand
both the actions of others and their emotions. Mirror neurons are a class of premotor
neurons in the brain that fire not just when someone makes a movement, but when that
person sees someone else making the same movement. As a result, when a person ob-
serves an action by another, his or her brain responds as if he or she were in fact moving.
Similar types of neurons react in the same way to emotional expressions, pain and touch.
This provides a link between individuals. It also provides a link between the viewer and
artefacts. The consequence of this embodied response is that humans are able to under-
stand the actions of others, and as an extension, empathize with them. It is thus not
strange that the notion that we feel empathy and emotional engagement as a result of
seeing someone else’s movements and expressions is a recurring theme in sources ranging
from classical Greek philosophy to modern art history (Onians 1999: 690–715; Onians
2007b: 307–20; Freedberg and Gallese 2007: 197–203 and Stafford 2007: 75–104).

Historiography
According to Xenophon, Socrates believed that the correct depiction of movement in
art is central to aesthetic experience (Xenophon 1926: 235). Horace advises the poet
that ‘if you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself: then . . . will your
misfortunes hurt me’ (Horace 1926: 459). His words were paraphrased by both Alberti
and Leonardo (Alberti 1972: 81, Da Vinci 1989: 130–5), who state that a good painter
should represent emotion and movement correctly in order to move the viewer. Charles
Le Brun similarly suggested that ‘JOY is an agreeable emotion of the soul which consists
in the enjoyment of a good which the impressions of the brain represent as its own’ (Le
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 619

Brun 1994: 126). In 1866 Friedrich Theodor Vischer discussed how humans intuitively
project their emotions on the rest of the world: ‘Thus we say, for example, that this place,
these skies and the colour of the whole, is cheerful, is melancholy, and so forth’ (Vischer
1998: 687–8). His son, Robert Vischer, suggested that humans empathetically transpose
themselves onto the objects they look at, be it a ‘proud’ fir tree, an ‘angry’ cloud or a
‘prickly stubborn’ cactus (Vischer 1998: 690–3). These ideas influenced Heinrich Wölf-
flin in his doctoral thesis ‘Prologomena to a Psychology of Architecture’ (1886). Vischer
implies that the aesthetic experience engages the eyes and then takes place in the human
imagination. Wölfflin proposes instead that empathy involves the whole body so that
when looking at columns it is ‘as if we ourselves were the supporting columns’ (Wölf-
flin 1998: 714). His mirror neurons then sustained his art historical contribution as he
recognized the different impact of specific architectural styles on the viewer’s body. The
brain, however, remained on the fringes of studies of empathy throughout the twentieth
century until the discovery of human mirror neurons in the 1990s.
Individual mirror neurons were discovered in macaque brains in 1988 (Rizzolatti
et al. 1988: 491) and then Jean Pierre Changeux tentatively suggested that they could
be integral in gesture recognition in art (Changeux 1994: 195–6). Clusters of similar
neurons were identified in human brains in 1996 (Rizzolatti et al. 1996: 131). V. S. Ra-
machandran predicted that this discovery would have a massive impact on neuroscience
and psychology (Ramachandran, Altschuler, and Hillyer 1997: 22). The art historian
David Freedberg, who argues that emotion has been ignored in favour of purely histori-
cal, cultural and social factors, also realized the potential of mirror neurons. Together
with the scientist Vittorio Gallese, he suggested that mirroring could help explain em-
bodied aesthetic responses and: ‘challenge the primacy of cognition in responses to art’
(Freedberg and Gallese 2007: 197). Most recently, in 2010, individual mirror neurons
were recorded in several areas of the human brain (Mukamel et al. 2010: 750).

Mirror Neurons
The first scientific evidence of mirror neurons was found in the macaque’s premotor cor-
tex. These neurons are activated not just when a macaque monkey performs a particular
movement, but when he only sees it. They respond strongly to hand and mouth move-
ments and are particularly active in the performance of goal-oriented movements, such as
grasping, tearing and holding. Further research suggests that mirror neurons are present
in the human brain and integral to a variety of responses and behaviours, including em-
pathy. Mirroring also occurs in the case of facial expressions. For example, the same area
of the Insular Cortex responds when the person feels disgust, makes an expression of dis-
gust or just sees someone else’s expression of disgust. The actual experience of the emotion
(such as happiness) is then closely linked to both seeing and making the expression (smil-
ing) (Wicker et al. 2003: 655). The results are also similar in the case of pain-processing
and touch. In an experiment that consisted of test-subjects viewing still imagery of hands
and feet being cut, the Anterior Insula was particularly active and it showed very similar
activity when subjects were in actual pain (Jackson, Meltzoff, and Decety 2005: 771).
620 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Mirror neurons are not static in their operation, as their responsiveness can be en-
hanced as a consequence of neural plasticity. This can be illustrated by an experiment in
which ballet dancers, capoeira dancers and nonexperts watched ballet (Calvion-Merino
et al. 2005: 1243–9). The results showed that ballet dancers’ brains, particularly their
Premotor Cortex, responded more than those of the others. Because their neural re-
sources for making the movements had been strengthened through constant training,
their brains could more easily respond to the sight of them. The capoeira dancers and
nonexperts, by contrast, lacking the neural resources needed for these particular move-
ments in their own motor repertoire, did not respond as strongly.
Variations in response occur in the emotional as well as the motor field. Scientists fo-
cussing on autism hypothesize that thinning of grey matter (a sign of the lack of neural
connections) in areas where mirror neurons are generally located leads to decreased em-
pathetic ability. Generally, mirroring neurons are crucial for emotional and empathetic
responses. That they are susceptible to plasticity means that they are malleable and their
structures are shaped not just by genetic, but also by environmental and other contex-
tual factors.

Application
Onians has suggested that the principles of mirroring are central to the understanding
of Greek culture in general and the emergence of life-sized and life-like sculpture in par-
ticular. Evidence that empathetic responses, and that imitation and emulation in general
were important aspects of Greek culture, can be found in mythology (later collected in
Ovid’s (1916) Metamorphoses), theatre (as seen in Aristotle’s (1997) Poetics) and sculp-
ture. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia Socrates asks the sculptor Cleiton a number of ques-
tions and establishes that the illusion of life in art is a result of ‘accurately representing
the different parts of the body as they are affected by the pose—the flesh wrinkled or
tense, the limbs compressed or outstretched, the muscles taut or loose’. This ‘exact imi-
tation of the feelings that affect bodies in action also produce[s] a sense of satisfaction in
the spectator’ (Xenophon 1926: 235).
Freedberg uses several examples to show how mirror neurons are crucial in under-
standing artworks (Freedberg and Gallese 2007: 197–203). Thus, as Michelangelo’s Slave
Called Atlas struggles out of the material, his strain is understood and felt by the view-
er’s brain and body. Similarly, looking at the mutilated and damaged bodies in Goya’s
Disasters of War leads to an internal simulation of pain. The responses are presented as
universal and the examples could be supplemented by references to a weightlifter strug-
gling with his load or the sufferings of a victim in a gory horror film. Freedberg also
presents Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas as a timeless example. As Thomas pushes a fin-
ger into Christ’s wound, the pain of being prodded and the sensation of touching flesh
can be transmitted through sight of the image. However, this response is likely also to
be the product of mirroring enhanced by plasticity, since, around 1600 in Rome there
was a new active engagement with movement and emotional expression. This was espe-
cially clear in the case of religious life and religious imagery. Not only did the practice of
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 621

Spiritual Exercises encourage the subject to mentally and practically imitate saints, the
Virgin and Christ, but images were used as an aid to meditation, with, for example the
gruesome martyrdom scenes in the paintings in S. Stefano Rotondo being used to train
Jesuit novices. As with the motor resources of modern ballet dancers, Catholics in Early
Modern Rome would have had their neural resources for both imitation and empathy
greatly reinforced. Caravaggio’s emphasis on movement would have played on these new
empathetic sensibilities, as when his Chiesa Nuova Entombment responds to St Filippo
Neri’s wishes that all of the paintings be used in meditation. The congregation would
have performed the Spiritual Exercises daily. The paintings functioned as visual aids,
helping the viewer to understand the biblical narratives by experiencing the depicted
movements and emotions through their own brains and bodies. The imagery would
have encouraged emotional involvement as a means of making the viewer more pious.
Examples of such reinforcement can be found in many periods, including today, as
in the case of Amy Caron, a contemporary American artist who uses neuroscience in her
installation work. She cooperates with several neuroscientists including V. S. Ramachan-
dran and Vittorio Gallese in the process. The performance installation, The Waves of Mu,
explores mirror neurons as a way of engaging the audience. Mu waves are the electro-
magnetic oscillations that reflect the mirror neuron activity in the brain. The audience
begins by walking through an installation representing a brain, where the artist provides
a multisensory experience, combining various arts, music and food. The second part in-
cludes the artist playing the part of a scientist, explaining the mirror neuron function
to the audience through evoking emotional responses. The artist’s work allows the au-
dience to experience mirroring both consciously and unconsciously (Phillips 2010: 10)
and uses mirror neurons to engage and educate her spectators.
Many other modern artists have also made use of mirror neurons to catch their view-
ers’ attention, even without explicit knowledge of the brain. In 1997 the Royal Academy
showed works by Young British Artists then in the Saatchi Collection in the exhibition
Sensation, a title that referred not just to the exhibition’s shocking novelty, but also to
the physical and mental feelings the works evoked in the viewer. Designed to involve
the spectator emotionally and viscerally the Chapman Brothers’ Zygotic acceleration, bio-
genetic, de-sublimated libidinal model and their Tragic Anatomies displayed grotesque
fibreglass child mannequins moulded together, several with nose and mouth replaced
by penis and anus. Also, by reproducing Goya’s etchings of the disasters of war in a life-
sized realistic sculpture Great Deeds against the Dead, the same artists amplified the mir-
roring of pain. Marcus Harvey, Sarah Lucas, Mark Quinn, Jenny Saville are only a few
of the artists in Saatchi’s collection that use the human body as a means to catch people’s
attention and thus rely on the mirroring of their spectators to create visceral responses
that engage viewers’ attention and interest.
Nor is it surprising that visual culture elsewhere in the world at different periods ex-
ploits mirror neurons particularly intensively. The anthropologist Nicholas Argenti has
suggested that, even though the complex and violent history of slave trade is barely spo-
ken of in the Cameroon Grassfields, it is still experienced through masked dance perfor-
mances in which feelings about contemporary oppression are embodied in movements
622 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

that refer to similar problems in the past (Argenti 2007: 142). While masks and dances
are spoken of in mythical terms the movements of the dancers and their relationships
tell another story. Argenti links the slow shuffling movements of the mask wearers with
the exhaustion of slaves, the uncomfortable closeness of the masks and their restricted
movements with the lines of slaves bound together and the stooped dancer with a large
ungainly headdress with the porter collapsing under the weight of his head-load. It
seems then that the implicit performance and experience of these movements offers an
outlet for historical atrocities that are not expressed in words. The past is reenacted and
remembered through the people’s bodily engagement and mirror neuron responses.

The Future

John Onians
More than all other current approaches to visual culture, the neuroscientific is certain to
become ever more important. This is partly because understanding of the brain is set to
increase rapidly, as ever more urgent medical and social needs generate ever improving
technologies of investigation. As scanners become less cumbersome and the computer
programs needed to process the data they yield become more sophisticated, images of
the brain will become ever more detailed. Similarly, as ways of monitoring individual
neurons become more refined and methods for tracking neurochemicals become more
effective, an increase in the comprehension of the complexity and specificity of neural
processes will lead to a new appreciation of the correlations between sensory inputs and
behavioral outputs. Also illuminated will be the correlations between different sensory
modalities that give rise to synaesthesia. This field will only gain in importance as visual
culture is joined by such parallel enterprises as aural, tactile olfactory and gustatory cul-
ture, and all are integrated in a better understanding of culture as a whole.
Another reason why a neuroscientific approach can be predicted to become more im-
portant is the widening of its application as more and more people find that neuroscience
can sustain and enhance the approaches they are already using. Phenomenology was based
on the idea that we need to understand how things are experienced, especially through
the body, and now neuroscience can tell us more and more about that experience. Again,
Poststructuralism argued that we should be wary of notions of objectivity, and that more
attention needed to be paid to subjectivity, and now neuroscience can confirm that need
by throwing new light on personal mental formation. Neuroscience can also illuminate
the process of ‘social construction’ by clarifying its neural basis. Even traditional posi-
tivists will be increasingly drawn to neuroscience, as they discover that the previously
obscure phenomenon of unconscious ‘artistic influence’ can be explained through an un-
derstanding of the neural changes caused by mere exposure to an artwork.
Finally, nothing will cement the relationship between neuroscience and visual cul-
ture more than those developments within neuroscience which render the mind itself
more and more visible. At present scholars in the humanities often cling to a view of
the brain as a god-like black box, its mysteries impenetrable. But this view is daily
Neuroscience and the Nature of Visual Culture 623

undermined, as the black box becomes ever more transparent and people realize that
the brain provides not just a more complex model of the mind, but one which is
clearer, because it is more accessible to sight. As visualizations of the brain become
both more familiar and more accessible, the words of philosophers will lose their pre-
eminence as the prime framework for conceptualizing the mind, being rivalled, if not
replaced, by a rich repertoire of imagery, both still and moving, generated by groups as
diverse as scientists and artists.
Out of this imagery will emerge new paradigms for the study of visual culture. These
will be founded in a broad agreement on:

1. the brain’s susceptibility to constant physical change, especially under the influ-
ence of experience;
2. the more or less complete integration in the brain of all of the body’s faculties
and activities, the sensory and the motor, the intellectual, the emotional and the
visceral, and recognition that each can influence the others;
3. the preeminence of the sense of sight as a source of information and the conse-
quent recognition of the importance of visual experience for the organization
of knowledge at both individual and community level;
4. the desirability of acknowledging, alongside the distinctiveness of all fields of
visual experience, the mutual influences between them.

Further Reading
Freedberg, D. and V. Gallese. 2007. ‘Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Artistic Experience’,
Trends in Cognitive Neurosciences, 197–203.
Neidich, W. 2003. Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain. New York: Distributed Art
Publishers.
Onians, J. 2007. Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki. London and
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Stafford, B. M. 2007. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Zeki, S. 1999. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

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 28

Re-visualizing Anthropology
through the Lens of The
Ethnographer’s Eye
David Howes

The practice of fieldwork is integral to modern anthropology. The origins of this prac-
tice date back to the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait of 1898,
led by the biologist A. C. Haddon. One of the men Haddon recruited for this mission
was the physician-psychologist W.H.R. Rivers (1864–1922). Rivers was transformed by
the experience into an ethnologist (though this remained but one facet of his multifac-
eted career), and he for his part sought to turn anthropology into a science. In addition
to his initial work on visual perception and subsequent work on social organization and
cultural diffusion in Melanesia, Rivers made important contributions to the codification
of fieldwork methods. Best known for The Todas (Rivers 1906)—a truly classic ethno-
graphic monograph (indeed, the first of its kind)—and winner of the Gold Medal of the
Royal Society, Rivers stood both as the most eminent social anthropologist in England
and for a seat in Parliament (as the Labour candidate for the University of London con-
stituency) on the eve of his untimely death in 1922 (see Slobodin 1978; Langham 1981;
Kuklick 1998).
To return to the Torres Strait expedition, this endeavour broke with the tradition
of ‘armchair anthropology’ typified by Sir J. G. Frazer and E. B. Tylor of Oxford.
Frazer and Tylor based their anthropological reflections on the writings of mission-
aries, colonial officials and travellers.1 In place of relying on such amateur reports
or ‘hearsay’, scientific anthropology would henceforth be founded on observation, or
‘going to see for yourself ’ (Grimshaw 2001: 7 and 2007: 299.) Significantly, Haddon
arranged for a photographer to accompany the expedition; he also acquired a cinema-
tographer to assist the team in recording the social life and culture of the natives of
the Torres Strait.
Only about four minutes of the film Haddon shot have survived. This foot-
age shows people engaged in both practical and ceremonial activities—all very
Re-visualizing Anthropology 629

evidently staged for the camera (Grimshaw 2007: 298). As for the photographs,
they consist mainly of close-ups of individuals (in both frontal and profile poses),
scenes from everyday life, and scenes from the psychological experiments which
the team performed (e.g. a photo of the set-up for testing the visual acuity of the
Torres Strait Islanders using Haken’s E). The photographs lend an aura of objec-
tivity to the extensive descriptions of native life contained in the six-volume Re-
ports of the expedition (Haddon 1901). But they remain illustrative, subordinate to
the text of the Reports. This subordinate status is indicative of the extent to which
anthropology is first and foremost a text-based discipline, typified by the ethno-
graphic monograph. ‘What does the ethnographer do?—he writes’ (Geertz quoted
in Howes 2003: 26).

Textualizing Anthropology
It took anthropologists the better part of a century to start to reflect critically on
the textual basis and biases of their discipline. This awakening plunged the field
into a ‘crisis of representation’. The latter crisis was signalled by a variety of texts
which began appearing in the 1980s with titles like ‘Ethnographies as Texts’ (Mar-
cus and Cushman 1982), ‘On Ethnographic Authority’ (Clifford 1983) and Works
and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Geertz 1988). While most anthropologists
continued reading the old monographs for what they said (e.g. W.H.R. Rivers as
an authority on the Toda, Bronislaw Malinowski as an authority on the Trobriand
Islanders), the authors of these new works started analysing the older works (par-
ticularly Malinowski’s) for the ‘rhetorical strategies’ or ‘modes of authority’ they
deployed. In the result, many ethnographers gave up the study of other cultures for
that of other texts. As Marcus and Cushman put it in the manifesto that heralded
this textual revolution in anthropological understanding: ‘In this emergent situa-
tion, ethnographers read widely among new works for models, being interested as
much, if not more, in styles of text construction as in their cultural analysis, both of
which are difficult to separate in any case’ (Marcus and Cushman 1982: 26, em-
phasis added).
The styles of the new works which blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s have the ap-
pearance of being quite heterogeneous: some were written dialogically, others polyphon-
ically; memoirs and confessions also became increasingly common, while ‘monograph’
became a term of opprobrium. Yet what above all distinguished the new works and
gave them a certain unity relative to the realist writings of the past was that: ‘In these
experiments, reporting fieldwork experience is just one aspect of wide-ranging personal
reflections’ (Marcus and Cushman 1982: 26). The pretence of ‘objectivity’ was aban-
doned in the name of ‘reflexivity’, and the idea of ‘observation’ was supplanted by that
of ‘negotiation’ as in ‘ethnography [is located] in a process of dialogue where interlocu-
tors actively negotiate a shared vision of reality’ (Clifford 1983: 43). Above all, the ‘I’
of the ethnographer was given a new licence to express itself within the text, instead of
standing behind it.
630 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

The overthrow of traditional canons of authority was summed up as follows by James

Clifford in ‘Partial Truths’ (the introduction to a highly influential book from the mid
1980s entitled Writing Culture):

Many voices clamor for expression. Polyvocality was restrained and orchestrated in
traditional ethnographies by giving to one voice a pervasive authorial function and to
others the role of sources, ‘informants,’ to be quoted or paraphrased. [But once] dia-
logism and polyphony are recognized as modes of textual production, monophonic
authority is questioned, revealed to be characteristic of a science that has claimed to
represent cultures. (Clifford 1986: 15)

The trouble with the claim to ‘represent cultures’ had to do with the unexamined ide-
ology it imported: ‘an ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy
of experience’ (Clifford 1986: 14)—both highly dubious propositions from the post-
modernist vantage point of the mid 1980s, apparently. The new standard that emerged
from this rupture with the monophonic-realist conventions of the past was that ‘the
proper referent of any account is not a represented “world”; now it is specific instances
of discourse’ (Clifford 1986: 14).
The limiting of ethnography to reporting on ‘specific instances of discourse’ involved
a reduction in the scope of what once passed under this name. For example if one goes
back to Rivers’s The Todas (1906), in the introduction to that monograph, one finds a
discussion of how Rivers would elicit ‘independent accounts’ of a given practice from
different ‘witnesses’ (i.e. informants), then compare them and ‘cross-examine into any
discrepancies’ (Rivers 1906: 7–17). Only then would he describe (or ‘write-up’) the
practice or custom for posterity. To Rivers, ethnography was a process of ‘corrobora-
tion’, not negotiation, and the accounts given by informants were always supplemented
by observation: ‘I did not content myself with . . . [the] independent accounts till I had
satisfied myself of the trustworthiness of the witness, and had learnt enough of the cus-
toms in question to be in a position to weigh the evidence’ (Rivers 1906: 10, 465–7).
Proceeding in this fashion, Rivers became a superior authority on Toda culture to his
Toda informants (at least in his own estimation). He wrote in a singular voice, relying
on the rigors of his method of data collection to eliminate misrepresentations.
In the wake of the textual revolution of the 1980s, by contrast, ethnographer and infor-
mant had to be equally present in the text if a monograph was to conform to ‘the principle
of dialogical textual production’ (Clifford 1986: 14) or be consistent with the new empha-
sis on ‘the emergent and cooperative nature of textualization’ (Tyler 1986: 127). One of the
casualties of this new emphasis on textualization was sense perception, or what an earlier
generation had called ‘observation’. Thus, one postmodern anthropologist went so far as to
proclaim: ‘Perception has nothing to do with it’—the ‘it’ being ethnography. Specifically:

An ethnography is no account of a rationalized movement from percept to concept.

It begins and ends in concepts. There is no origin in perception, no priority of vision,
and no data of observation
Re-visualizing Anthropology 631

Or, again:

[An ethnography] is not a record of experience at all; it is the means of experience.

That experience became experience only in the writing of the ethnography. Before that
it was only a disconnected array of chance happenings. (Tyler 1986: 138)

Case closed.

Visualizing Anthropology
It was against this backdrop of hypertexuality in mainstream anthropology that the sub-
discipline of visual anthropology underwent its reflexive moment in the 1990s. Visual
anthropologists stopped simply making films or taking pictures and started reflecting on
anthropology itself as a ‘way of seeing’ (just as the textual anthropologists had come to
view anthropology as ‘a kind of writing’ before them). What Clifford says of writing in
the following quotation could equally well be said of seeing: ‘No longer a marginal, or
occulted dimension, writing has emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in
the field and thereafter’ (Clifford 1986: 2).
The visual revolution in anthropological understanding unfolded in a series of steps.
The first step involved the interrogation of the alleged objectivity of the photograph and
other visual media by exposing how these technologies had been used to promote es-
sentialist ideologies of race and gender. The second step involved the expansion of the
boundaries of visual anthropology to include not just photography and film but visible
culture (e.g. art) and visual systems (Banks and Morphy 1997). The third step involved
contesting the marginal status of the visual in the ‘discipline of words’ that anthropol-
ogy had become, and, at the same time bringing to light the centrality of vision to the
writing process itself. Consider Anna Grimshaw’s argument in The Ethnographer’s Eye:
Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (2001). ‘Over the last decade’, she writes in her
introduction

anthropology has been much discussed as a particular kind of literary endeavour. What
happens if we imagine it differently—as a form of art or cinema? Such a proposal may
seem fanciful, perverse even, though it is not without its precedents. By suggesting
that we ‘see’ anthropology as a project of the visual imagination, rather than ‘read’ it
as a particular kind of literature, I believe that we can discover contrasting ways of see-
ing and knowing within the early modern project. The ‘visualization’ of anthropology
I propose is built around a particular example. [In Part I of The Ethnographer’s Eye,]
I take three key figures from the classic British school (1898–1939) and place their
work alongside that of their artistic and cinematic counterparts, I consider the work of
W.H.R. Rivers alongside that of Cézanne and the Cubist artists (as the precursors of
cinematic montage—Griffith, Eisenstein and Vertov); I place Bronislaw Malinowski
in the context of Robert Flaherty’s development of a Romantic cinema; and, finally, I
seek to explore Radcliffe-Brownian anthropology by means of its juxtaposition with
632 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

the interwar school of British documentary associated with John Grierson. (Grimshaw
2001: 9)

The ‘perversity’ of Grimshaw’s proposal consists in the way she chose to examine­
vision as a way of knowing at a time when the ‘denigration of vision’ was the norm,
due to the influence of certain contemporary French philosophers (Jay 1993) and
Johannes Fabian’s blistering critique of ‘visualism’ in anthropology for its alleged
­objectifying and dehumanizing effects (Fabian 1983). The ‘fancifulness’ of her pro-
posal consisted in the way her analysis is based on ‘imaginative connections’ between
modern art and modern anthropology which were ‘unashamedly speculative’, as she
herself admitted (Grimshaw 2001: 11). The interest of her proposal lies in the way
she recuperated the legacy of W.H.R. Rivers, and has gone on in her own work to
rehabilitate observation, and to experiment with other media besides writing for the
communication of anthropological findings. We shall explore Grimshaw’s own con-
tribution to the visualization of anthropology presently, but first let us examine how
she visualizes Rivers’s life and work.

Rivers’s Unoptical Unconscious

Grimshaw discovered Rivers not through her anthropological training but rather
through literature—specifically, through chancing upon the novels of the contemporary
British writer Pat Barker (see Grimshaw 2001: 3, 33). Rivers figures as one of the main
characters in Barker’s ‘War Trilogy’ (Barker 1997): Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the
Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995). These novels centre on the relationships Rivers
formed with a series of army officers suffering from war neuroses (or ‘shell shock’) who
came under his care first at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland where he was stationed
during the early part of the First World War and later in London, after he transferred to
the Central Hospital at Hampstead.
‘Barker works in interesting ways with vision and visualization’, and these lie ‘at the
heart of her interpretation of Rivers’, Grimshaw (2001: 33) writes. For example one of
the subthemes of the novels is how Rivers lost the power to visualize scenes in his mind’s
eye due to a traumatic childhood incident (which is a source of recurrent, albeit incho-
ate, flashbacks).2 The implication is that this loss drove him to dedicate his medical/
psychological career to plumbing the mysteries of visual perception (first as a student of
the physiology of vision in Jena and later as a field researcher in Melanesia and India)
and visual hallucinations and nightmares (during his period as a military psychiatrist at
Craiglockhart and thereafter). The memory of this incident is so shrouded in repression
that Rivers never manages to reconstruct it definitively and thereby confront, much less
resolve, the psychic issues at the root of his visual troubles. However, in classic (almost
archetypal) wounded-healer fashion, he goes on to author Instinct and the Unconscious
(1920) and the posthumous Conflict and Dream (1923), and in the result became one
of the foremost interpreters of psychoanalytic theory to the British public. It could be
Re-visualizing Anthropology 633

said that Rivers gained his deep insights into the unconscious (which were substantially
less sexualized though no less profound than Freud’s) through reflecting on his own in-
ability to visualize, and the troubled visions of his patients in the aftermath of their war
experience (for details see Slobodin 1978).
In addition to pointing to a certain ambivalent relationship to vision as the spring of
Rivers’s complex personality, Grimshaw notes that

eyes are scattered everywhere across the novels. Barker often refers to Rivers’ habit of
drawing his hand across his eyes; but eyes are also found on the battlefield; they are
picked up and held in the hand; they watch, secretly but tangibly present, within dif-
ferent scenes. (2001: 34)

And, there is the powerfully suggestive title of the second novel in the trilogy. ‘What did
the image of the eye in the door suggest about vision and anthropology?’ (Grimshaw
2001: 34).
In pursuing this question, Grimshaw gives short shrift to Rivers’s actual experiments
on visual perception and concentrates on his invention of ‘the genealogical method’.
Finding out how the members of a community stand to each other through collecting
oral genealogies and modelling these relationships in the form of a kinship diagram was
a crucial innovation in anthropological field research methodology introduced by Riv-
ers (see Langham 1981). He developed it at about the same time Picasso and Braque
made their breakthrough into Cubism, leading Grimshaw (2001: 36–7) to remark: ‘that
Rivers, like the Cubist painters, reduced the visible world to a simple abstract form (the
kinship diagram) in order to construct a more complex [multiperspectival, relational]
view of reality than had previously been attempted’. As an expression of the structural
order behind the sensible flux, this modernist way of seeing proved extremely produc-
tive in art as in anthropology, but it was soon dashed by the experience of the Great War.
The battlefield of the First World War was ‘the graveyard of the eye’. Grimshaw quotes
Martin Jay:

The Western front’s interminable trench warfare . . . created a bewildering landscape

of indistinguishable, shadowy shapes, illuminated by lightning flashes of blinding in-
tensity, and then obscured by phantasmagoric, often gas-induced haze . . . When all
the soldier could see was the sky above and the mud below, the traditional reliance on
visual evidence for survival could no longer be easily maintained. (Quoted in Grim-
shaw 2001: 41)

The conventional association between vision, reason and order was sundered, tempo-
rarily replaced by vision, nightmare-phantasy and turmoil. This was both the cause and
the context of Rivers’s work with the army officers suffering from war neuroses which
preoccupied him during the latter part of his career, and which supplied much of the
raw material for Conflict and Dream (1923). Grimshaw sees the latter work as analogous
634 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

to the cinematic works of Rivers’s contemporary, D. W. Griffith, who used the then
novel technique of montage to plunge the viewer into a world characterized by ‘move-
ment, complexity, interconnection, violence and conflict’ (Grimshaw 2001: 26) as well
as Dziga Vertov in A Man with a Movie Camera (1929), who also captured the dyna-
mism and disorder of his times using novel film techniques.
In her visualization of the history of anthropology, Grimshaw goes on to describe
how the ‘anxious, fragmented, multiperspectival vision’ of Rivers3 was supplanted by
the ‘innocent’, ‘visionary eye’ of Malinowski (who endeavoured to write ‘from the na-
tive’s point of view’),4 and transformed again into ‘the gaze’, or ‘disembodied eye of ob-
servation’ of Radcliffe-Brown. As noted previously, she also posits a cinematic double
for each of these figures, Flaherty in the case of Malinowski, and Grierson in the case of
Radcliffe-Brown.
I find Grimshaw’s analysis highly suggestive, and important for the way it highlights
the multiple ways of seeing and knowing that took shape within early modern anthro-
pology (i.e. there was not just the one mode—the Radcliffe-Brownian mode, which is
an easy target for criticism (e.g. Fabian 1983)). However, there was more to the anthro-
pology of this period than meets the eye. The nonvisual senses have a history too, and it
is important that this not be occluded by filtering the history of the discipline exclusively
through the model of the camera lens or gaze.5 Otherwise visual anthropology risks fall-
ing into the same trap as textual anthropology, for which there had ceased to exist any
hors texte by the mid 1980s.6

The Measurement of the Senses

To return to the Torres Strait expedition, the men Haddon recruited—Rivers and his
two protégés (fellow physician-psychologists) Charles Myers and William McDougall—
went to Melanesia not just to ‘see for themselves’ (Grimshaw 2001: 7) but to measure.
Specifically, they went to gauge the sensory acuity of the natives. Rivers took on the
study of visual perception (colour vision, spatial vision, susceptibility to illusion) but
also oversaw and collaborated on the tests administered by the other two; Myers, who
was something of a musician, was assigned hearing, taste and smell as well as the study
of reaction-times; and McDougall was responsible for ‘cutaneous sensations’ (pain,
temperature, localization) and the ‘muscular sense’ (weight). The team brought along
a formidable battery of tests to determine the natives’ thresholds of perception, in-
cluding Haken’s E, Lovibund’s tintometer, the Müller-Lyer and other such illusions,
Politzer’s Hörmesser (for measuring auditory sensitivity), Galton’s whistle (for pitch
discrimination), diverse musical instruments, Zwaardemaker’s olfactometer, various
taste solutions, a hand-grasp dynanometer, an algometer (for studying pain thresh-
olds), and marbles, to mention only about a third of the items in their ‘psychologi-
cal kit’.
Why this fascination with testing the senses of ‘savages’? First, because it was do-
able: perception had come to be (re)defined as a psychophysical process by various Ger-
man researchers of the highest authority, and a whole barrage of apparatuses (like those
Re-visualizing Anthropology 635

mentioned above) had been invented to study it as such. Second, because it was the
thing to do, in keeping with the Spencerian hypothesis, which was key to the general
intellectual climate of the period (late Victorian).
The Spencerian hypothesis (or rather conceit) was grounded in a series of cultural
assumptions concerning the relationship between the intellect on the one hand and the
body and senses on the other, and between the senses themselves in terms of higher vs.
lower, and civilized vs. primitive. Various treatises dating from the eighteenth century
already played up the supposedly superior sensory abilities and proclivities of ‘primitive’
peoples, particularly in so far as the ‘lower’, ‘primitive’ senses were concerned (smell and
touch). These representations became commonplace in the nineteenth century, sup-
ported by the anecdotal observations of travellers and missionaries. All this fed into
the Spencerian hypothesis, which held that ‘ “primitives” surpassed “civilised” people in
psychophysical performance because more energy remained devoted to this level in the
­former instead of being diverted to “higher functions” ’ (Richards 1998: 137). Here is
how Rivers gave expression to this conceit

We know that the growth of intellect depends on material which is furnished by the
senses, and it therefore at first sight may appear strange that elaboration of the sensory
side of mental life should be a hindrance to intellectual development . . . [However, if ]
too much energy is expended on the sensory foundations, it is natural that the intel-
lectual superstructures should suffer.

And, that such is the case was attested by the fact that:

the savage is an extremely close observer of nature . . . [T]he attention is ­predominantly

devoted to objects of sense, and . . . such exclusive attention is a distinct hindrance to
higher mental development. (Rivers 1901: 44)

In keeping with this notion, Rivers and company introduced their experiments to
the Torres Strait Islanders as follows:

The natives were told that some people had said that the black man could see and
hear, etc., better than the white man and that we had come to find out how clever they
were, and that their performances would all be described in a big book so that every-
one would read about them. This appealed to the vanity of the people and put them
on their mettle. (Rivers 1901: 3).

It will be appreciated that, given the supposed connection between sensory superiority
and mental inferiority, to win at this contest was also to lose.
Rivers and Myers carried out very thorough eye and ear exams of the natives, not-
ing the prevalence of colour-blindness, deafness, etc (so that the issues of pathology
and acuity could be kept separate). They also gathered extensive data on sensory vo-
cabularies (not just colour terms, but taste and smell and hearing terms too), prompted
636 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

by the supposition that there might be some association between extensiveness of no-
menclature (e.g. the presence/absence of a word for blue) and degree of sensitiveness
(to said colour). They carried out their studies of psychophysical performance with re-
markable resolve considering the deficiencies or outright failure of much of their test
equipment, illness (which impaired their own sensory abilities), and native resistance
(e.g. to having tubes stuck up their noses—understandably). For example the hearing
threshold tests were compromised by the pounding of the surf and rustle of the breeze
in the palm trees—not your ordinary laboratory conditions. Getting a result was diffi-
cult (Richards 1998). They also had to control for the problem of subjects responding
to the tests based on inferences (which obviously involved some degree of intellection)
as opposed to reporting ‘immediate sense impressions’ (which is what they were after).7
Their difficulties in this connection ought to have prompted more reflection on the
impossibilities of ever completely stripping the perceptual process of its cultural and
personal lining, but they did not.
What did the team find? The results were mixed, as were their interpretations and
McDougall appears to have differed from Rivers and Myers in the conclusions he
drew. Thus, McDougall studied the Islanders’ tactile sensitivity using a compass to
measure the threshold for the discrimination of two points on the skin and found
this to be comparatively low: ‘about one half that of Englishmen’ (McDougall 1901:
192). He used an algometer, which presses a point against the skin with varying levels
of pressure to determine sensibility to pain and found this to be comparatively high:
‘nearly double that of Englishmen’ (McDougall 1901: 195). He concluded that the na-
tives’ ‘delicacy of tactile discrimination constitutes a racial characteristic’ and that the
‘oft-repeated statement that savages in general are less susceptible to pain than white
men’ was exact (McDougall 1901: 193–4). McDougall did not perceive any contra-
diction to the quite opposite results of these two tests, nor did he demonstrate the
same methodological acumen (or experimental reflexivity) as his fellow team members
(Richards 1998).
While McDougall found confirmation for the prevailing stereotypes of ‘primitive’
man, Rivers and Myers found no definite racial differences in the acuity of the senses
they studied (see further Rivers 1905). For example Myers found the average olfactory
acuity to be slightly higher in Torres Strait than in Aberdeenshire and general auditory
acuity to be inferior, but emphasized the limits of the test equipment he utilized (and
incomparability of the data) more than anything, while Rivers concluded that ‘the gen-
eral average’ in Torres Strait ‘do not exhibit that degree of superiority over the European
in visual acuity proper which the accounts of travelers might have led one to expect’
(Rivers 1901: 42). Rivers otherwise found that some visual illusions were experienced
more strongly by native subjects than by British subjects, and others less strongly, but
there was no ‘marked degree’ of difference here either. This strike in favour of the psy-
chophysical unity of humankind and incipient critique of the racist reasoning of the
day was, however, tempered by Rivers and Myers resorting in the next sentences of
their respective reports to relating anecdotes of native sensory virtuosity or extraordi-
nary ‘powers of observation’. They simply could not get the Spencerian hypothesis out
Re-visualizing Anthropology 637

of their heads. The one difference from MacDougall (1901) is that they related these
manifestations of extrasensitivity to ‘habits of life’ or custom rather than inheritance—
but, then, because customs could be graded in terms of degree of civilization, this al-
ternate explanation did nothing to unseat the Spencerian hypothesis. Thus, Rivers and
Myers were both very modern in their use of statistics and the (experimental) evidence
of the senses to challenge racist doctrines, and very Victorian in the way they persisted
in employing ­evolutionary-style reasoning to interpret the scarcest indication of differ-
ence in the statistical tables their research generated.

Sensualizing Anthropology
Part II of The Ethnographer’s Eye is entitled ‘Anthropological Visions’. It starts with a
chapter on cinema and anthropology in the postwar period and then presents a series
of case studies of prominent ethnographic film-makers, including Jean Rouch, followed
by David and Judith MacDougal, and finally Melissa Llewlyn-Davies. The first chap-
ter is interesting for what could be called its ‘intervisuality’ as Grimshaw traces the in-
fluence of different postwar cinematic genres—Italian neorealism, cinéma vérité, direct
cinema—on the nascent tradition of ethnographic film. Always one for uncovering dif-
ferences, Grimshaw goes on to point out the singularities and contrasts between the cin-
ema ‘as initiation’ style of Rouch, the ‘observational cinema’ of the MacDougals and the
‘made for television’ style of Llewlyn-Davies. Here we will focus on Grimshaw’s analysis
of the MacDougals’ oeuvre.
The ‘observation’ involved in observational cinema has to do with intimacy rather
than distance and intensity rather than objectivity. Above all, it entails a particular so-
cial relationship with a film’s subjects—namely, a relationship based in humility and
respect, not surveillance. This unique use of the term was coined by Colin Young,
the mentor of the small group of film-makers (including the MacDougals) working at
UCLA in the late 1960s. Their modus operandi was summed up as follows by one of
their company:

We shoot in long takes dealing with specific individuals rather than cultural patterns
or analysis. We try to complete an action within a single shot, rather than fragment-
ing it. Our work is based on an open interaction between us as people (not just film-
makers)­and the people being filmed. (Hancock quoted in Grimshaw 2001: 13)

Grimshaw elaborates on these remarks by suggesting that observational cinema is

fundamentally about integrity—the integrity of events, the integrity of the encounter,
and the integrity of the film-maker. The former is established through the extended shot,
that of the encounter through making the relationship between film-maker and subject
central to the film, and that of the film-makers themselves through attention to detail,
and through editing (see further Grimshaw 2009).
As regards the importance of detail, Grimshaw lays much stress on ‘the focus and
intensity of the camera eye’ in the case of David MacDougal’s work. (It should be
638 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

noted that Judith MacDougal was the one responsible for the sound in the films the
MacDougals shot together.) She writes:

[The camera eye] serves as a filter, one which seems anxious not to intrude, but to sim-
ply to [sic] be there, quietly watching, an expression of the film-maker’s sensitivity and
deference towards his subjects. And yet the occasional movements of the camera and
its changing positions are necessary, in fact, to remind us of MacDougall’s presence,
to reassure us of the integrity of the vision he is presenting, one intimately tied to his
having genuinely been there. (Grimshaw 2001: 131, emphasis added)

As an example of the way the MacDougals practised observational cinema, consider

To Live with Herds: A Dry Season among the Jie (1971). This film explores the pastoral
life of a herding people in Uganda within the context of wider political and economic
changes. It has a five-part structure. The film opens in a Jie compound, with a series of
shots that extoll the quiet dignity of the organic, cyclical way of life of the Jie and their
cattle. Then, in a single extended shot, a man by the name of Logoth points out the ex-
tent of Jie terrain in response to a request to do so from the film-makers. The ensuing
parts disclose the prejudice and casual brutality of the Ugandan state apparatus towards
pastoralists, as well as the incursion of market relations. There is a dust storm, which
seems an apt symbol for the increasing turbulence of life (even as the film has no sym-
bolic pretensions), and the film draws to a close on the edge of the cattle camps (once
again), with an extended shot of Logoth and others exchanging greetings. The cyclical
structure of the film is no accident: it reinforces the MacDougals’ powerful indictment
of market-driven and state-sponsored linear notions of progress and development. The
message is in the juxtaposition, the montage.
To Live with Herds is heavily and artfully edited, despite the appearance of being
direct. Grimshaw raises the question of whether the formal perfection of its structure
does not betray the principles of observational cinema (for it can hardly be considered
a ‘found’ film). She then moves on to discuss how the MacDougals themselves moved
on to develop ‘participatory’ or what could be called ‘conversational cinema’. The latter
approach is said by Grimshaw to have involved ‘a shift away from vision and towards
voice’, and from structure to process, since the notion of ‘[c]onversation signalled in-
formality, spontanaeity and open-ended interaction’ (Grimshaw 2001: 138). There was
a change in David MacDougal’s camera technique as well, from the ‘privileged camera
style’ of the Jie films (where the camera can be anywhere within a scene—aperspectival,
omniscient) to what he called an ‘unprivileged camera style’. The latter, which empha-
sizes the situatedness of the film-maker’s perspective,

essentially involved ‘humanising’ the camera. There was an acknowledgment of film’s

subjective qualities, and the text itself was to reveal that ‘film-makers are human, fal-
lible, rooted in physical space and society, governed by chance, limited in perception’.
(Grimshaw 2001: 138)
Re-visualizing Anthropology 639

The first traces of this shift towards a more situated and voiceful or collaborative film
process can be seen in the Turkana Conversations trilogy, which the MacDougals worked
on in the early 1970s. The films in this trilogy do not assume a unified culture (as with
the Jie films), but rather deal with points of crisis within Turkana society as well as be-
tween it and the dominant society. They are structured around conversations with differ-
ent individuals rather than a single representative individual (such as Logoth).
In the late 1970s, the MacDougals shifted terrain from East Africa to Australia, and
lived as resident film-makers in aboriginal communities in the Arukun area of northern
Queensland. During this period their films stopped being about the struggle between
indigenous communities and the state, and become part of that struggle, that process.
‘The MacDougals sought to give voice to people’, Grimshaw (2001: 142) writes, ‘allow-
ing people to tell their own stories, to name experience, such that the members of the
Aboriginal community could assert, challenge or redefine relationships with the world
on their own terms.’ This process of redefinition plays out within the time of filming,
so that the film becomes a record of an open-ended, tumultuous conversation between
different members of the communities concerned, state officials and the film-makers
themselves.
The MacDougals shifted terrain again, from Australia to India in the 1980s, while
remaining based at the Australian National University, Canberra. Grimshaw’s analy-
sisof their contribution to the evolution of visual anthropology ends with a discus-
sion of Photo Wallahs (1991).8 Photo Wallahs centres on the practice of photography
in Mussoorie, a former hill station which is now a popular Indian vacation and hon-
eymoon destination. Making a film about the history of photography in this Hima-
layan resort may be seen to represent a ‘return to a preoccupation with vision rather
than voice’ (Grimshaw 2001: 145), but in point of fact, this documentary, with its
emphasis on indigenous aesthetics, is best seen as transitional to what could be called
the ‘sensational cinema’ of the latest phase of David MacDougal’s film career. This
sensorial turn found its fullest expression in Doon School Chronicle (2000), and its
most complete theorization in The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses
(MacDougal 2005). Neither of these works would have been accessible to Grimshaw
at the time she was writing The Ethnographer’s Eye, although they definitely resonate
with how her own work has evolved since the publication of that book, as we shall
see presently.
MacDougal chose to make a video study of what he calls the ‘social aesthetics’ of
Doon School, the famed residential boys’ secondary school situated near Mussoorie
in the foothills of the Himalayas, as a companion study to Sanjay Srivastava’s (2007)
­ethnography of the school’s role in reproducing and shaping concepts of the modern In-
dian citizen and nation. While Srivastava’s work focusses on the socialization of the boys,
MacDougal’s video concentrates on the aesthetics or ‘culturally patterned sensory expe-
rience’ of school life, including ‘the design of buildings and grounds, the use of cloth-
ing and colors, the rules of dormitory life, the organization of students’ time, particular
styles of speech and gesture, and the many rituals of everyday life that accompany such
640 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

activities as eating, school gatherings, and sport’ (MacDougal 2005: 98). All of these
‘aesthetic features’ are held by MacDougal to be influential in their own right, and not
simply ‘the symbolic expression of more profound forces (such as history and ideology)’.
‘What is interesting sociologically’, he writes

is the extent to which these aesthetic patterns may influence events and decisions in a
community, along with the other more commonly recognized social forces of history,
economics, politics, and ideology. All these forces are, of course, interconnected, but
it often seems that the aesthetic features of a society are too easily assimilated into
other categories, to such a extent that they become invisible or ignored. (MacDougal
2005: 98)

MacDougal would likely agree with Italo Calvino: ‘It is only after you have come to
know the surface of things . . . that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the
surface of things is inexhaustible’ (cited in Howes 2004: 245).
Looking back, it could be said that while MacDougal’s films have long been lauded
for their audio and visual detail, now the message is in those very details; while his films
have come to be known for foregrounding individuals, now the accent is on how indi-
viduals are formed, or, put another way, how ‘the school impressed its own distinctive
stamp on them’ (MacDougal 2005: 96); and, where the image of a cycle or the idea of
conversation formerly provided the organizing framework for his films, now the focus
is on ‘aesthetic features’ or the presence and interrelations of the senses, as when he writes:
‘Doon School’s social aesthetic is made up of many elements and consists not so much
in a list of ingredients as a complex, whose interrelations as a totality (as in gastronomy)
are as important as their individual effects’ (MacDougal 2005: 98). Summing up, Mac-
Dougal’s abiding concern with sensitizing audiences to issues has transformed into a
concern with sensitization itself.9
MacDougal’s The Corporeal Image, in addition to setting out the socioaes-
thetic theory that informs Doon School Chronicles, makes many robust claims and
arguments for the sensual in anthropology, with film being the primary medium for
conveying sense experience. For example Chapter 2 is entitled ‘Voice and Vision’, and
consists of a sustained reflection on the contrasts between text and image, narrative
and film, with respect to conveying and fostering the analysis of complex social events.
MacDougal comes down squarely in favour of film on account of its intrinsic multi-
modality, which is hardly surprising in view of his métier, but he remains conscious
of the experiential limits of film even as he extols its sensory extensivity relative to the
printed page.

one of the distinctive things about film is its routine mixing of different modes of
thought and perception. There is a continuous interplay among its varied forms of
address—the aural with the visual, the sensory with the verbal, the narrative with the
pictorial. There is a semblance of this interplay in literature, as well, but it is actually a
construction of the writer’s and reader’s imaginations, since the actual form of address,
Re-visualizing Anthropology 641

words on a page, remains constant. Although films still have a comparatively limited
experiential range (one does not smell the flowers in a film, or speak with others, or
touch, or feel touched), they do offer the spectator some insight into the integrated
and often confusing social reality faced by the protagonists. Writing can provide the
jolt of a physical encounter, but films provide a flow of sensory (and other) expe-
riences that requires considerable application to derive from writing. (MacDougal
2006: 52)

MacDougal does not always in his writings underscore the limited experiential range
of film to the extent he does in this passage,10 and there could be more debate regard-
ing the respective merits of text and film with respect to dissecting and communicat-
ing sense experience,11 but the most important point to retain from this discussion is
its cross-modal reflexivity. Instead of simply being reflexive about textuality, or simply
being reflexive about visuality, MacDougal situates both within the larger context of
a growing concern with the possibilities of intersensoriality or ‘sensuous scholarship’
(Stoller 1997).12 Sarah Pink makes a similar case in The Future of Visual Anthropology:
Engaging the Senses (Pink 2006).
This brings us back to Grimshaw, who was the first to theorize in a comprehensive
way the epistemological possibilities of visualization as opposed to textualization, and
for whom visualization has increasingly come to mean the sensualization of knowing
and of how anthropologists ought to communicate what they know. Thus, one finds
repeatedly in her writings since the publication of The Ethnographer’s Eye references to
the project of ‘visualizing anthropology’ as ‘going beyond the narrow concerns of ocu-
larity to investigate ways of knowing located in the body and in the senses’ (Grimshaw
and Ravetz 2005: 2).13 For her, ‘questions of the visual’ are to be ‘interpreted broadly
as about embodied and sensory-based ways of knowing’ (Grimshaw 2005: 25). Using
a camera (i.e. practising observational cinema) is important to her because of the way
it ‘positions oneself differently in the world’, and enables a shift from the conventional
‘word-sentence to an image-sequence approach’ to knowledge production (Grimshaw
2007: 199). But her practice has also evolved beyond reflecting on what is distinctive
about the insights observational cinema can yield to involve collaborative projects with
diverse visual artists and experimentation with alternative sites for the dissemination of
knowledge. As she notes,

anthropologists have not gone very far in pushing beyond existing conventions. Even
in the area of visual anthropology, filmmakers tend to make pieces for conventional
screening or they work with museums to present knowledge through particular ar-
rangements of textually situated objects. (Grimshaw 2007: 203)

Grimshaw urges them to try ‘putting anthropology in different spaces’, such as an art
gallery, and to start thinking of fieldwork as ‘about techniques of material practice’ or
‘making objects’. What she has in mind when she refers to these techniques is ‘seeking
ways to realign the researcher’s [and the audience’s] body within the process of inquiry
642 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

such that understanding might encompass the full range of the senses and emerge from
embodied intersubjective encounter’ (Grimshaw 2007: 204). Anthropology is no longer
about writing and publishing texts or shooting and screening films but about making
and experiencing objects or environments.
Since 2009 I have been collaborating with my colleague in the Design Art Department­
at Concordia, the artist and performance theorist Chris Salter, to produce ‘total sensory
environments’ as an alternative and complement to the ethnographic monograph and
ethnographic film. The Mediations of Sensation project has involved contemplating
diverse case studies in sensory anthropology (e.g. Classen 1993) and imagining how to
model them using coloured light, sound, vibration, motion, heat and haze, among other
sensory cues. The ‘atmospheres’ Chris Salter has created using new (and traditional)
media have proved to be deeply engaging, as visitors (or better, ‘experiencers’ since it is
impossible to remain a viewer) find their senses elicited and then conjoined in all sorts
of unexpected ways which open cracks in the conventional Western sensory paradigm
and plunge them into parallel sensory worlds. For visitors to make sense of these ‘per-
formative environments’ involves practicing just the sorts of ‘realignments’ Grimshaw
describes.14

Conclusion
The exercise in ‘re-visualizing anthropology’ broached here has involved investigating
two moments in the history of the discipline—namely, the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury and the turn of the twenty-first century—when vision appeared to play the domi-
nant role in the production of knowledge, if one follows Anna Grimshaw’s argument
in The Ethnographer’s Eye. However, in both instances the focus on vision turned out to
occlude the equally constitutive role of diverse nonvisual senses in the constitution and
advancement of anthropological knowledge. In this chapter, I have tried to make a case
for attending to the interplay of the senses, rather than focus on any one sense in isola-
tion, because of the additional insights into cultural processes which such an intersen-
sory approach can generate.

Further Reading
Bull, Michael and Les Back, eds. 2003. The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Classen, Constance, ed. 2005. The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg.
Drobnick, Jim, ed. 2006. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Kaushik Bhaumik, eds. 2008. Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader. Oxford:
Berg.
Howes, David, ed. 2004. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Howes, David, ed. 2009. The Sixth Sense Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn, ed. 2005. The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Oxford:
Berg.
Re-visualizing Anthropology 643

Notes
1. The charge of being an armchair anthropologist is not entirely fair when directed at E. B.
Tylor. As Gosden, Larsden and Petch have brought out in Knowing Things, Tylor trained
his attention on objects rather than people: his fieldsite was the museum, and he paid as
close attention to material culture as the succeeding generation of anthropologists would
pay to social organization. The Pitt Rivers Museum, which was Tylor’s bailiwick, is famous
for its arrangements of objects in static displays to demonstrate evolutionary sequences.
But these schemes were arrived at through an intimate first-hand knowledge of the things
themselves—that is through manipulation. For example Tylor gave demonstrations of fire-
making with rubbing sticks, and also practised boomerang throwing in the University Parks.
In this way he picked up the habitus of the object. Consider further Tylor’s vision for the
museum:

When will hearing be like seeing? says the Persian proverb. Words of description will
never give the grasp that the mind takes through the handling and sight of objects. And
this is why in fixing and forming ideas of civilization a museum is so necessary. (Quoted
in Gosden, Larson, and Petch 2007)

  Note that while the museum remained a place to handle as well as see objects for scien-
tists like Tylor, by this period the general public was forced to form its ideas of civilization
by sight alone (see Classen 2005 and 2007).
2. Barker may have derived part of her inspiration for the development of this subtheme from
the passage in Ian Langham’s psychological portrait of Rivers in The Building of British Social
Anthropology, where he writes

As Rivers himself states on a number of occasions, his conscious cerebrations were

almost wholly devoid of visual imagery, although he remembered being capable of vi-
sualization as a child and still experienced it while dreaming. According to Rivers, the
loss of his childhood capacity to picture could be understood as part of the process by
which he had become especially interested in abstract matters, and had, therefore, de-
voted less attention and interest to the concrete world. One of the major motivations
of much of Rivers’ scientific work seems to have been to understand mental processes
based on visualization, a type of thought which he himself was apparently no longer
able to consciously perform. (Langham 1981: 54)

  It will be appreciated that, in his diminished ability to visualize, Rivers was a living ex-
ample of the Spencerian hypothesis. It was no conceit for him.
3. Rivers had a thing about vision, to be sure. However, he was also a stammerer, a fact
ignored by Grimshaw, but one which certainly had an impact on his life (see Slobodin
1978: 8). His sexual orientation was also indeterminate, or to put this another way, as re-
pressed as his visual imagination. It would further appear that Rivers had a thing about
skin: over the course of 167 sessions in his rooms at Cambridge between April 1903 and
October 1907, Rivers was involved in an experiment concerning the recovery of tactile sen-
sitivity through nerve regeneration. His research partner for this experiment, Henry Head,
had the nerves in his left forearm severed so that he could track and describe the process of
644 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

regeneration first-hand; Rivers administered pricks, made measurements and took notes.
This experiment with and on his close friend Head absorbed Rivers deeply. Out of it there
emerged a theory of the protopathic versus epicritic mechanisms of the skin (known as the
Head-Rivers Hypothesis), which Rivers continued reflecting on and embellishing into a
general theory of sensibility and of the differences between the mentality of ‘primitive’ and
‘civilized’ peoples (Slobodin 1978: 31–3; Langham 1981: 57–78). All this to say that filter-
ing the interpretation of Rivers’s life and work through the lens of his (alleged) fixation on
the visual risks obscuring the no less important role of certain nonvisual senses (namely the
cutaneous senses and speech) both with respect to the shaping of his character and to his
scientific interests and output. Incidentally, it would be fascinating to compare the Rivers-
Head friendship with the Freud-Fliess friendship since these intellectual (and erotic) part-
nerships served as the crucible for the generation of theories that would have a profound
impact on Western psychology (see Howes 2003: ch. 7).
4. Of course, Malinowski’s gaze was not so innocent, as we learned from his posthumously
published diary. Furthermore, there was actually a problem with his ‘visionary eye’: for ex-
ample he espied what he took to be the ‘big picture’ of the kula ring when he should have
been listening, as discussed at length elsewhere (Howes 2003). There is, moreover, some
question regarding the extent to which Malinowski’s sensibility actually differed from that
of Rivers’s

Consider Malinowski’s psychophysical understanding of himself during his initial field-

work, described in his diary. He consistently represented his feelings in Riversian—[or
what we have been calling Spencerian] . . . terms. Journeying by ship, he reported:
‘Lay in euthanasian [sic] concentration . . . living only by the five senses and the body
(through impressions) causes direct merging with surroundings.’ And he identified his
frequent lapses from his ideal moral standard as descents into sensuality . . . [for exam-
ple,] when he had no ‘energy to get to work’, his ‘moral tonus [wa]s also considerably
lower,’ he succumbed to ‘lecherous thoughts,’ and his ‘metaphysical conception of the
world [was] completely dimmed’. (Kuklick 1998: 179)

  Thus, underlying the ostensibly opposed ‘visions’ of Rivers and Malinowski there per-
sisted a common (very Victorian) sensibility. All this to say that Grimshaw’s overwhelming
focus on the visual sometimes occludes as much as it reveals. Incidentally, Malinowski’s life
and work would be a fascinating subject for a sensory biography, such as has been attempted
elsewhere for Freud and also for Marx (see Howes 2003: ch. 7 and 8).
5. See notes 3 and 4 for some indication of the occlusions which result from too strong a fixa-
tion on vision.
6. ‘Il n’y a pas de hors texte’ was a favourite slogan of poststructuralists at the time.
7. This was supposed to be more of a problem when testing European populations, because of
the presumed inverse relation between the development of higher and lower functions, but
it would still interfere with the drawing of comparisons, and so had to be ‘controlled’.
8. Judith and David MacDougall parted ways after filming Photo Wallahs (see Grimshaw 2001:
145).
9. One can track this transition by following the changing meanings attached to camera angles
and movements. In MacDougall’s observational cinema stage, these signify his having ‘genu-
inely been there’ (according to Grimshaw), in his conversational cinema stage they indicate
Re-visualizing Anthropology 645

‘perspective’, and in his sensational cinema stage they index ‘the presence of the filmmaker’s
body’ (see MacDougall 2006: 26–8, 54).
10. See ‘Screening the Senses’ (Howes 2008) for a discussion of how some senses get screened
out in the process of transposing the lived into the filmed.
11. For a discussion of how writing may do a better job at conserving ‘the parity of the senses’
(MacDougall 2006: 60) than film see Howes 2003: 57–8.
12. Thus, MacDougall makes many keen observations concerning the interrelations of the
senses in The Corporeal Image (see e.g. MacDougall 2006: 29, 42), albeit mainly limited to
what could be called ‘the film senses’ of vision, audition and kinesthesia.
13. This opening in the direction of the ‘other’ senses from within visual anthropology dove-
tails with the rise of sensory anthropology (see Howes 1991; Classen 1993, 1997; Geurts
2002; Robben and Sluka 2007), which also has its roots in a critique of the hypertex-
tuality of mainstream anthropology in the 1980s (Howes 2003), but is also somewhat
more wary of relying on visual technologies like the camera to free the ethnographic
imagination.
14. Those interested in following the results of the Mediations of Sensation project are invited to
do so by periodically visiting the ‘Senses’ Web site at http://www.david-howes.com/senses/
MediationsofSensation.htm and the labxmodal Web site at http://xmodal.hexagram.ca/.

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Classen, Constance. 1997. ‘Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses’, International Social
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Classen, Constance. 2005. ‘Touch in the Early Museum’, in Constance Classen (ed.), The Book
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Clifford, James. 1983. ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, Representations, 2: 118–46.
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 29

Seven Theses on Visual

Culture: Towards a
Critical-Reflexive Paradigm
for the New Visual Studies
Barry Sandywell

Many recent theoretical perspectives and critical-analytical approaches to visual per-

ception and visual culture have implicitly or explicitly defined some of the conceptual
contours for a more radical transdisciplinary approach to visual studies. The following
presentation attempts to articulate some of the operative presuppositions for a critical
and reflexive paradigm of research in the emerging field of the New Visual Studies. The
themes are formulated in seven generic theses that are partially elaborated in corollary
theorems, arguments and speculations. These all revolve around the interplay between
our consciousness of images and materializations of image consciousness operating prior
to all theorizing and disciplinary projects. Needless to say this schematic presentation
should be viewed as an invitation for further thought and, in the light of this, more con-
crete specification and development.

The Historicity Thesis

The historicity thesis holds that history (or ‘historicity’) enters into the fabric of visual phe-
nomena to shape diverse frameworks of visual experience and, correlatively, that models
of visuality generate different configurations of virtual existence and cultural experience.

1. What is called ‘seeing’ or ‘vision’ has a history. This elementary thesis claims
that what is deemed to be ‘phenomenal’, ‘natural’, and ‘universal’ is in real-
ity shaped by historical conditions and local social arrangements. Like social
practices in general, seeing is located in and dependent upon pre-given systems
of meaning and institutional contexts. The universe of the perceptible—and,
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 649

thereby, of the conceivable, believable and knowable—is already articulated in

particular language-games, discourses and other technical apparatuses (these
might be called ‘practices of seeing’).
2. As these material contexts implicate complex social and semantic histories
they invite genealogical questions concerning the diverse functions of images,
image techniques and image consciousness as these inform the changing tex-
ture of human experience. Given the temporality of perception it follows that
every domain of the visible (and in principle every form of research into the
visible) is finite and time-dependent. As the contingent structures of phenom-
enality display an irreducible temporal dimension even the most vivid act of
seeing—whether in real-time perception of objects, in inner cognition, or in
acts of reading and cultural criticism—‘takes time’ and this ineluctable ‘in-
terval’ discloses constellations of signifying effects that shape the constructive
possibilities of physical, personal and social experience.
3. As an appropriation of the world, every perception contains memories of ear-
lier perceptions. Seeing—visual consciousness—is contextual, modal and plu-
ral. Each act of perception depends on prior contexts of meaning, forms and
rituals that are destined to be overtaken by future, hitherto unanticipated,
acts of meaning. If seeing is both a belated praxis and a projective site of in-
tentional activity then there are innumerable ways of viewing, an indefinite
number of ‘eyes’ and incommensurable perspectives correlated to different in-
terpretive communities (consider, for example the similarities and differences
between utopian visions, theological contemplation, the philosopher’s gaze,
scientific observation, the clinical inspection, ethnographic seeing, the lover’s
look, the optic of childhood, technologically expanded perception, etc, etc).
Under analysis each of these ‘perspectives’ turns out to be a particular histori-
cal and cultural experiment in imaging that invites historical and sociological
investigations of the changing dynamics of image practices. Images not only
reflect social life but also in complex ways mediate and change social rela-
tionships. What are commonly called ‘images’ are in reality symbolic processes
embedded in particular life-worlds (what we call ‘world’ is more accurately
defined as ‘imagined worlds’).
4. As a spatiotemporal signifying event seeing can function as a reminder of the im-
possibility of pure knowledge. Given its obsession with objects as visual things
rather than with processes of envisioning, the history of Western philosophy could
be productively rewritten in terms of the framing of sense-perception and, in
particular, the sense perception of everyday things as a model for experience in
general (Sandywell 2011). Such a history would necessarily take the form of
a reconstruction of noncommensurate theories of ordinary perceptual experi-
ences of things. The still-point in this diachronic multiplicity is the functional-
ity of the image or the universe of real virtuality invoked by different theories of
perception and knowledge. Such a reconstruction would also reveal how every
discipline that has tried to conceptually delimit vision—philosophy, aesthetics,
650 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

psychology, sociology, poetics, phenomenology and so on—implicitly draws

upon particular images of imaging (and thereby, imagination) in its analytical
strategies and programmatic perspectives. Hidden behind all the academic par-
aphernalia, the basic gesture of disciplinarity is one that elides the myriad pos-
sibilities of image processing to promote a single conceptually privileged way
of seeing—what might be called the rule of a conceptual optic. ‘Disciplinarity’
means normatively envisioning phenomena as ‘phenomena worth studying’ by
real and projected communities through particular conceptual instruments. And
the paradigmatic instruments of envisioning are historically situated metaphors
and concepts drawn from particular images of visual life (images that exploit the
reflexive citability of a ‘seeing of seeing’, an ‘imaging of images’, ‘instancing of
a generality’, ‘exemplifying a genre’, etc). In this way all disciplines impose a
conceptual diagram upon both their investigative objects and their prospective
audiences (‘seeability’, ‘observability’, ‘analysablity’, ‘reportability’, ‘readability’,
‘interpretability’, ‘criticizability’, etc all being diagrammatic visual capacities).
A discipline’s research horizon is constituted by a promissory rule of verbal
and visual translation: ‘Speak like this and you will see these phenomena’. But
being primarily object-focussed, disciplines rarely disclose and reflect upon the
temporal-historical structure of their own conceptual operations (they are, in
effect, silent about their translation and interpretive procedures). By reverse en-
gineering this process of envisioning we can restore the act-character of vision
as a seeing-through imagery and take the first step towards a reflexive cultural
paradigm premised upon the plurality and typical incommensurability of visual
translations of reality.
5. If there can be no pure seeing, if we see through historical eyes, being attentive
to historicity transforms every substantive topic and theoretical perspective in
visual research into an index of a genesis of meaning and, more specifically, a
genesis of memory, subjectivity and sociality understood as social processes. As ‘real-
ity’ is always something appropriated, interpreted and envisioned, all ‘thinking’
about the visual is already indebted to the visuality of thinking: no discipline
ever simply gazes at objects as though through a transparent medium; objects
are always mediated, always half-known things, entities that never shake off
their aura of unknowability. Individuals have to learn to see, just as they have
to be trained to attend to what is revealed in perception. When approached as
a process every act of perception—like every act of reading and writing—bears
the traces of violence and decision (more particularly in the ‘cuts’ that sepa-
rates this act of seeing from alternatives and from the horizontal possibilities of
things yet to be seen and things unseen). By means of cultural reverse engineer-
ing subjectivity—or, if you will, materialized consciousness—is restored to every
process of objectification. If cultures change as old ways of seeing, reading and
remembering are replaced by new forms of visual knowledge so ‘cultures of
inquiry’ display an analogous hermeneutic pattern of displacement. For ex-
ample what is now called ‘science’—including social science—developed­as a
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 651

long historical struggle to re-see and re-interpret the world through analyti-
cal, objectivist, causal lenses (modes of perception whose existence was purely
hypothetical and ‘unthinkable’ prior to their concrete actualization). And to
see ‘objects’ scientifically—to observe, classify and analyse phenomena—also
meant to desist from seeing objects in mythical, theological and everyday cul-
tural frames antedating the birth of science.
6. If we see in and through such normative practices and imaginative forms
(where praxis, poiesis and episteme belong to the same dialectical constellation)
it follows that any critical programme of visual studies must investigate the
situated eventfulness, plurality and heterogeneity of practices of seeing. ‘Prac-
tices of seeing’ are thus not primarily passages or relays conveying significance
from object to subject. Rather, as multidimensional networks, practices con-
stitute the material space for such abstract entities like subjects and objects
(‘readers’, ‘writers’, ‘interpreters’ and so on are both the outcomes and agen-
cies of such networks). Once we accept the idea that perception is more than a
natural faculty we also see that there can be no immediate seeing or direct visual
meaning that could bring the world to presence untouched by sociocultural
instruments. When extended to the realm of culture as a whole this thesis entails
that there can be no uniquely privileged image, presentation or re-presentation
without mediation (of concepts, technical devices, discursive and nondis-
cursive practices, interpretive communities, ideological formations, cultural
frameworks, brain circuitry and so forth) and therefore without repetition:
every ‘inspection’ is also a ‘retrospection’, every image a re-imagining, every
perception a memory. From this reflexive perspective ‘culture’ is a misnomer
for ‘mediated cultures’ (just as ‘visuality’ is better understood as shorthand
for ‘re-mediated visualities’). This interpretive principle makes every critical
investigation of the complex grammars governing the semantic field of vision
(or visualities) in both everyday life and vision-oriented discourses a primary
research priority.
7. Vision is not what you think it is. This is the lesson common to a range of
disciplines from cultural studies to neuroscience. Vision is more like a syn-
aptic link in a complex network than a self-standing presence. We have to
radically re-imagine the functions of visual consciousness more dynamically
as simultaneously sensory modality, metaphor and conceptual diagram. The
semantic relations and multiplicities ‘vision’ enfolds suspend the consoling
idea that there might be one answer to the question, What is it to see? Here we
can extend what Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier claim about reading,
that seeing ‘is not a solely abstract intellectual operation; it involves the body,
is inscribed within a space, and implies a relationship to oneself or to others’
(1999: 4).
8. Thinking concretely we could say that where individuals see with their senses,
cultures ‘envision’ through their collective memories, metaphors and techni-
cal diagrams. Rather than naturalizing ‘seeing’ we should think in terms of
652 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

changing ‘scopic regimes’, historically variant modes of organizing observa-

tion and perception of the world. Transform a society’s practices of seeing—its
ways of meaning, symbolic frameworks and institutionalized traditions—and
you change the meaning of historical situations and the terms of sociocultural
experience. To first see we already have to have imagined. Seeing is a thoughtful
repetition, or rather, an iterable possibility of materialized imagination (where,
for example we might view social institutions as imaginary diagrams). This ac-
cords the work of imaginative metaphor a fundamental cognitive role across
every sphere of meaning (revealing the forms and contents of culture as het-
erogeneous topographies of creative symbolic praxis). When understood liter-
ally the historicity thesis—and more specifically the thesis of the historicity
of cultures of inquiry—facilitates the construction of new objects of thought,
conceptual frameworks and research methodologies untrammelled by current
disciplinary boundaries. One of these problematics is the cluster of reflexive
questions developed by the emerging paradigm we call New Visual Studies.
9. A central contention of the new visual studies movement is that it is the work
of situated imagination—what Greek culture calls poiesis and what German
philosophy calls Dichtung—that has created the visible and not the visible that
controls the imaginable. From this perspective the discourses of ­theory—like
the language-games of everyday life—are themselves crafted from ancient
forms of poiesis and figuration that are already at work in the material pro-
cesses of human embodiment. Like language itself, visual consciousness and
theories of the visible are the outcome of congealed poetry. The world is not
passively waiting to be seen (appropriately denigrated as ‘the myth of the
given’ or the ideology of immaculate perception); rather what we call ‘world’
has always-already been seen; what we see and what we call ‘world’ is pre-given
within the terms of some interpretive framework. We might more usefully
think of seeing as a type of cultural mapping or diagramming responsive to
wider changes in values, discourses and cultural experience. And, in principle,
there is no original map or diagram (just as in technical spheres there is no
original blueprint). What passes for ‘perceived reality’ is itself a legacy of ear-
lier imaging techniques embedded in the human sensorium. We could say that
what is visible, observable and reportable is indebted to a densely interwoven
matrix of neurons, memories and other imaging techniques (indexed in theo-
retical terms by the problematics of neurophysiology, phenomenology and
technology).
10. The map analogy explains why seeing the world differently requires work and
self-transformation. Seeing is like map-making (and like mapping it is moti-
vated by cultural relevances, prior definitions of value and powerful interests
in objectifying reality). If seeing is a mode of being-in-the-world the anticipa-
tion of seeing differently becomes foundational for the work of cultural criti-
cism. As with other social practices we need to think of seeing simultaneously
as contestation and tradition. Accepting the logic of reflexivity encourages a
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 653

generic social constructivist and hermeneutic orientation towards visual for-

mations (indeed the term ‘historicity’ can be replaced in many contexts by the
word ‘constructive’ and its derivatives). But we do not ‘construct’ from noth-
ing (this would be one consequence of the myth of visual immediacy). Rather,
we see in medias res. We construct meanings from within the dense materiality
of things, events and relationships as these have been imagined and institu-
tionally embodied. The latter formations—in their ‘obviousness’—have been
typically neglected by the dominant paradigms of visual research—especially
the material conditions of visuality, everyday visual technologies, gender dif-
ferences in seeing, the functionality of grammar, cognitive scripts and nar-
rative logics and so forth. Here the historicity thesis operates as an ethical
incentive to interrupt the scientistic and technocratic stories informing previ-
ous forms of inquiry within the human sciences and to imagine more creative
models and metaphors that are capable of recovering visual worlds lost to so-
cial theory and philosophy. In place of third-person ontologies the New Vi-
sual Studies commend pragmatic, transactional and reflexive narratives of the
complex cultural life of seeing.
11. In the light of this turn towards the materiality of visual experience it is not
surprising that many of the new cultural methodologies—semiotics, psycho-
analysis, deconstruction, genealogy, cultural studies, feminist research, eth-
nography, multiculturalism, cognitive science and so forth—have framed
their analytical tasks as acts of material anamnesis. Memory, recollection and
the recovery of lost objects and worlds then assume a more fundamental role
in critical self-reflection. With the insight that an archaic past still haunts the
scenarios of the present these forms of analysis commit themselves to the work
of recovering and translating worlds of experience that have been occluded by
traditional approaches or repressed by ideologies and dominant power struc-
tures. A shared interest in anamnesis—in deconstructing, reconstructing and
translating past worlds—has opened dialogues between new visual research,
poetry and poetics, literature, neurophysiology and some of the more inno-
vative explorations of postcontinental reflexive philosophy. The New Visual
Studies promises to become an exemplary site of the radical social and herme-
neutic ‘turn’ of contemporary postanalytical thought.
12. If the existential significance of every form of visibility is contingent upon
neurophysiological networks, social contexts, historical meanings and politi-
cal appropriations then different cultural self-definitions of visibilization—
different ways of seeing—enter into the self-understanding of human action,
individuation and community. Here the active role of visualization techniques
in different societies (or earlier phases of the same culture) prove to be central
to the project of human self-understanding (e.g. the critical confluence of a
range of visualization technologies that contributed to the constitution of the
nation-state and national identities with the coming of modernity). How dif-
ferent historical societies have seen their worlds, articulated images of life, and
654 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

projected possible futures in concrete activities becomes a central research topic

in the study of sociocultural change.
13. An important consequence of these recursive complexities is a renewed ap-
preciation of the constitutive function of images and imagination in the self-
constitution of bodies, selves and social worlds. The self—a person’s style,
comportment and mode of embodiment—is revealed in a way of seeing. What
was once merely a romantic ideology—the celebration of the creative ego and
the struggle for identity—can now be translated into a systemic programme of
critical research. The paradoxical thought also follows that the world is always
something yet to be seen.
14. The constructivist-hermeneutic orientation applies in principle to its own or-
ganizing metaphors, procedures and textual practices. We find the Möbian
loop that the topic and the analytical resources of visual analysis are both
woven from practices of seeing. The general thesis stipulates that the ‘historic-
ity of the visual’ should be reflexively turned back upon the situated processes
of research into visual phenomena. Visual structures only become accessi-
ble through visual means (just as we can only read maps if we understand
the idea and uses of mapping). Thus how different theories and conceptual
frameworks have ‘seen’ the world can also be treated as question-worthy—
and questionable—phenomena in their own right. This reflexive imperative
becomes especially crucial where the disciplines of art, art history, art criticism
and academic visual research have actively contributed to the great transfor-
mations that inaugurated modernity and the cultural changes that imple-
mented reflexive practices and energies within increasingly globalized forms
of life. In the light of these transformations traditional conceptions of what it
is to be human have to be rethought and this process of reconfiguration needs
to be viewed as a consequential reflexive variable in the contradictory dynam-
ics of modern life. In ethical terms, we have to accept responsibility for how
and what we see.
   This ethical dimension further underlines the radical involvement of the
self and self-cognition in the constitution of visible worlds and thus the vital
importance of exploring ‘techniques of subjectivation’ (or subject formation)
as specific historical-technological-political processes. In this context almost
every form of postcritical inquiry has come to the conclusion that images and
image technologies (icons, image flesh, image systems, imaginary formations,
multimedia, ideological figurations and so on) have a powerful ontological role
to play in the formation and (de)formation of selfhood, social relationships
and life-worlds. The restricted and one-sided approaches to seeing and vision
that have operated in the philosophical tradition are turned into questions
rather than ‘applied’ as neutral instruments of thought. What began life as
an imaginatively projected ‘virtual reality’—for example the projective ideas
human agents have of their own activities and selves—ends up institutional-
ized as ‘real virtuality’. By reversing this process we may experience the ‘shock
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 655

of the old’ as an incentive to re-envision the new by recovering the normative

concerns and discourse formations of the old.
15. Visual worlds understood in their complex heterogeneity, discontinuous sin-
gularity and multidimensional concreteness are invariably contested sites of
values mediated and mandated by power relationships. This applies to the
world of the painting or poem as it does to the social relations of everyday life,
subcultures and the larger structures of society. To become real ‘selfhood’ has
to be envisioned. Hence the almost inevitable hypostatization wherever the
‘self ’ is in question. Dominant forms of subjectivation operate by bringing
perceived excess, extremes and threatening alterities to some norm of delim-
ited order. What can be seen, how it is seen and by whom are subject to social
control imperatives. Like the universe of affective life, the life of seeing also
has to be carefully monitored and organized by institutional imperatives (here
the rule of social control is, ‘Not everything should be seen (spoken, thought,
etc.)’). This is why the possible modalities of seeing are invariably differentially
valued, distributed and normatively patrolled by political regimes (consider,
for example the long history of patronage as a political economy that licensed
and controlled ‘legitimate’ aesthetic representation or the equally contorted
history of visual censorship and proscription). We thus anticipate the emer-
gence of a transdisciplinary ‘political economy’ of image delimitation (or what
some have called political aesthetics) as a central focus of visual inquiry.
   The investigation of historically specific visual worlds and correlated
modes of subjectivation is itself a contested cultural terrain of practices (a
situation characterized by alternative approaches to cultural life-worlds,
different­ methodological translations, analytical perspectives and definitions
of ­relevance). The effects of these contestations and interruptions—their
­active role in the genealogy of discourses, critical engagements, disciplinary
traditions and so on—endure as traces in the orthodox problematics and writ-
ing styles of art history, aesthetic criticism and aesthetic philosophy as these
have been institutionalized in academic debates about the arts, art education
and the function of aesthetic objects in society. Even the traditional idea of a
‘field’ of specialized disciplines devoted to the objective investigation of visual
objects is a particular historical ordering that both discloses and forecloses
interpretive differences and possibilities. The writing practices and texts that
these specialized disciplines have generated as normative orderings of visual
phenomena become researchable topics for reflexive inquiry (e.g. as the study
of how social ordering glosses discontinuity, interruption and alterity in every-
day life to produce ‘life as usual’). The systemic deconstruction of such insti-
tutional formations as ‘canonicity’, ‘genre’, ‘disciplinarity’, ‘normal inquiry’,
‘methodic perspectives’ and the like now takes centre-stage as part of a radi-
cally reflexive hermeneutics of cultural orderings.
16. In the light of this self-reflexive paradigm every traditional conception of aes-
thetics, art and art education needs to be transformed through a re-specification
656 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

of aesthetic knowledge and its social and ideological functions. We then ask
not ‘what is art?’ but ‘when is art?’ and ‘for whom are these objects, artefacts
and performances art?’ This becomes the working principle for a genealogy
of the ‘aesthetic self ’. By bracketing the ideological signifier ‘art’ we begin the
process of aesthetic deconstruction and re-specification of everyday aesthetics
as one of the many dimensions of human action and cultural self-definition.
The first phase of this re-visioning must be one that celebrates the historic-
ity of art worlds (and today, art markets) and the mutable forms of aesthetic
self-consciousness they both foster and inhibit. This critical reappraisal of ‘aes-
thetic sensibility’ necessarily moves beyond a traditional hermeneutics of art
objects towards critical socio-historical genealogies focusing upon the dialec­
tical relationships between image-making, sociality and human praxis as these
are interwoven into the horizons of different interpretive communities. As the
ancient roots of the term ‘aesthetics’ attest (as the ‘science of the sensuous’),
a new aesthetics will need to recover the affective and cultural embodiments
of aesthetic experience as these are shaped by the multisensory formations
of human activity. The reconstituted domain of such an embodied aesthet-
ics must be capable of providing further instruments of contestation, self-
reflection and criticism of social and ethico-political arrangements (in this
sense even the classical ‘discourse of beauty’ with its emphasis on spectatorship
and visual pleasure may yet retain its force as a resource for future projects of
art practice and aesthetic experiment). A radical constructivist conception of
visibilization thus promises to open creative dialogues between the politics of
knowledge and the ethics of visualization as these operate in different societies
and civilizations.

The Artefactuality Thesis

The artefactuality thesis holds that all visual objects, practices and institutions are so-
cially constructed artefacts subject to situational analysis, deconstruction and revision-
ary transformation.

1. The conditions of visibility are not themselves visible. If we see through so-
cial eyes then historical forms of perception are specific to local cultures (and
subcultures) and their available technologies. The topography of the visible
is further mediated by ethical and political relations and representations (as
powerful interests struggle to control and channel visual energies by regulating
the visible and the invisible in particular situations and for particular purposes).
We have suggested that one of the least noticed aspects of visual praxis is its
remarkable ability to conjure order out of chaos (or rather, to order chaos for
normative ends). Inversely, what has been made socially and historically can
be ‘unmade’ through critique and social transformation. This process reveals
the realm of subjectivity and the multiple selves that are correlated to ­different
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 657

practices of seeing and their material correlates (a visual space that is ‘occu-
pied’ by no subject being a contradiction in terms).
2. We first encounter the visual order in and as the world of everyday artefacts
and structures that provide the background contexts of human activities (social
spaces, physical objects, visual representations, texts and so on). In this sense
the larger part of material culture is organized around the invisible orderings
of visible things. A material phenomenology of ‘things visual’ reveals the so-
cial applications, uses and appropriations of objects in the context of a diverse
range of social transactions.
3. If different orderings of visual experience function as blueprints for broader
cultural formations it follows that ‘cultures of visibility’ are necessarily contin-
gent formations indebted to social imaginaries and circumstances that vary
considerably in space and time (and one exemplary axis in such a history is the
social regulation of what passes for ‘aesthetic experience’ in different societies).
Just as individuals see the world differently (and to some extent inhabit differ-
ent ‘worlds’) so whole societies and cultures carve out different sensory worlds
and identities from the tactile, auditory, olfactory and visual possibilities of
experience. Just as the living body feels itself into place prior to projecting it-
self in space so cultures first imagine a space of possibilities prior to colonizing
these virtualities.
4. In understanding the dynamics of such affective life-worlds everything de-
pends upon the meaning that individuals give to artefacts within the terms
and practical orders set by a dominant political aesthetic as these are insti-
tutionalized in the transactions of everyday life. What is called ‘ordinary
life’ turns out to be a heterogeneous intersection of cultural imaginaries,
unrecognized desires and mundane pleasures (in this sense the term ‘mate-
rial culture’ obscures the embodied and affective dimensions of artefacts and
visual experiences that organize the routines and rhythms of everyday life).
From this perspective ‘ordinary life’ assumes the appearance of the ‘extraor­
dinary’. What is deemed ‘normal’ and ‘familiar’ is, in effect, the charnel
house of the imaginary.
5. Each social imaginary is also, from another perspective, an economy of plea-
sure. Affectivity—the economy of emotional life—is also subject to cultural-
historical­ordering. Bringing individuals into the space of familial, pedagogic
and public life is first and foremost a work of ethical-aesthetic praxis at the
level of primordial affectivity. Every acquired ‘posture’ and ‘habitus’ prom-
ises ­another map of the real, another way of seeing. New members of a com-
munity are just as subject to figural shaping and stylization as any material
­artefact. How a community imagines and represents its ‘other’, how a society
normatively distributes its zones of pleasure, how it constitutes practical on-
tologies of alterity are highlighted as fundamental topics for a reflexive pro-
gramme of visual research. Here the issue is not how we see, but how we come
to see and not to see the mundane realities of ordinary life.
658 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

6. Once this bracketing of taken-for-granted visual knowledge has been ef-

fected we may approach the architecture of the visible as grounded in par-
ticular image constellations. The genealogical project of an ‘archaeology
of the visible’—itself part of an archaeology of pleasure and historical
subjectivation—is one such reflexive domain within a wider theoretical inves-
tigation of world-making signifying praxis.
7. The investigation of the concrete cultural functions of visual artefacts and
media in constituting human selves and life-worlds (what might be called
the constitutive function of symbolpoiesis in subjectivation practices) becomes
a priority for future historical, sociological and cultural analyses. What con-
ventional social theory simply accepts as ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are now seen
as the phenomenal outcomes of imaginary processes of subjectivation and
objectivation (e.g. in the widely differing forms of human embodiment, in
the transition from fixed status selfhood into the mobile selves of urban and
metropolitan cultures or the symbolic constitution of ‘nationhood’). How a
culture imagines ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’—indeed how it projects ‘being’
and ‘being-in-the-world’—becomes a problem and researchable question. How
is ‘nature’ envisioned? How are the differences between natural orders and ar-
tificial orders themselves visualized? How are visual representations of nature
(and human nature) articulated by the arts and sciences?
8. How individuals and collective actors ‘view’ others and themselves, how iden-
tities and ‘otherness’ are translated and codified in social roles and practices,
how whole societies come to normatively objectify the ‘alterity’ of others all
belong within the general problematic of social legibility. Here the ethics of
visuality, the phenomenology of social recognition, and the sociology of urban
space converge in a reflexive ontology of social reality. Prior to all formalized
‘visual practices’ a child already lives in affective, sensory and imaginary worlds
that have been stylized and configured through visual schemata. Learning to
live and interact in a particular life-world is a process of acquiring the compe-
tences governing orientations towards artefacts, objects and persons. A large
part of everyday enculturation—what sociologists call socialization—coincides
with the translation of past practices of visibilization into contemporary social
forms. Once established these acquisitions function as a corpus of ‘normal’
or ‘everyday’ knowledge, a situated pragmatic repertoire that also involves an
‘un-learning’ of earlier affective intentionalities and world orientations. The
very ubiquity of such normalized visual practices in everyday life suggests that
regimes of visibility have a powerful—if subterranean—role in shaping selves,
social relations and institutions (this ranges from the banal observation that
every form of social action and interaction presupposes the visibility of ob-
jects and bodies as normatively prescribed fields to the more disturbing idea
that visual worlds are already shaped by ideological forms and power rela-
tions). Something like vision machinery is already at work in the organization
of both personal life and public space (machinery that is most visible in the
imaginary formations of sacred practices and religious institutions).
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 659

9. As visual media and practices are themselves cultural artefacts saturated with
the effects of technological apparatuses they defy analysis in terms of the stan-
dard divisions of ‘verbal’ and ‘visual’, ‘discursive’ and ‘figural’, ‘word’ and
‘image’. Most so-called visual practices are in reality dense configurations of
images, sounds and text linked to the major pleasure zones of a society. Thus
whole realms of ‘art’ turn out to be instances of densely implicated practices
(involving configurations of media, performances, material objects, relations
of patronage, commercial instruments and the like). By unconsciously op-
erating within an ocularcentric worldview we tend to spontaneously oppose
the image to graphic phenomena (photograph and text, image and word and
so on) forgetting that at root both presuppose a common image ontology.
We should recall that reading and writing are themselves visual (and, indeed,
manual) competences. The ‘world of literacy’ as this has been organized by
powerful institutional apparatuses is at base a continuous circulation of word-
images and related behavioural and cultural diagrams. Such ‘audio-visual’
image flows are inherently dynamic, mediated political formations (we might
compare the premodern medieval world of theocentric image economies with
the expanded circuitry of transnational capitalism as a social constellation
where, verbal signs operate in symbiosis with complex iconic displays such as
billboards, advertising brands, designer artefacts, newsprint, Web pages and
global logos). The ever-expanding circuitry of image flows becomes insepa-
rable from the wider economic, political and cultural ‘logics’ at work in the
worldwide organization and regulation of visual space. We anticipate that fu-
ture theorizations of these dynamic topographies will only be possible along
the lines of an expanded sociocultural theory of image-production, reproduc-
tion and appropriation (that does not coincide with semiotics, sociology or
social theory as these are currently understood). As a uniquely social constel-
lation we can project an expanded and historically sensitive visual rhetoric as
one of the key transdisciplinary domains within the new visual studies.
10. Social space is necessarily visible space. In fact every social space is an empiri-
cal force field of discontinuous zones of transcendence. This does not simply
mean that visual objects are a subset of sociocultural objects. Rather, visualiza-
tion practices range across every form of social objectivity, including the most
abstract and virtual relations and systems. Whatever their provenance, social
institutions and social worlds necessarily project themselves as visual worlds
(as institutionalized ways of seeing and being seen). And the instruments in-
volved in this projection are quite mundane devices—material objects, con-
versational practices, vectors of pleasure and pain, everyday rhetorics and the
like. As the outcome of specific signifying practices social worlds are already
saturated with reflexively accessible local knowledge and interpretive reper-
toires. Thus members of particular visual worlds do not have to be instructed
about appropriate visual codes, practical activities and translation activities.
They are, as sociologists say, always-already reflexive actors spontaneously
drawing upon practical competences and interpretive skills in making sense
660 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

of their activities. It follows that the sociocultural diagrams that order social
life are invariably dialectical logics of visualization bound up with the con-
struction of identity and differential presence understood as negotiated and
contested symbolic processes. Here the symbolic construction of shared spec-
tacles, image screens, and visible spaces plays a fundamental role in the consti-
tution of social life as well as in every attempt to gain systematic knowledge of
social reality. But this work of mundane construction can never be considered
complete or free from conflicts and contradictions. For example how a com-
munity distributes its population into social categories and ranks invariably
assumes the form of visible classifications and symbolic representations. De-
mographic sets and relationships are by definition socially constructed ‘objec-
tivities’ imposed upon subjects who spontaneously resist classification in and
through their concrete mapping practices.
11. The process of symbolic categorization and ordering makes social space both
real and virtual, both material and ideal (to such an extent that individuals
come to accept that they live in a particular locality, eat and dress in particu-
lar ways, are members of a family, participate in ritualized practices and so
on). At root all of these quasi-spatial orderings are social fictions that organize
bodies and social relationships into intelligible structures (e.g. the symbolic
and iconic fashioning of the idea of a ‘people’ or ‘society’). The repertoires of
self-understanding available to a society are further mediated and fictional-
ized through the constructive operation of image apparatuses (what can be
envisioned by a given historical society or civilization depends on the cultural
cartography of visualizable zones). In an increasingly digitalized world such
topographies increasingly assume the form of virtual geodemographic systems
wired up to governmental, corporate advertising and commercial marketing
interests. Everyday forms of ‘social literacy’ then take the form of an ability to
navigate these emergent societal networks (suggesting perhaps that historically
there has always been a complex dialectic between practices of social and vi-
sual legibility). As with early forms of sociocultural change it is only from the
vantage point of the emerging world of hypervisuality that we gain perspec-
tive upon earlier attempts to create national and transnational regimes of the
visible.
12. The artefactuality thesis provides an analytical context for the plausible idea
that of all visual technologies photographic inscription has defined the modern
age in all its violence, horror and wonder. The etymology of ‘photography’—
light writing—is itself a clue to an unanticipated future of image techniques
concerned with fixing the flux of events into precise, if unfathomable, images.
Hence if the iconic events of the twentieth century are invariably dramatized
as photographed occasions, the iconic events of the twenty-first century will
be celebrated as mobile digital images. Given photography’s democratic pro-
miscuity and media ubiquity these speculations also suggest why modern cul-
ture displays its surfaces in sprawling, undisciplined, heterogeneous series of
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 661

personal and collective memories. It has become impossible to imagine the

effects of ‘thinking away’ the mediations of photographic and cinematic im-
ages from recent history. Here we simply note the important research topic
of the ubiquitous role of digitally mediated identities and memory cultures in
contemporary society. The digital mobilization of photography in the form
of the iPhone and related mobile communication machines promises to radi-
cally transform the practice of photographic activity and social organizations
linked to photographic representation (visual design, reportage, photo and
video journalism, civic journalism, publishing, social research, biographical
archiving, Internet social Web sites, blogging and so on). In this context the
problematics of individual, familial and collective memory become unavoid-
able topics for a reflexive investigation of how new media technologies have
reorganized what we know as everyday life.

The Language Thesis

The language thesis holds that visibility is correlated to the field of language and is as
discontinuous and heterogeneous as the spectrum of available language-games in a given
society.

1. Language (whether as dialogue, communication or discourse) is fundamen-

tal to research in visual fields. The idea of historicity thus extends to the lan-
guages of seeing and the grammars of visual experience (see Sandywell 2011).
Visibility is typically constructed in and displayed by a diverse series of image
practices governed by specific, and often divergent, ‘codes’. Image artefacts
(graffiti, writing, symbolism, photography, material design, architectural styles,
dress codes and fashion, the moving image, aesthetic ideologies, computer-
­generated images, etc) enter into the circuitry of language that diagrams the
virtual life of a culture. If the meaning of ‘language’ can be extended in this
way then what is called ‘seeing’ is already saturated with the work of signs,
emblems, insignia, masks and other diagrammatic symbols. From this per-
spective verbal and nonverbal media appear as signifying workshops—virtual
laboratories—where new forms of visibility and visual pleasures are forged
(where, for example, the discourses of poetry and literature generate visual
experience and produce visual formations for particular audiences). While vi-
sual codes tend to be transinstitutional in their functions, subuniverses of a
culture typically display their own distinctive styles of visualization and iconic
discourse (hence the ‘graphic’ dimensions of visual media expressed in words
such as photography and cinematography).
2. The grammar of images needs to be analytically distinguished from the lin-
guisticality of verbal communication. Visuality is not merely another depart-
ment subsumed under the logic of signs. As a working hypothesis we might
propose that each subuniverse of meaning is governed by its own particular
662 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

structure of visual schematization through which it objectifies and actualizes

lines of possible action and symbolic performances (which then function as
idealized spaces of normative activity for wider social constituencies). Paral-
lels, homologies and transpositions across such sense-making universes will
inevitably be strained (consider for example the classical problems generated
by attempts to reduce the ‘languages’ of photography and cinematography
to classical questions of mimesis and realistic representation or, inversely, at-
tempts to think of ‘literature’ as purely pictorial in its operations). The precise
structure of the grammars governing such universes—neural cognition, every-
day perception, art, architecture, photography, scientific modelling, technical
design, themed worlds and so on—will need to be delimited prior to empirical
research within and upon these worlds.
3. Whatever the final resolution of these semantic and philosophical relation-
ships may be we can say that research into the logics of cultural diagrams will
play a central role in new visual studies theory. We might even suggest that in
genealogical and developmental terms the regime of the image—the diagram-
ming of social imaginaries in and through iconic symbolisms—antedates all
verbally based semiotic and cultural formations. This revaluation of the mi-
metic faculty might occasion a comprehensive rethinking of the denigration
of symbols and symbolic consciousness in social thought. What are the evo-
lutionary links between visual ‘signing’ and linguistic signs? How do visual
signs acquire symbolic functions? What are the social functions of images?
Why are words lacking for phenomena that are half-word and half-image? The
fact that such hybrid visual diagrams are pervasive and ‘normal’ in the order-
ing work of modern societies (in advertising logos, objects covered with text,
signs on building facades, architectural monuments, instruction manuals, etc)
perhaps explains why visual phenomena have rarely been studied as topics
in their own right. What such hybridized phenomena have in common is a
shared indebtedness to material diagrams and diagrammatic translation op-
erations (alphabetic literacy being the most pervasive instance of these transla-
tion processes).
4. Images (e.g. systems of visual representation, but also nonverbal mimesis),
although superficially similar to linguistic signs and symbols, need to be ap-
proached and understood in terms of their own specific semantic constraints.
Here a comprehensive phenomenology of symbolic diagrams is still lacking. For
example, we might compare the linear sonorous ontology of verbal commu-
nication with the multisensorial singularities of visual symbols and artworks
(exemplified today in the multisensory events associated with performance
art). We could contrast the discrete semiotic units and double articulation of
­spoken language with the continuous, analogical and synaesthetic grammars of
visual imagery. We might also contrast the binary principles of verbal ­encoding
with the multidimensional principles of iconic coding and the mimetic behav-
iour it facilitates. Where the former leads speech and communication to its
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 663

referents, the latter transports the viewer to intangible and invisible worlds of
transcendent meaning. Here the tradition of religious icons provides one such
model of iconic semiosis. Another example is the verbal icons that organize
poetic signification. A third is the diagrammatic iconologies that operate in
written language and graphic texts (including texts such as architecture and
the built environment). A fourth is the mimetic organization of childhood
speech and play. Where one encoding privileges the referential and the objec-
tive, the other prioritizes the symbolic, subjectivity and spiritual transforma-
tion. Icons are thus not ‘about’ anything outside of the universe of significance
they precipitate.
   In the light of these reflections we would need to reconsider the so-called
victory of geometrical perspective over the pre-perspective regimes of religious
art and iconic depiction. The idea of visual progress implicit in the heroic story
of Renaissance art is itself indicative of a misunderstanding of the cultural
grammars of visibilization at work in premodern aesthetic and religious prac-
tices. All of these issues require a more radical analysis of the role of symbolism
in the mimetic life-worlds of human beings.
   Such underlying differences have evolved into the grammars that govern
visual systems (and here ‘grammar’ is clearly a metaphorical diagram that will
need to be re-specified and reformulated after the detailed empirical examina-
tion of the social life of visual images, symbols and image-based sign systems).
We can certainly imagine a genealogy of the grammar of image formations
complementing a genealogy of discursive formations. We can also imagine a
future field of inquiry devoted to explorations of the interactions and transac-
tions between different image formations, symbolism and discursive forma-
tions. Future research will need to revisit earlier traditions of iconography
and iconology as path-breaking investigations of iconic symbolism (this also
points towards a more historically oriented sociology of symbols and symbolic
consciousness as a desideratum of the new paradigm).
5. It has become a media cliché to speak of photography, cinema and related
­image-based technologies as ‘languages’ although we hear much less of the
negative analogies and distortions that such a comparison involves. What kind
of language, for example is the symbolic language of pictorial art? What kind
of ‘communication’ is in play in photography or cinematic media? Who speaks
in the ‘language’ of poetry? What would the syntax, semantics and pragmatics
of visual imagery look like? What is the equivalent of conversation in our dia-
logical encounter with visual artworks? For each of these analogies we need to
exercise extreme vigilance by asking: Who speaks this language? What are the
parallels to verbal self-reference in image-based worlds? Given the prior opera-
tions of nonverbal signs and mimetic symbols what are the limits of ‘speech’ as
a general model of human symbolic behaviour and semiopraxis? Can we not
imagine versions of ‘art’ where art holds out the only available resource com-
munication where other forms of communication have broken down or fallen
664 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

into silence (a theme of extremes and limits that links the craft of poetry and
visual art to the question of the ‘un-representable’ and the ‘inexpressible’ in
human experience)? It is conceivable that we have still not fully explored the
distinctive grammars of vision because of a restrictive and unduly rational un-
derstanding of the meaning of ‘language’. As we are too ‘close’ to speech and
speaking we tend to misrepresent nonverbal symbolic practices by translating
them into quasi-communicative forms. Perhaps the image-flesh of poetry and
art is closer to the nonverbal grammars of music and dance and to possible
grammars of transfiguration and transcendence that still have no name or con-
ceptual articulation?
6. New media have made the experience of reflexivity, interactivity and creativ-
ity in visual practices both commonplace and problematic. Paradoxically, the
extreme digitalization of media has led to a radical re-appraisal of earlier iconic
and mimetic forms. With the invention of mobile computer-based commu-
nications and digital photography the traditional image of the photographic
‘author’ (as well as the photographic ‘viewer’) has been transformed by the
possibilities of interactivity and collaborative image production. The ‘author’
and ‘viewer’ roles have been disassembled and reconfigured in novel ways. As
a consequence the virtual symbolic worlds disclosed by digitalization have pre-
cipitated a renewed interest in the constitutive work of symbolic conscious-
ness. With the technical possibilities of accessible software photographers can
now creatively edit and ‘publish’ their work outside the normal channels of
the organized media. This not only democratizes image-making (iconpoiesis)
but leads to new forms of symbolic action (symbolpoiesis) such as personal ar-
chiving, image morphing, genealogical research, biographical writing and re-
construction, critical intervention in political narratives and so forth). All of
these phenomena index important programmes of future empirical research.
7. In keeping with the increasing reflexivity of modern media, we can also sug-
gest that writing about visual culture (in visual studies, art criticism, research,
education, curriculum development and so on) has itself become a visual phe-
nomenon of some consequence. Writing and criticism—especially the diverse
activities involved in art education, art history and aesthetic popularization—
become integral moments of the ‘art system’ as more individuals have access
to vision-based archives of artworks, texts and performances (no other society
has been able to routinely access the complete oeuvre of a writer or composer).
Whole new programmes of research and research methodologies become pos-
sible as the interactivity and reflexivity of new media impact upon existing
intellectual divisions of labour and disciplinary paradigms. The use of digital
media to access analogue artefacts and artworks might be illustrated by the
example of the ‘tour’ through virtual architectural spaces, museums and art
galleries. Where the latter traditionally functioned as places to go and see, they
now become instruments of seeing and research in their own right. All of these
emergent practices open up symbolic worlds that were earlier unthinkable in
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 665

their impact upon aesthetic experience, education and general public aware-
ness of visual culture. Somewhat paradoxically these ‘virtual pathways’ have
led to an increasingly ‘visceral’ awareness of the material characteristics of pub-
lic architecture, artworks and aesthetic creativity. Such striking developments
lead to a fourth thesis.

The Technopoiesis Thesis

The technopoiesis thesis holds that visual phenomena are creatively mediated, shaped
and transformed by available technologies.

1. The ‘modes of production’ of visibility (and correlated visual practices and

fields) are contingent upon technologies and their creative applications within
particular social practices. The root of the word ‘techne’ emphasizes the produc-
tive, labour-intensive, craft-like dimensions of visual worlds (as artifices that are
contingent upon particular production conditions, divisions of labour, forms
of appropriation and so on). ‘Poiesis’ indexes the creative and transformative di-
mensions of media and technology (hence the familiar modernist definition of
poetry as the creative re-crafting of word materials to create the poetic ‘object’
and poetic ‘thought’). It follows that our understanding of social worlds—art
worlds, science worlds, political worlds, poetic worlds and so forth—is inevita-
bly indebted to the operative workings of unacknowledged technical, ideologi-
cal and material conditions (for example as expressed in the banal truth that
most of these ‘worlds’ are the products of human praxis and, more particularly,
of man-made designs). The phallocentric logic at work in many mainstream in-
stitutional systems points to more deep-rooted structures of meaning and ideo-
logical determinations.
2. The force fields of the visual are decisively shaped by the range of ocular ma-
chines available to a community (again consider such inventions as the mu-
seum, library, national archive and research centre as information machines).
Here we need to expand the narrow sense of ‘technology’ to include all cre-
ative apparatuses and their correlative discourses (hence techno-logy). Ocular
machines (for example optical machines such as the camera obscura, Claude
glass, telescope, microscope, electromagnetic scanners, cellular telephones) cre-
ate different objects (and thereby, different object relations and object phenom-
enologies). Such object fields define constellations of the visible as the primary
theme for a reflexive philosophy of visuality (here the parallels between research
upon the visual machinery of advanced biomedicine and surgery—for exam-
ple the neuro-imaging techniques made available through MRI (magnetic res-
onance imaging) scanners—and the massive developments of radio telescope
and electron microscope technology). In all these cases the technology in ques-
tion is embedded in a dense social fabric of material structures, technical know-
how, social organizations and communication systems. A radical social theory
666 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

of visual technology promises to integrate some of the major advances in the

contemporary knowledge economy with paradigm changes in the arts, com-
munication studies and philosophy. And inevitably all of these domains are
engaged in new forms of multi- and transdisciplinary dialogue about their
respective perspectives and object fields.
3. The complex interplay of physical, social, political and cultural conditions of
visualization technologies excludes every form of technological determinism in
the study of visual fields and scopic regimes. The invention and use of a particu-
lar visual technology does not wholly determine or dictate its possible uses (as
we see from the exponential differential applications of the Internet and the un-
anticipated impact of the new media upon everyday life). Here it is the specific
applications and creative appropriations of technical instruments and machines
in human activities that shape visual culture (e.g. the singular configuration
of photography, digital mathematics, satellite communications and global net-
works involved in the production of Internet visibility and more generally the
mathematical conditions behind the global digitization of visual culture). We
should also note that such technologies also re-programme the uses of previous
and now ‘residual’ technologies into new configurations (the Internet remains
indebted to forms of screen machinery with very ancient roots). The inven-
tion of a new visual machine does not automatically eliminate older technolo-
gies. Rather, older social, aesthetic and technical forms are often given a new
lease on life through the extensions and unpredictable applications of a new
technology.
4. Technological reductionism is also discredited by the fact that no medium (or
technology) can be a mirror, copy or recording of the world: every medium in-
volves a transformation of experience. Here the dialectical language of recipro-
cal interaction and discontinuous mutations is more useful than the historicist
scheme of linear progress or the one-sided dominion of technical framing (the
Heideggerian Ge-stell). The unanticipated effects of new practices and cultural
forms is more typical of rapid periods of technological change. While machines
frequently usurp human powers, in general creative application and practical
appropriation have characterized the history of cultural apparatuses.
5. It follows that radical changes in visual media, information and communica-
tion technologies do not merely extend the human sensorium, but transform
the possibilities of human experience and self-understanding in unpredictable
and emergent ways. Changing media impose different interpretive diagrams
upon the flux of events. Here ‘interpretation’ has to be viewed as a primary
form of transformative action (we might index this with the generic title of
diagrammatization). In the light of this concern for the constitutive work
diagrammatic consciousness we need to rewrite the history of photography
and the moving image (seeing the invention of cinema and all the cinemato-
graphic apparatuses associated with cinema is the first phase of a radical trans-
formation of visuality and visual relationships in the (post)modern world).
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 667

A future ‘politics of the image’ was implicit in the first act of making photo-
graphs or constructing fictions of reality from reels of discrete images. While
photography and moving imagery are certainly sign systems, in reality they
operate completely differently as interpretive deformations and imaginative
re-­creations of the world. At this juncture the politics of the image interfaces
with the politics of the imaginable and both recoil to the transformative work
of diagrammatization.

The Sociocultural Thesis

The sociocultural thesis contends that regimes of the visual are constituted by and con-
stitutive of existing social relations and, more particularly, existing relations of authority
and power as these are diagrammatically inscribed in social institutions.

1. A critical phenomenology of culture—an analytic of its specific dynamics, or-

ganized sites, modes of appearance, contradictory forms and appropriations—
presupposes a social hermeneutics of technology and power relations. Such a
phenomenology necessarily assumes the form of a ‘critique’ of existing mate-
rial, social and cultural relations. With its concern for modes of subjectiva-
tion or subject-constitution as sociocultural activities this critical perspective
foregrounds the ethical and political interfaces of the New Visual Studies. We
have already seen from the historicity thesis that cultures of visuality are always
cultures of subjectivity (and most typically cultures of political subjectivity).
The sociocultural argument gives flesh to this formal argument by exploring
the production and manipulation of spaces and temporal events by powerful
groups and societies.
2. If we still retain the concept, for analytical purposes ‘culture’ can be differentiated
into possible worlds of embodied meaning correlated to sense-producing appa-
ratuses (this claim presupposes a more general theory of the auto-production­
of social life as organized semiopraxis). This theme of societal autopoiesis
­foregrounds the play of reflexivity as the investigation of cultural ­artefacts impli-
cates the study of apparatuses that are themselves deployed to produce artefacts
and relations (consider the higher technological economies where laser-based
technologies are used to produce high-resolution lenses, reflecting mirrors and
further laser-based instruments). Furthermore, the outcome of such analyses
suggests further levels of artefactuality that become available as possible topics
of meta-inquiry. For example what has been called ‘art’ (or ‘art worlds’) now ap-
pears as a heterogeneous series of image machines operating at the heart of a wide
range of different signifying practices. Film—cinema—can then be approached
materialistically as technologically conditioned ribbons of narrative-bearing im-
ages (‘moving pictures’). But cinema should also be seen in phenomenological
terms as the sites and spaces of viewing experience (from the pleasure-palaces of
early cinema to the industrialized complexes of digital cinema). The coming of
668 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

digital media has the effect of radically restructuring the industrial systems and
distribution networks associated with classical Hollywood cinema.
3. What appears as ‘the social’ or ‘the political’ in a given culture depends on the
available regimes of visibilization (or, as we might now say, diagrammatic re-
gimes). These are equally regimes of subjectivation as the normalization of vi-
sual space bears directly upon the organization of the self, self-other relations
and subjective experience. By virtue of their complex origins and dynamics
such regimes are essentially contested formations. However, no culture or civi-
lization is ever wholly dominated by a single regime of visualization (hence the
so-called hegemony of vision or scopic regimes in the development of modern
European cultures needs to be reconsidered in more concrete, differentiated
and historically specific terms). We might conjecture that at the core of every
powerful social imaginary lies a visual imaginary.
4. New visual media and communicative forms facilitate novel art forms (creating
hybrid media of self-expression and self-articulation). Consider, for example the
direct linkages between so-called postmodern art forms and the wider dynamics
of consumerism and mass popular culture that have reshaped the whole terrain
of popular culture over the last fifty years. In analysing the changing functions of
art (and visual media more generally) it is crucial to distinguish between con-
formist and contestatory art/cultural practices and places. Experimental art,
constructivist practice, multimedia installations, ready-mades, earth-art and
performance arts also in their different ways draw attention to the material
singularities of aesthetic praxis. The emphasis upon the dense materiality of art
practices also problematizes the function of artworks in relation to social space
and the affective dimensions of viewing and spectatorship (the transformation
of the religious icon, the use of art in political discourse, the democratic expan-
sion of artworks through the practice of collecting, museums and galleries, the
interrelationships between art and the designed character of the public sphere
and so forth). Once more it is the critical self-deconstruction of art in a tradi-
tion that stretches from Dada and Epic Theatre to the Situationist International
that has problematized the dialectical interfaces between art and nonart.
5. The revival of a critical-historical aesthetics must be initiated by way of a cri-
tique of current aesthetic discourse and mediated through the experimental
practices of this critical problematic. A future aesthetic philosophy will neces-
sarily be radically cultural and historical in its basic design and operative pro-
cedures. To recover the concreteness of art practices a material aesthetics must
first deconstruct academic aesthetics as a primary antagonist. As socio-historical­
conditions mutate so too do forms of aesthetic contestation (rendering the the-
sis that whatever resists and derails commonsense assumptions acquires the
functions of aesthetic praxis). Here again the emphasis upon the ‘conditions
of production’ of artworks must be complemented by an analysis of the social
relations of situated appropriation and affective ‘consumption’ (the analysis of
art and desire and art-as-pleasure being important foci for such sociological
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 669

studies). In many respects this condenses to the formula that ‘art is what art
does’. But this formula can be misinterpreted as ‘anything goes’ nihilism that
ignores the fact that there are establishment, conformist and insular art prac-
tices just as there are anti-establishment, revolutionary and expansionary art
practices. These connections become critically important in the current expan-
sion of art markets and the growth of a global public sphere in which art and
aesthetic discourses play a central role. It goes without saying that a one-sided
analysis of ‘aesthetic commodification’ is not the last word on the meaning and
changing significance of artworks. We stand by the idea that the truth content
of different art forms can only be located in their singularities—and ultimately
in the defamiliarization effects of multisensorial performances in relation to ev-
eryday doxa and mundane forms of life.

The Political Thesis

The political thesis holds that logics of visibility provide apparatuses of political self-
definition, self-understanding and self-exploration for a given community or society.

1. Traditional definitions of the visual elide the complex political functions of visu-
ality by imposing simplistic grids upon a complex dialectical field. For example
most ‘disciplinary’ approaches to visual phenomena fail to address the multisen-
sorial dimensions and transdisciplinary dynamics of visibility. Such perspectives
ignore both the situated and the dialectical character of the image by trading
upon the one-dimensional logic of the visual in formulations like ‘visual stud-
ies’, ‘visual rhetoric’, ‘visual arts’ and ‘visual philosophy’. The tacit assumption
is that what these concepts designate are settled and stable ‘domains’ available
for academic colonization. Visuality is too readily identified with a one-sided
idea of the visual sense or with ‘perception’ as this has been conceptualized by
orthodox science, aesthetics and philosophy. It then follows that how different
ways of seeing actually function within the operative ontologies of film studies,
television studies, Internet studies and so on necessarily remains an unresolved
question. The resulting paradigms are thus abstract and apolitical. We sponta-
neously think of ‘vision’ as the sensory input from the ‘outside world’ that im-
pinges upon the receptive eye (or, in modern parlance, the brain). ‘Art’ is treated
independently from questions of the politics of truth and knowledge, liberated
into the bad infinity of ‘whatever is recognized as art is art’, if what passes for
art gives pleasure then this is enough and so on.
2. What some have called the ‘ocular bias’ of European culture has excluded the
practical realm of embodied images and replaced this with a disembodied idea
of the visual (what might be called the visual or videological bias of Western
thought). On one side the sensory density of seeing and contextual envision-
ing is reduced to a mechanistic and biologized idea of the optical, while on
the other ‘the visual’ has been elevated as a high-order faculty that transcends
670 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

political life and exemplified by the more ‘contemplative’ and ‘theoretical’ inter-
ests of human praxis. Either type of deflationary reduction or idealist inflation
has the effect of disembodying visual experience from its material and political
contexts and replacing situated image production with an abstract idea of the
visual. Either art is a branch of sensory pleasure or it is the portal to philosophi-
cal truth. In principle it has absolutely nothing to do with the political arrange-
ments of a society.
3. A major task of future transdisciplinary visual studies is to restore the ethico-
political dimensions of sensory experience and, more particularly, the politics of
visual regimes that cross disciplinary boundaries. In historical terms, we require
a richer philosophical anthropology of the political life of visual media. Here
the emphasis needs to be placed on both ‘life’ and the media’s links to social ma-
chines (e.g. the critical role of visual experience in contemporary science, medi-
cal technologies and bio-politics). More broadly this requires an equally radical
critique of the disembodied concept of ‘culture’ as this has hitherto operated in
the traditional arts and human sciences.
4. In the wake of this sensory auto-critique the arts and aesthetics of the future
will necessarily adopt transdisciplinary (and initially perhaps ‘in-disciplinary’)
stances towards what passes for aesthetic and cultural discourse. Given that
many of the major forces impacting upon contemporary art practice are derived
from outside the universe of art—in the development of ‘new media’, digital
software, commercial markets, free-media movements, corporate sponsorship,
state cultural policy and so on—a critical theory of art can no longer focus ex-
clusively upon the ‘artwork’ or artefact as a realm ‘in itself ’. The traditional on-
tology of the ‘in-itself ’ has come to an end. Aesthetic transcendence is one of
the first victims of this ‘auto-deconstruction of realms’. To incorporate the most
creative forms of theorizing in these new formations any transdisciplinary aes-
thetics will need to open dialogues with a diverse range of new visual media and
information systems.
5. As a space of aesthetic contestation the ethico-political dimensions of this
emerging framework will necessarily lead to the transformation of traditional
cultural studies and media studies as these have been encased in the semiotic-
oriented categories of powerful theoretical frameworks. The radicalization and
reshaping of existing programmes in explicitly political and ethical directions
will inevitably involve the self-critique and transcendence of current semiotic,
critical-theoretic, feminist, media-based approaches to visual studies.

The Reflexive Praxis Thesis

The reflexive praxis thesis proposes that visual practices and visual fields are active agen-
cies in transforming social relations and prefiguring possible futures.

1. We have suggested that visual fields are reflexive arrangements that facilitate
(or obstruct) specific modes of social praxis (thus the process of globalization
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 671

is historically inseparable from the emergence of reflexive practices that have

transformed the visible world through digital media and related information
technologies). As it is the conceptual recalcitrance of alterities that disturbs ex-
isting social arrangements the traditional realm of art can be re-seen as an earlier
source of a-categorial singularities (here ‘singularity’ may be defined as anything
that resists subsumption under the rule of a general concept or category). We
then recover the domain of art as the province of outlaw and renegade praxes.
If the vocation of art is to contest and defamiliarize the sclerotic relations and
structures of everyday life then wherever ‘art’ settles into an expression or re-
flection of a genre it loses its questioning functions (which is not to say that it
loses its visual qualities or applications to other noncontestatory domains). The
recovery of the singularity of art practices is one field where the politics of past,
present and future aesthetics might be renewed. If philosophy is the construc-
tion of concepts, art is the creation of iconic utopias, of imaginary nonplaces
and forbidden pleasures. The ‘value’ of an art form would then be measured
by the energies and rhythms of freedom it releases. In the chiastic formula: the
freedom of art is the art of freedom (like poetry art is an apparatus that visibi-
lizes the world). Art is to be appraised by the praxis it engenders.
2. In contemporary society the ‘objects’ of visual culture are increasingly defined
in globalized cybernetic terms (a process that is itself dependent upon material
systems, software applications and global social arrangements that are perva-
sively visual). With increasing societal complexity there is a general movement
from local to global visibilities and the convergence of local and global (the glo-
calization of the visible facilitated by mobile digital machines and new conver-
gent technologies has become a media symbol of these mutations).
3. The transformation of the world into a ‘picture’, ‘view’ or ‘spectacle’ is contin-
gent upon powerful icon-based information technologies (alphabetic commu-
nication, print, telegraph, televisual, digital, convergent and so on). From this
we derive the popular idea of the ‘society of the spectacle’ and the aestheticiza-
tion of social and political arrangements as both products and agencies of mod-
ern mass media and related technological formations. However, the ‘society of
the spectacle’ has itself been assimilated to commercial interests and is actively
and un-ironically promoted as an idealized state of social being. Idealized im-
ages of consumer bliss neutered by pleasure have become the preferred rhetoric
of global consumerism and socially engineered perception. Yet one unintended
consequence of global consumption is the proliferation of iconic imagery and
the reaffirmation of the immense power of visual media. Contemporary capital-
ism, it would seem, can only expand and multiply its operations through a vast
range of interlocking imagineering industries. To borrow a Marxist idiom, until
the advent of globalization we had not realized the tremendous powers lying
dormant within the machinery of symbolic praxis.
4. One aspect of the global culture industries is the revolutionary shift towards
generalized iconicity as mass media become digitalized and globalized. Global
culture industries symbolized by corporate names like Google, Microsoft, News
672 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Corp, Time Warner and Sony are now imagineering enterprises that harness the
resources of graphic animation, computer simulation and commercial rhetoric
not only to sell their products but to transform everyday life through new types
of communication and social relations. Indeed, with the coming of cyberculture
the commodification of visual space is now in the driving seat of hyper-capitalist
development. Here we witness the dialectic of unanticipated consequences: the
very ‘socializing’ effect of ‘new media’ creates practices and operations which
transform users into active manipulators of symbols. Modern digital technolo-
gies are themselves increasingly reconfigured around keyboards, click-and-drop
computing, visual iconography and mobile forms of representation (computer
graphics, iPods, iPhones, portable video, e-Books/Tablets, etc). By exploiting
the new imagineering logics, hyper-capitalism displaces word-based paradigms
by icon-based ontologies (and their associated habitus). Before this is a theoreti-
cal shift, it is a real-world transformation that both empowers and disempowers
groups and classes throughout the global economy. We are at the beginning of
a digital imaging age where the corporate shift from televisuality to cybervisu-
ality marks the dawn of an intensively global culture produced by new image
cultures (film, television, photographic Web sites, digital cinema, multimedia
advertising, scientific and technical representations, model-building and so on).
Intensively visual corporations such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are the lat-
est examples of this transition to visual cyberspace. The impact of the mobile
visual dynamics of Web 2.0 social media (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace,
Bebo and so on) is already a phenomenon with fundamental implications for
the reorganization of social and political life. With respect to the actuality of
24/7 digital image flows we move from the realm of virtual reality to an age of
real virtuality.
5. In the light of these emergent phenomena we urgently require more reflexive
transdisciplinary concepts capable of articulating the intended and unintended
consequences of global electronic mediators. Above all we need a radical social
theory of the dialectical structure of global visual cultures. Future visual studies
research must begin with the global digitalization of contemporary society and
culture as a strategy of understanding the revolutionary innovations and tech-
nologies of earlier forms of visualization. It must also revisit the question of the
truth-value of artworks and the functions of aesthetic praxis within the wider
horizon of human self-understanding. At the point where there is no more
space for art, everything becomes art. But even at this null-point the disappear-
ance of art and the nihilist regime of nonart themselves become media events
with all the characteristics earlier ascribed to artworks.
6. The coming of cyberculture illuminates the social significance of earlier ana-
logue technologies (which now fall into the category of ‘residual media’). The
emergence of ‘information arts’ and digital imagineering sheds light upon
earlier aesthetic innovations and practices. The ‘trans-’ element in ‘transdisci-
plinary’ underlines the generic application of these themes across traditionally
Seven Theses on Visual Culture 673

defined borders (e.g. the concern for image logics and representational iconic-
ity now traverses almost every form of global multimedia and so-called creative
industries).
7. By responding positively to these emergent processes the New Visual Stud-
ies paradigm provides a powerful example of the processes of transdisciplinar-
ity that are currently reconfiguring the organization of higher education and
research on a global scale. Future visual studies will necessarily be collabora-
tive enterprises drawing upon such emergent fields as media studies, art-design
complexes, Internet studies, informatics/geodemographics, multidisciplinary
investigations of information technology systems, artificial intelligence, inves-
tigations of complex discourse formations, the study of hypermodern social
formations—network societies, information societies, reflexive capitalism, re-
flexive modernization theory and new globalisms.
8. The great danger for post- and in-disciplinary collaboration is for New Visual
Studies paradigms to over-identify with their phenomenal objects to produce
a transdisciplinary form of technocratic-administrative scientism. To avoid this
development the methodologies of the new visual studies must be resolutely
vigilant about their presuppositions and consistently reflexive towards the phe-
nomenal domains they take as their research focus. Mapped onto a broader
theoretical canvas we need to locate the New Visual Studies within a radically
reflexive material theory of everyday life practices. Only by resisting the tech-
nocratic logics of contemporary society will visual studies be able to fully con-
tribute to the understanding of the ubiquitous functions of the visible in society
and participate in the transformation of everyday life.

Further Reading
Cavallo, G. and R. Chartier, eds. 1999. A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Halsall, F., J. Jansen and T. O’Connor, eds. 2009. Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices
from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jay, M. 1998. Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time. London: Athlone Press.
Sandywell, B. 2011. Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms. Farnham, Sur-
rey: Ashgate.
Weber, S. 2008. Benjamin’s –abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

References
Cavallo, G. and R. Chartier, eds. 1999. A History of Reading in the West, trans. L. G. Cochrane.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sandywell, B. 2011. Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms. Farnham,
­Surrey: Ashgate.
 30

Mapping the Visual Field:

A Bibliographical Guide
Barry Sandywell

The following bibliographical chapter delineates some of the landmark contributions to

research on visual theory, visual culture and visual studies over the past two to three de-
cades. Because of the extent and range of publications in this field and the exponential
growth of interest in visual culture more generally there is no attempt to provide any-
thing like a complete or comprehensive bibliography. Rather, I have taken a more selec-
tive approach and singled out texts that are both accessible and intellectually stimulating
in a range of interrelated thematic areas. The main aim of this chapter is to provide
readers with an introductory map of the complex landscape of visual research as this has
been shaped by different theoretical and cultural traditions. Given the multidisciplinary
and transdisciplinary character of the new visual studies emphasis has been placed on
texts that invite their readers to question existing research agendas and encourage them
to cross disciplinary boundaries and imagine new knowledge formations.

Organization
The bibliography has been divided into the following sections:

1. Resources in Visual Culture

2. Visual Theory: Major Theoretical Frameworks in Visual Culture
3. History of Visual Culture
4. Art History, Art Theory and Aesthetics
5. Cultural Studies Perspectives
6. The Sociology and Anthropology of Visual Art, Techniques, Media and Com-
munications (including the use of visual technologies such as photography
and film in anthropological research)
Mapping the Visual Field 675

7. Visual Rhetoric
8. Architecture and Design
9. Visual Cultural Institutions
10. Visual Experiences of the Social World
11. Technoculture and Visual Technology: The Global Digital Revolution
12. The Politics of Vision
13. The Politics of Seeing and Being Seen: New Social Movements
14. Visual Pedagogy
15. (Re)envisioning the Public Sphere

Resources in Visual Culture

Today there is a wealth of background reading and resources for students and researchers
interested in pursuing inquiries in the field of visual culture. This section identifies some
of the most critical documents from the past two decades.

Readers in Visual Culture

S. Brent Plate, ed., Religion, Art and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2002)
Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (1999)
Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003)
David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (1998)
George Robertson, Melinda Mash and Lisa Tickner, eds., The Block Reader in Visual Culture
(1996)

Useful Collections of Writings on Visual Culture

Lisa Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999)
Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, eds., Vision in Context (1996)
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual Culture: Images and Inter-
pretations (1994)
Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, eds., Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Herme-
neutics of the Visual (1999)
Christopher Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (1995)
Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (1995)
Joanna Morra and Marquard Smith, eds., Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural
Studies (2006)

General Introductions to Visual Studies

Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (2001)
Terry Barrett, Interpreting Art: Responding to Visual Culture (2002)
Norman Bryson et al. Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991)
Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996)
676 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (2005)
James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003)
John R. Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker, eds., Visual Worlds (2005)
Richard Howells, Visual Culture: An Introduction (2003)
Christopher Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (1995)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999)
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (1994)
Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (2001)
Barry Sandywell, Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms (2011)
Tony Shirato and Jen Webb, Understanding the Visual (2009)
Marquard Smith, ed., Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (2008)
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
(2001)
John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (1997)

Journals in Visual Culture

Art Journal (College Art Association of America)
Block
British Journal of Aesthetics
Cahiers du Cinéma
Cahiers pour l’Analyse
camera obscura
Cinéthique
Cine-tracts
Cinema Journal
Critical Studies in Mass Communication
Cultural Critique
Cultural Hermeneutics
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies
Early Popular Visual Culture
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Film Quarterly
Gender, Place and Culture
Information, Communication and Society
International Journal of Cultural Studies
Invisible Culture
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Journal of Intercultural Studies
Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture
Journal of Visual Culture
Leisure Studies
Media, Culture and Society
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics
New Media and Society
Mapping the Visual Field 677

October
Oxford Art Journal
Parallax
Revue d’Esthétique
Screen
Screen Education
Sémiotext(e)
Semiotica
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Social Semiotics
Textual Practice
Theory and Society
Theory, Culture and Society
Visual Arts and Culture
Visual Sociology
Visual Studies
Word and Image

Internet Resources
Each of the key theorists in the field of studies now has multiple Web sites that
provide background information (some of these more useful than others). For guid-
ance to some of the key names see Marquard Smith, ed., Visual Culture Studies: In-
terviews with Key Thinkers (2008) and past volumes of the Journal of Visual Culture
(see Sage Journals Online at http://vcu.sagepub.com). See also the responses of a
range of researchers in ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’, October, 77, Summer 1996,
pp. 25–70.
A sample of related Web sites might include:

http://www.corbis.com
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm
http://mitpress.mit.edu/Leonardo
http://www.rhizome.org/
http://www.org.uk
http://www.ubu.com/film
http://www.icosilune.com/2008/08
http://www.film-philosophy.com
http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk
http://www.sensesofcinema.com
http://www.metacritic.com
http://www.visual-studies.com
http://www.imagehistory.org/theory/institutes.htm
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk
678 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Visual Theory: Major Theoretical

Frameworks in Visual Culture
Among the most prominent theoretical approaches to visual culture are those drawn
from the philosophical traditions of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Psychoanaly-
sis, Semiotics, Structuralism, Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian Philosophy, Poststruc-
turalism, Postmodernism, Marxism and Critical Theory, Feminism, Gay and Lesbian
Studies, Queer Theory and Postcolonialism. All of these movements are attempts
to describe and evaluate the multidimensional phenomenal structures of ‘being-in-
the-world’ and all, necessarily, adopt particular theoretical practices and perspectives
for this purpose. For general background to these traditions see William McNeill
and Karen S. Feldman, eds., Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (1998), Constan-
tin V. Boundas, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies
(2007), and Dermot Moran, ed., The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century
­Philosophy (2008).

Phenomenology and Hermeneutic Philosophy

Seeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me
for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being
only at the end of which do I close up into myself. (Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’,
in 1993: 146)

Phenomenology
Phenomenological philosophy has had a longstanding interest in things visual. Indeed,
the central models of phenomenological analysis in the work of the founding theorist,
Edmund Husserl, are primarily taken from visual perception. This perceptual orienta-
tion was questioned by Husserl’s students, most particularly by Martin Heidegger and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Where Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl’s Cartesian ocularcen-
trism led to the development of philosophical hermeneutics, the French philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty deepened Husserl’s perceptual emphasis by historicizing and
ontologizing the structures of perception and existence (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1993). It
is probably Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenological analysis with its acute sense
of the involvement of the body and intercorporeality in all forms of awareness that pro-
vides the natural home for a critically oriented theory of visual culture understood as a
historically embodied phenomenal field.
Merleau-Ponty is also unique in the early phenomenological tradition in engag-
ing in an extensive dialogue between philosophy and painting as two complementary
ways of rethinking seeing and perception. The movement from ‘pure’ or transcen-
dental phenomenology to existential phenomenology prefigures the field of incarnate
phenomenology—the investigation of the embodiments of lived experience and the het-
erotopical sites of perceptual/aesthetic experience. In 1948 Merleau-Ponty concluded a
series of radio broadcasts with a comprehensive vision of the role of phenomenological
Mapping the Visual Field 679

thought as a general framework for integration in the arts, humanities and sciences.
He writes: ‘The world of perception consists not just of all natural objects but also of
paintings, pieces of music, books and all that the Germans call the ‘world of culture’.
Far from having narrowed our horizons by immersing ourselves in the world of percep-
tion, far from being limited to water and stone, we have rediscovered a way of looking
at works of art, language and culture, which respects their autonomy and their origi-
nal richness’ (2008: 76). The current name for this rediscovered terrain is, of course,
visual culture.
For Merleau-Ponty’s major work, the Phenomenology of Perception, see the refer-
ences below. One of the most useful collections of Merleau-Ponty’s essays on paint-
ing (including commentaries on the contemporary relevance of these essays) is
G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, eds., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy
and Painting (1993). A useful guide to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thought
can be found in Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds, eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key Con-
cepts (2008), G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, eds., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-
Ponty (1990) and T. Carman and M.B.N. Hanson, eds., The Cambridge Companion
to Merleau-Ponty (2004). Also see the essays by Michael Gardiner and Martin Jay in
this volume.
Emund Husserl, Ideas Towards a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1931)
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970)
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy.
Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences (Ideen III) (1980)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (1964a)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (1964b)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays (1964c)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible (1968),
pp. 130–55
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (2008)

Other phenomenological thinkers developed Husserl’s transcendental phenomenol-

ogy in more social and cultural directions. Among these the following texts should be
noted:
Renaud Barbaras, Vie et intentionalité (2003)
Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1966)
Aron Gurwitsch, Human Encounters in the Social World (1979)
Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation (1973)
Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (1975)
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969)
Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1973)
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (1985)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1958)
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (2004)
Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology of the Social World (1967)
680 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

For the continuing relevance of phenomenological problematics for visual studies see:
T. W. Basch and S. Gallagher, eds., Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics and Postmodernism (1992)
Peter Burke and J van der Veken, Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective (1993)
Martin Dillon, ed., Merleau-Ponty Vivant (1991)
R. Diprose and J. Reynolds, eds., Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (2008)
Don Ihde, Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context (1993)
Martin Jay, ‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight’, in David Mi-
chael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993), pp. 143–85
G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, eds., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (1990)
David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze (1999)
William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (1999)
Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (2000)
D. E. Olkowski, ‘Feminism and Phenomenology’, in Simon Glendinning, ed., The Edinburgh
Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy (1999), pp. 323–32
D. E. Olkowski and J. Morley, eds., Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority (1999)
Aurora Plomer, Phenomenology, Geometry and Vision: Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Classical Theories
of Vision (1991)
Charles Tilley, The Phenomenology of Landscape (1994)
Charles Tilley, The Materiality of Stone (2004)
Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Iragaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty
(1998)

Hermeneutics
Modern hermeneutics has also been shaped by its phenomenological predecessors, most
especially by the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
However, it is the development of a fully fledged ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ in the
work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur that has provided occasions and en-
counters with other approaches to the visual world; these include dialogues with critical
theory (Jürgen Habermas), deconstruction (Jacques Derrida), ordinary language phi-
losophy (Wittgenstein), social theory (Jürgen Habermas, Richard Bernstein), geneal-
ogy (Michel Foucault), American pragmatist traditions (Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor,
Hubert Dreyfus, Joseph Margolis), cognitive science (Dan Zahavi), feminism and criti-
cal thought. More recent researchers are also rediscovering a hermeneutic dimension in
earlier thinkers as apparently diverse as Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Benjamin, Adorno and
Merleau-Ponty.
Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis
(1983)
Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000), Part 2, ‘Phenomenology and
Hermeneutics’
Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings (1976)
Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (1991)
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Aesthetics and Hermeneutics’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics (1977),
pp. 95–104
Mapping the Visual Field 681

Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Idea of Practical Philosophy’, in Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays
(1998), pp. 50–61
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (2004)
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927/1962)
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language and Thought (1971),
pp. 15–87.
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World-Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays (1977), pp. 115–54
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings (1978),
pp. 143–87
Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, eds. Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Herme-
neutics of the Visual (1999)
Richard Hollinger, ed., Hermeneutics and Praxis (1985)
John Llewelyn, Beyond Metaphysics: The Hermeneutical Circle in Contemporary Continental Phi-
losophy (1985)
Gary Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (1988)
William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (1999)
D. Michelfelder and R. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encoun-
ter (1989)
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
J.-M. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (2000)
Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992)
High J. Silverman, ed., Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture (1993)
G. Warnke, ‘Ocularcentrism and Social Criticism’, in D. M. Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hege-
mony of Vision (1993), pp. 287–308
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1958)

Psychoanalysis
Visual phenomena and visual metaphors play a profound role in classical psychoanalysis
and in the revisionary variants of psychoanalysis associated with the traditions of struc-
turalism, semiotics and feminst theorizing. The literature relating to this domain is al-
ready vast and expanding. The following texts provide useful starting points:
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (2001)
Hélëne Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader (1994)
Luce Iragaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (1974), Speculum of the Other Woman, (1985)
Luce Iragaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977), This Sex Which Is Not One (1985)
Luce Iragaray, Ethique de la différance sexuelle (1984), An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993)
Luce Iragaray, The Iragaray Reader (1992)
Sarah Kofman, L’Enigme de la femme: La femme dans les texts de Freud (1980), The Enigma of
Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings (1985)
Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics (1988)
Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction (1991)
Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (1993)
Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings (2007), Part 1 ‘Reading (with) Freud’ and Part 4 ‘The Truth in
Painting’
682 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1977/1980)
Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Litera-
ture and Art (1977/1980)
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (1980), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Ab-
jection (1982)
Julia Kristeva, A Kristeva Reader, (1982)
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (1977)
Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977)
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954
(1988)
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Tech-
nique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (1988)
Michelle Le Doeuff, Recherches sur l’imaginaire philosophique (1980), The Philosophical Imaginary
(1986)
Michelle Le Doeuff, L’Etude et le rouet, des femmes, de la philosophie, etc. (1989), Hipparchia’s
Choice: An Essay Concerning Women Philosophy, etc. (1991)
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985)
Toril Moi, ed., A Kristeva Reader (1986)
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987)
Margaret Whitford, ed., The Iragaray Reader (1991)
Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992)

For the broader social background and cultural applications see:

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (2001)
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990)
E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1990)
Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (2000)
Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973)
George Makari, The Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (2008)
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1956)
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (1982)
Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (1983)
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989)
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986)
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (1983)
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988)
Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992)
Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World (1996)

Structuralism and Semiotics

Structuralism
Structural ways of thinking trace their origins to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913). Saussure commended the idea of a general theory of signs or semiology
Mapping the Visual Field 683

as an integrative framework for the human studies (1969). This idea became influential
in French intellectual life with the writings of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, Lacan
and others. A comprehensive history of structuralism can be found in François Dosse,
History of Structuralism, Vol. 1, The Rising Sign, 1945–1966 and Vol. 2, The Sign Sets,
1967-Present (1997). A general introduction to semiotic approaches to cultural analy-
sis is provided by Andy Tudor, Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural Studies
(1999), John Hartley, A Short History of Cultural Studies (2003) and Lawrence Gross-
berg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (1992).

Semiotics
For the language of images (visual iconicity, visual rhetorics, communications, technol-
ogy of image culture; the relationship between discursive and pictorial representation
and so forth) see:
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence (1994)
Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (2003)
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (1968)
Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (1995)
W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., The Language of Images (1980)
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1987)
W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (1994)
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994)
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture,
Vol. 1(2), 2002, pp. 165–81
W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (2006)
For approaches to visual imagery and representations that draw explicitly upon
linguistic and semiotic models see:
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1972)
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (1977)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (2000)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
John Berger, About Looking (2002)
Gregory Currie, ‘The Long Goodbye: The Imaginary Language of Film’ (1993)
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (1976)
Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (1979)
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (1987)
Garry L. Hagberg, Art as Language (1995)
Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design
(1996/2006)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966)
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting (1995)
Louis Marin, ‘Topics and Figures of Enunciation: It Is Myself That I Paint’, in Stephen Melville
and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (1995), pp. 195–214
684 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

F. Saint-Martin, Semiotics of Visual Language (1990)

Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (1983)

From Semiotic Codes to Cultural Intertextuality

For texts that emphasize the complex dialectic of image-text-culture relationships:

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

Roland Barthes, S/Z (1990)
Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds. Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances (1995)
Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy: On Touching (2005)
Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1989)
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (2005)
Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (2008)

From Structuralism to Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

While it is difficult to cleanly separate ‘structuralist’ and ‘poststructuralist’ perspectives we
can note the movement away from ‘scientific’ and ‘formalist’ semiotic analysis derived in
European social theory from the linguistic writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, the social
anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the early semiology of Roland ­Barthes to the
psychoanalytic ‘post-structuralism’ of Jacques Lacan, the genealogical studies of Michel
Foucault, deconstructionist criticism in Jacques Derrida, and the fully fledged anti-struc-
turalism of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Paul Virilio and others.
The ‘deconstructive turn’ places all structural and systems metaphors in brackets in order
to explore what such images presuppose and how they might be ‘dissolved’ to give ground
to other ways of thinking about and analysing of social and cultural phenomena.
For general background see Barker, ed. (2000); Baynes (1987); Dreyfus and Rabi-
now (1982); Easthope and McGowan (1997); Lane (1970); McGowan (2007); Silver-
man (1996).
Basic reading here includes:
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies, 1987, pp. 12–20
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (1992)
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (1973)
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1978b)
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1982)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1971)
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (1973)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)
Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1978)
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005)
Jacques Lacan, Écrits (1977)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966)
Mapping the Visual Field 685

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1968 and 1977)

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984)
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988)
Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (1988)
Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (1992)
Gianni Vattimo, The Adventures of Difference (1993)
Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991a)

Deconstruction in Visual Theory

The trajectory of poststructural thought might be reduced to the diagram of the move-
ment from ‘work’ to ‘text’ to ‘image’. Work in visual studies influenced by the movement
towards poststructuralist perspectives would include:
Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture
(1994)
Peter Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (1989)
Peter Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993)
Peter Crowther, Philosophy after Postmodernism (2003)
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987)
Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus (1993)
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (1989)
John McCumber, ‘Derrida and the Closure of Vision’, in David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity
and the Hegemony of Vision (1993), pp. 234–51
Stephen Melville and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context: Critical Voices
in Art, Theory and Culture (1996)
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (2005)
Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, (1993)
Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (1992)
Richard Shusterman, Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (2002)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1996)
Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason (1982)
David Wood, ed., Derrida: A Critical Reader (1992)

Marxism and Critical Theory

For general background see Eagleton (2000, 2003); Eagleton and Milne (1996); East-
hope and McGowan (1997/2004); Hemingway (2006); McGowan (2007); Nelson and
Grossberg, eds (1988). For recent essays on the significance of Marxism for contempo-
rary art and aesthetics see Matthew Beaumont et al., eds., As Radical as Reality Itself: Es-
says on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century (2007).
While so-called Western Marxist traditions have emphasized art and visual culture
as part of their attempt to address the economic determinism of classical base-super-
structure models of the social formation the particular dynamics of visual phenomena
are relatively unrepresented if not invisible in the canonical Marxist texts. To this day
there remains no Marxist equivalent to Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1975).
The great exceptions to this generalization lies in the writings of figures associated with
686 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

the first-generation Frankfurt School of Critical Theory—Walter Benjamin, Theodor

Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch, the Hungarian Marx-
ist Georg Lukács, and with figures from the heterodox tradition of French Marxism—
Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Lefebvre. The work of these subtra-
ditions of Western Marxism have, however, been very influential in contemporary cul-
tural studies, critical media and communications theory. Important contemporary figures
in this Left-Hegelian tradition are Ben Agger, Terry Eagleton, Alex Honneth, Martin Jay,
Fredric Jameson, Douglas Kellner, Mark Poster and Albrecht Wellmer, among others.

Theodor W. Adorno and Culture Industry Perspectives

Second (and now third) generations of Critical Theorists have continued to build on these be-
ginnings, recently reanimated by the recovery of Adorno’s work on the ‘culture industry’ and
his critical appraisal of art and aesthetics in the framework of a more politically oriented ‘neg-
ative dialectics’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 1973). Today this Adornoesque reading of the
crisis of art and society is continued by such figures as Jay M. Bernstein, Simon Critchley, Fre-
dric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, Douglas Kellner and Samuel Weber. The general trend of
these later interpreters, however, is one that makes an explicit effort to avoid the binarism and
elitism of Adorno’s critique of popular culture for more situated and interpretative approaches
to the operations, functions and practices of everyday culture and cultural criticism.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry (2001)
Theodor W. Adorno, and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972)
Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writ-
ings on Media (2008)
Jay M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992)
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1986)
Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977)
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)
Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and the Citizen’ (2002), Journal
of Visual Culture, 1/3 (2002): 325–40
Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (1998)
Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998)
Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990)
David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and
Benjamin (1986)
Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan, Art in Bourgeois Society 1790–1850 (1998)
Ben Highmore, ed., The Everyday Life Reader (2002)
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (1991)
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (1993a) (also Jay 1986, 1988, 1993b)
Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle (2003)
Mapping the Visual Field 687

Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (1984)

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)
Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (1992)
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)
Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows (2004)
Gerhardt Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (2007)
G. Rose, The Melancholy Science (1978)
Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (1982)
Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities (2008)
Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (1996)
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)

Postcolonial Theory
In general terms Postcolonial theory challenges the received assumptions about Western
socioeconomic and cultural dominance. In particular it is concerned with the critical
deconstruction of the colonial gaze and exploitative relations based upon racial differ-
ences, with images of oppression, images of empire, Orientalism, the dialectics of colo-
nialism and postcolonialism; postcolonial critiques of dominant image regimes and so
forth. As with intellectual movements like Deconstruction and Genealogy, it should be
approached in an open and plural way concerned with the many systems of ‘colonial-
isms’ that organize the ‘hybridized’ geopolitical spaces of the world today.
Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (2009)
P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993a)
P. Gilroy, Small Acts (1993b)
P. Gilroy, ‘British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity’, in J. Curran et al., eds., Cultural
Studies and Communication (1996), pp. 35–49
Paul Gilroy, ‘Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problem of Belonging to England’, in Nicholas
Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (1998), pp. 331–37
Marie-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992)
E. Said, Orientalism (1978)
E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987)
Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture (1988), pp. 271–313
Gayatri C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990)
Shirley Anne Tate, Black Skins, Black Masks (2005)
Robert Young, Colonial Desire (1995)

Postmodern Theory and Postmodern Visual Culture (rereading, evaluating

and moving beyond the theories of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari,
Jameson, Iragaray, Lyotard, ŽiŽek and others)
While the ‘post-’ in ‘Post-modernism’ and Poststructuralism remains a source of debate
and controversy we can say broadly that postmodern discourses adopt a more radical
688 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

scepticism towards many of the leading narratives of modernity in social and political
thought and modernism in the arts. In place of ‘the Same’, ‘Identity’ and ‘Order’ it sets
into play the forces of difference, nonidentity and transformation. For early statements
regarding the postmodernization of modern culture see the collection of essays edited by
Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture (1983).
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (1983)
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (1988)
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1996)
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992)
Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (1990)
R. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance. A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (1991)
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1977, 1994)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedpius: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977)
Gilles Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dialogues (1987)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (1991)
Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989)
Scott Lash, Another Modernity, a Different Rationality (1999)
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (2006)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (1971)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994)
Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997)
H. J. Silverman, ed., Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture (1993)
S. ŽiŽek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
S. ŽiŽek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991)
S. ŽiŽek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993)
S. ŽiŽek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)

History of Visual Culture

The task of analysing and understanding visual phenomena has been central to the arts
and humanities for centuries. The exploration of visual experience has very ancient ori-
gins in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and their Arab interpreters like the ninth-
century­ theorist Ibn al-Haytham (or Alhazen, b. 965). The modern reappearance of
optical philosophy is usually ascribed to the writings of Renaissance scientists, philoso-
phers and artists (Roger Bacon, Alberti, Vasari, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Cellini and so
on) and, in the seventeenth century, to the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton and the
rationalist philosopher René Descartes, particularly the latter’s work on the physics of
perception and optical experience:
L. B. Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture (1972)
B. Cellini, Autobiography (1998)
René Descartes, ‘Optics’, in Selected Philosophical Writings (1988), reprinted in Nicholas Mirzo-
eff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (1998), pp. 60–5
Mapping the Visual Field 689

Isaac Newton, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light
(1952)
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1987)

For the complex history of the eye and ocularcentrism in European culture see
Hans Blumenberg, ‘Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical
Concepty Formation’, in David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision
(1993), pp. 30–62
Simon Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (2007)
John Hendrix and Charles H. Carman, eds., Renaissance Theories of Vision (2010)
Simon Ings, The Eye: A Natural History (2008)
Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in H. Foster, ed., Modernity and Identity (1992)
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(1993a)
Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes (1988)
Dalia Judovitz, ‘Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes’, in David Michael Levin,
ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993), pp. 63–86
Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (2005)
Barry Sandywell, ‘Specular Grammar: The Visual Rhetoric of Modernity’, in Ian Heywood and
Barry Sandywell, eds., Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Vi-
sual (1999), pp. 30–56
Michael Wintle, The Image of Europe (2009).

The Prehistory of Visual Studies

For overlaps and interfaces with art history and the historiography of art history see
Grant Pooke and Diane Newall, Art History: The Basics (2008). For the social con-
struction of the beaux artes (‘Fine art’), connoisseurs and connoisseurship, authentica-
tion and validation, cabinets of curiosities to national museum displays and aesthetic
archives and the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century or what might be called
the modern aesthetic regime see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2006) and
The Future of the Image (2007). While aesthetic reflection in its modern sense can be
traced to Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) the classic roots of modern aesthetics as a
theory of the fine arts remains Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art
(1764), Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education
of Man (1967), and Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1975). German aesthetics
was profoundly influenced by the idea of recovering the aesthetic form of life attrib-
uted to the ancient Greeks (an attribution that was inseparable from the ideal of an
aesthetically founded German education system within an autonomous German nation
state). The most accessible collection of aesthetic texts from Lessing, Hamann, Moritz,
Novalis, Hölderlin, Schiller and Schlegel is Jay M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic
­German Aesthetics (2003). For a critical analysis of the ‘Hellenic’ ideology underlying the
eighteenth-century origins of aesthetics see Martin Bernal, The Fabrication of Ancient
Greece 1785–1985 (1987).
690 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Philosophy of Perception
The philosophy and psychology of perception is a vast area embracing speculation and
research on visual perception that dates back to the earliest Greek writers. Its modern
representatives are thinkers like John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, Maine de
Biran, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann von Helmholz, Robert Vischer, Edmund Husserl,
Gestalt psychologists such as Karl Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Goldstein, Ernst
Gombrich, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, James J. Gibson, among many others. The collection
of essays edited by Alva Noë and Evan Thompson, Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in
the Philosophy of Perception (2002) is to date the standard reader in the philosophy of per-
ception. A useful introductory text on the psychology of vision is Richard L. Gregory’s
Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (1998). Also see Michele Emmer, ed., The Visual
Mind (2005), Robert L. Solso, ed., Cognition and the Visual Arts (1996), Roy Sorensen,
Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (2008), Evan Thompson’s Colour Vision
(1995), and Semir Zeki’s Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999).
For the philosophy and sociology of vision in the context of multisensorial experi-
ence see the essays in David Howes, ed. Empire of the Senses (2006). Also useful as back-
ground: Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across
Cultures (1993), Constance Classen, The Book of Touch (2005), Mark Johnson, Phi-
losophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Philosophy (1999),
David Howes, Sensual Relations (2003), Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cog-
nitive Work of Images (2007), Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History
of the Senses (1993) and Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (1999).
Berg has also published a number of works on the senses in its Sensory Formations and
Senses and Sensibilities series (see the bibliographical essay ‘Forming Perceptions’ in David
Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses (2006), pp. 399–403). Deconstructionist approaches
have also questioned the dominance of sensory phenomenology. See Jacques Derrida’s
Jean-Luc Nancy: On Touching (2005). Michel Serres’s Les cinq sens (philosophie des corps
mêlées, volume I) has been recently translated into English, The Five Senses: A Philosophy
of Mingled Bodies, vol. 1 (2008). All of these diverse writings concur in pointing towards
a more concrete and relational theory of the visual and, in particular, a relational con-
cept of aesthetic illumination and knowledge.

Vision in the History of Science

The development of concepts of rigorous observation, empirical seeing and factual evi-
dence has been inseparable from the idea and conduct of modern science. Among the
vast body of relevant literature see:
Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon, eds., The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture
since the Renaissance (1993)
Sian Ede, Strange and Charmed: Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts (2000)
Peter Galison and Caroline Jones, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998)
Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat
(1990)
Mapping the Visual Field 691

Martin Kemp, Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science (2000)
Martin Kemp, Seen/Unseen: Art, Science and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope
(2006)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
David Lindbergh, Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler (1996)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine
(1991)

Philosophy of Visuality
Vision and issues relating to visual perception can be found across the traditions of con-
temporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction. Here the work of such
thinkers as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964a,b,c), Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel
Levinas, Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger should be singled out as classical precursors
of the visual turn in modern thought. An accessible introduction to phenomenology
can be found in Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to
Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (2008). Zahavi is worth reading with respect
to the linkages between the phenomenology of perception and first-person subjectivity
(see Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (2005)).
For the phenomenological and hermeneutic background to visual analysis see the lit-
erature mentioned under these headings above. For a useful collection of essays on the
embodied subject, drawing inspiration from the ‘philosophy of the body’ in the thought
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty see Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds., Feminist In-
terpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2006). The older study by M. H. Segal, D. T.
Campbell and M. J. Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception (1966), is
still an important resource.

Social History of Visual Regimes

This thematic category would include the social history of seeing, scopic regimes, visual
discourse formations, ideals and ideologies of viewing and seeing. Seminal contributions
to this growing tradition can be dated to the work of theorists such as Walter Benjamin,
Ernst Bloch, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the mes-
sage’ became one of the cultural catchphrases of the 1960s), and the much underrated
writings of Raymond Williams on media technology (his Television: Technology and Cul-
tural Form (1974) and futuristic Towards 2000 (1983) in particular).
Mainstream philosophy has also come to be interested in the role of visual media
and visual metaphors in the constitution of models of mind, understanding and reality.
The work of the US pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty is well known for popular-
izing and disseminating the idea of the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy. He has
also written a very influential book on the idea of representation and ‘mirroring’ within
modern epistemology. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
Developing an idea used by the French film semiologist Christian Metz, Martin Jay has
written extensively on ‘scopic regimes’ and their links to contested modernities. His
692 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

original essay on the topic appeared in 1988. Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigra-
tion of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993a) remains a classical statement
of the ‘textual’ bias in modern French philosophy. Parallel themes can be found in the
writings of Michael Baxandall (the concept of ‘the period eye’ for example in his Paint-
ing and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972)) and David Michael Levin (The
Opening of Vision (1988), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993), The Philoso-
pher’s Gaze (1999) and Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History
of Philosophy (1997)).

Visuality, Power Formations and Modernity

Many of the key works of Michel Foucault are relevant to the study of the linkages be-
tween modern society and regimes of visibilization. Foucault has been most influential
in putting the power/knowledge/culture nexus upon the intellectual map. Among the
central texts are The Order of Things (1971), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), The
Birth of the Clinic (1973), Discipline and Punish (1977) and History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
(1978). See also G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (1989).

Genealogies of Western Thought and Its Cultural Contexts

the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the
modern age. (Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Heidegger 1977)

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973)
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005)
David Michael Levin, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993)
Barry Sandywell, Logological Investigations, 3 vols. (1996)
Barry Sandywell, Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms (2011)
Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003)

Visual Culture in the Context of Wider Cultural Formations

For an incisive history of Western visual culture see Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Op-
tical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (1990) and The Oxford History of
Western Art (2002). For the scopic regimes of modernity see Martin Jay (1988, 1993a).
For premodern scopic regimes see Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzan-
tine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (2004), Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual
Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (2008). On medieval visual culture see Erwin
Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) and Otto Georg von Simson, The
Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (1988).
On Renaissance ‘visualities’ (especially the invention of three-dimensional perspec-
tive space and its vital importance in the definition of Renaissance humanism) see Hu-
bert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (1994), Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura (1999),
Mapping the Visual Field 693

and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (1990). Martin Jay summarizes the as-
sumptions of Renaissance visual space as geometrically isotropic, rectilinear, abstract
and uniform (‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, 1988). For the development of the idea of
the individualized and ‘alienated’ Renaissance artist see Margot and Rudolf Wittkower,
Born under Saturn (1963). For the wider historical and cultural background see John
Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (1993) and Simon Clark, Vanities of
the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (2007). A Heideggerian perspective
is developed in Ernesto Grassi’s Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism
(1983). For the optical metaphysics that Heidegger opposed see William McNeill, The
Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (1999). A fascinating analy-
sis of the early use of the camera obscura is given in David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge:
Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001). Also see Maillet (2004) on
the role of the ‘Claude Glass’ in Western art practices.
For an important socio-historical survey of transformations of visual space in the
transition to modernity see Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918
(1993). For further background on the dialectical relationships between industrializa-
tion, modernization and the transformation of visual space see Louis Dupré, Passage to
Modernity (1993), Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1982), Donald M. Lowe, His-
tory of Bourgeois Perception (1982), Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989), Charles
Taylor, A Secular Age (2007), Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Mo-
dernity (1990) and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society
in the Gilded Age (1982). For general historical background see Barry Sandywell, Logo-
logical Investigations, volume 1, Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason (1996).

Impact of Visual Technologies upon Scopic Regimes and Imaginary Cultures

There are many recent works devoted to the investigation of the social and cultural im-
pact of visual technologies such as writing, the camera, moving pictures, video and digi-
tal communications. Among the most influential are:
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(1990)
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999)
Don Ihde, Postphenomenology (1993)
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988)
John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (1992)

For technology and the transformation of visual imagination see Rosalind Williams,
Notes on the Underground (1990). For directions that are more rooted in phenomeno-
logical traditions see Don Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth
(1990) and Postphenomenology (1993). William McNeill has an interesting analysis of
the transformation of visual experience through modern science and technology (Part II,
‘The Transformation of Theoria’, in The Glance of the Eye (1999), pp. 161–218). Barry
Sandywell treats the coming of cyberspace and ‘technovision’ extensively in his Diction-
ary of Visual Discourse (2011).
694 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Art History, Art Theory and Aesthetics

Basic Art History
Art history is the traditional forbear of visual studies. In its dominant perspective it has
focused upon the work of individual artists, artistic images (in two-dimensional and
three-dimensonal forms), artistic practices, genres (styles), art movements and art insti-
tutions. In the terminology of German epistemology traditional art history thought of
itself as an ideographic rather than a nomothetic discipline. Over its long history the dis-
cipline has typically located itself as part of the ‘humanities’ concerned with the origins
and consequences of cultural life rather than the sciences with their concern for abstract
generalities and laws. An introductory overview of art history can be found in John Har-
ris, Art History: The Key Concepts (2006). There have been several attempts to reinvigo-
rate these descriptive and idiographic concerns. For the ‘new art history’ see John Harris,
The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (2001). For a popular account of myth and
symbology in the ‘reading’ of paintings see Patrick de Rynck, Understanding Paintings:
Bible Stories and Classical Myths in Art (2009).
Despite their analytical limitations many traditional accounts of art history from
some of the founders of the discipline are still valuable. These might include writings
in the German tradition of Kunstwissenschaft of Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin
Panofsky, E. H. Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim, Wilhelm Pinder, Hans Sedlmayr, Aby War-
burg, Edgar Wind, Arnold Hauser and others. For examples of traditional approaches
to art history see R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
(1969), E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950/1995), Art and Illusion (1960), and The
Image and the Eye (1962), Erwin Panofsky, Meaning and the Visual Arts (1955), Alois
Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry (1985), and Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis (2006). More
critical accounts can be found in Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in
the Seventeenth Century (1989), Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and
Market (1988) and Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy
(1972) and Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985). For the
Viennese school and its influence see Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory
and the History of Art in Twentieth Century Germany (2005) and Chrisopher S. Wood,
ed., Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (2000).
A representative sample of texts on art history can be found in Donald Preziosi’s ed-
ited collection, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (1998). See also Steve Ed-
wards, ed., Art and Its Histories: A Reader (1996), Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, eds.,
Art of the Avant-Gardes (2004) and John Onians, ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on Art
and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich (1994). For a recent review of concepts and
terminology see Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History
(2003) and P. Smith and C. Wilde, eds., A Companion to Art Theory (2002).
For influential voices in the description and criticism of modern art see Jason Gaiger
and Paul Wood, eds., Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader (2003). For a richly illus-
trated history of the avant-gardes see Christopher Green’s The European Avant-gardes
(1995). It would be no exaggeration to claim that the language of modern art and
Mapping the Visual Field 695

art criticism has been shaped by modernist movements. These include Impressionism,
Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Primitivism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism,
Photomontage, Abstract Formalism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Concep-
tual Art, Pop Art and Neo-Realism. Accessible accounts of aesthetic modernism can be
found in:
Clive Bell, Art (1987)
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984)
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984)
Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4 (1993)
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (1991)
Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (2001)
Amelia Jones, ed., A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (2006)
Elaine de Kooning, The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism (1994)
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (1982)
B. K. Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990)
David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)
Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984)

Art Theory
Dana Arnold, ed. Art Theory (2003)
Yve-Alain Bois, Art since 1900 (2005)
Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (1984)
Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2003)
Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood, eds. Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader (2003)
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory: 1900–2000 (2002)
Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (2004)

Aesthetics
For a general overview see B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes, eds., The Routledge Companion to
Aesthetics (2001) and M. Kelly, ed., Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (1998). For mainly Euro-
pean aesthetic debate see Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000).
For studies of different perspectives and problems in contemporary aesthetics:
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966)
Jay M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (2003)
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (2003)
Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000)
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938)
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934, 2005)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990)
David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown, eds., Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (2005)
Catherine Van Eck and Edward Winters, eds., Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and
Visual Culture (2005)
696 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Visual Theory and New Art History

Mieke Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (1991)
Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (1996)
N. Bryson et al., eds. Visual Theory (1991)
Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art and Art History: Moments of Discipline (2001)
Mark A. Cheetham, ‘Visual Studies, Historiography and Aesthetics’, Journal of Visual Culture,
Vol. 4(1), 2005, pp. 75–90
Mark A. Cheetham, Abstract Art against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s
(2006)
Mark A. Cheetham with E. Legge and C. Soussloff, eds., Editing the Image: Strategies in the Pro-
duction and Reception of the Visual (2008)
Mark A. Cheetham et al., eds., The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary
Perspective (1998)
James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003)
James Elkins, ed. Art History versus Aesthetics (2006)
Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts, Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture
(2005)
Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, eds., What Is Research in the Visual Arts: Obsession, Ar-
chive, Encounter (2008)
Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (1997)
Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (1995)
Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute Artist (1997)

Anti-aesthetics
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1990, 1997)
Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and Art (2004)
Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Part 5, ‘Poststructralism and Postmodern-
ism’ (2000)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1977, 1994)
Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (2002)
Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (2007)
Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (1997)

The global generalization of aesthetic forms and media now includes work on the
expanded functions of narrative and mimesis through digitalization, analyses of techno-
digital art (televisual aesthetics); the complex relationships between ‘everyday’ art, rep-
resentation and social relations; art and its media; technological infrastructures of art
practices, design, graphic media; information and image construction/processing; digi-
talization of art practices; the fate of the European avant-gardes and so on.
Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces (1996)
Stephen Connor, The Book of Skin (2003)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990)
Steve Edwards, ed., Art and Its Histories: A Reader (1996)
Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, eds., Art of the Avant-Gardes (2004)
Mapping the Visual Field 697

Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (1993)

Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000)
Peter Osborne, ed., Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (2004)
Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (2007)
Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings (1982)
Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (1993)

Radical Art Theory and Art Practice

Philip Alperson, ed., The Philosophy of the Visual Arts (1992)
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983)
Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1984)
Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (2004)
Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (1986)
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (1984)
Keith Moxley, The Practice of Theory: Postructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (1994)
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (1988)
Griselda Pollock, Avante-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art Theory
(1993)
Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories
(1999)
Griselda Pollock, ed., Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (1996)

Typography/Art/Writing
Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in the New Art History from France (1988)
Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (1999)
Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923
(1994)
Joanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995)
E. E. Eisenstein, ‘Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and
Thought’, Journal of Modern History, 40, 1968, pp. 1–56
E. E. Eisenstein, ‘The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance’, Past and Present,
45, 1969, pp. 19–89
E. E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transfor-
mations in Early-Modern Europe (1979)
E. E. Eisenstein, ‘Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and
Thought: A Preliminary Report’, in H. J. Graff, ed., Literacy and Social Development in the
West (1981), pp. 53–68
E. E. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983)
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1400–
1800 (1997)
J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977)
J. Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968)
J. Goody and I. Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
5, April 1963, pp. 304–45
698 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (1963)

P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (1989)
Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History
(1967)
Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies on the Interaction of Expression and
Culture (1971)
Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word (1977)

Aesthetics and Critical Social Theory

For key texts see Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000), Part 3,
‘Marxism and Critical Theory’.
T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1990, 1997)
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983)
Norman Bryson et al., eds., Visual Theory (1991)
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984)
Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History (2002)
Ian Heywood, Social Theories of Art (1997)
Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993)
Scott Lash, ‘Reflexivity and Its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community’, in U. Beck, A. Gid-
dens and S. Lash, eds., Reflexive Modernization (1994), pp. 110–73
L. Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1991)
Catherine Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (2006)
Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Object (1980)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

Aesthetic Philosophy
It is important to distinguish the more traditional ‘philosophy of art’ with its central
concern with the nature of beauty, normative values and aesthetic appreciation from
‘aesthetic philosophy’ in its more recent ‘continental-philosophical’ meaning. The for-
mer has been typically concerned with applying the techniques of Anglo-American con-
ceptual analysis to aesthetic questions and problems (see Dickie 1974 and 1997). While
the latter approaches ‘artworks’ and ‘the aesthetic’ as the starting point for the develop-
ment of distinctive postempiricist philosophical positions and perspectives. The ‘conti-
nental’ current of aesthetic philosophy traces its roots to Kant’s Critique of Judgement
(1790) and to debates about the social origins and functions of art in the Hegelian,
Marxist and Critical Theory traditions. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1997) comes closest
to the development of a distinctively postmodern aesthetic philosophy. Recent writ-
ings in this vein have reassessed the place of art and aesthetic objects as fundamental to
any comprehensive understanding of the human condition (for example Joseph Mar-
golis 2009). Today there are many signs of dialogue and rapprochement between these
strands of thought; for example the emphasis is now placed upon the plural multiplici-
ties that intersect across the fields of philosophical reflection and visual art (for example
Mapping the Visual Field 699

Peter Kivy’s Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (1997) or the collection of essays
edited by David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown, Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the
Arts (2005)). For an overview of aesthetic theorizing in the twentieth century see Paul
Guyer, ‘Twentieth-Century Aesthetics’ (2008).
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1990, 1997)
Andrew Benjamin, Object, Painting (1994)
Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (1993)
Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory (1997)
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (2003)
Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History (2002)
Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986)
Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997)
Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (2003)
George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (1974)
George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics (1997)
Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (1974)
Frank Sibley, Approaches to Aesthetics (2001)

For the philosophical implications of art for ‘philosophical anthropology’ see Joseph
Margolis, The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropol-
ogy (2009). Also in this context, Stephen Melville and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Seams: Art
as a Philosophical Context: Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture (1996) and Peter
Crowther, Art and Embodiment (1993).

The Return of Beauty

A clear case of ‘the return of the repressed’ in recent visual culture is the revival of inter-
est in questions of beauty and pleasure (questions that were central to mainstream art
history—of the kind exemplified by Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clarke—but were
effectively sidelined by the dominant modernist versions of cultural theory). For at-
tempts to recover the problematics of beauty see:
Dave Beech, Beauty: Documents of Contemporary Art (2009)
Bonnie Berry, The Power of Looks: Social Stratification of Physical Appearance (2008)
Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1988)
Umberto Eco, ed., On Ugliness (2008)
Paul A. Fishwick, ed., Aesthetic Computing (2006)
Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (2009)
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2008)
Stephen Johnstone, ed., The Everyday (Documents of Contemporary Art) (2008)
Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art: 1750–2000 (2005)
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (2006)
Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism (1997)
Wendy Steiner, Beauty in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2002)
700 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Janet Wolff, ‘Groundless Beauty: Feminism and the Aesthetics of Uncertainty’, Feminist Theory,
Vol. 7(2), 2006 (Special Issue on Beauty)
Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (2008)
Anthony Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (1999)

Ethics of Seeing
Important explorations of the ethical grounds and dimensions of visual experience
include:
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1969/1992)
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (1969/1992),
pp. 245–55
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, in Walter
Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings
on Media (2008), pp. 19–55
L. A. Blum, Moral Particularity and Perception (1994)
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004)
Kenneth Clark, The Nude (1970)
Claire Colebrook, Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Post-Structuralism (2000)
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992)
Anne Eaton, ‘Painting and Ethics’, in D. Goldblatt and L. B. Brown, eds., Aesthetics: A Reader in
Philosophy of the Arts (1997), pp. 63–8
Claire Farago, ed., Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style (2008)
Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1994)
Charles E. Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (1987)
Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996)
Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (1998)
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986)
Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (2006)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2004)
Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (2008)

Cultural Studies Perspectives

For general outlines and further bibliographical references to the cultural studies para-
digm see:
Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, eds., Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates
(1990)
M. Barrett et al., eds., Ideology and Cultural Production (1979)
Tony Bennett and John Frow, eds., The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (2008)
Simon During, Cultural Studies (2005)
Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (1993)
Lawrence Grossberg et al., Cultural Studies (1992)
Mapping the Visual Field 701

Gary Hill and Clare Birchall, eds., New Cultural Studies (2006)
Brian Longhurst et al., Introducing Cultural Studies (2008)
Jim McGuigan, Cultural Analysis (2009)
Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan, eds., A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice (1995)
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)
John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (2008)
John Storey, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (2008)
Andy Tudor, Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural Studies (1999)
Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1996)

Media Studies of Visuality

For recent statements from key figures in the field of visual studies see Marquard Smith,
ed., Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (2008).

General Introductions
Tony Bennett et al., eds., Culture, Society and the Media (1982)
Adam Briggs and Paul Cobley, The Media (2002)
Peter Burke and Asa Briggs, A Social History of the Media (2005)
Stuart Hall, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)
Douglas Kellner, Media Culture (1994)
Jim McGuigan, Cultural Analysis (2009)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999)
John B. Thompson, Media and Modernity (1995)

Mass Communication
Tony Bennett and John Frow, eds., The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (2008)
Paddy Scannell et al., eds., Culture and Power: A Media, Culture and Society Reader (1992)
Philip Schlesinger, Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities (1991)
Nick Stevenson, Understanding Media Cultures: Social Theory and Mass Communication (1995)

Philosophy of Film and the Moving Image

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971)
Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981)
Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996)
Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004)
Lucien Taylor, ed., Visualizing Theory (1994)

Film Studies (history, film theory, film genres, reception theory, semiotics, etc)
Useful anthologies on film and cinema are Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film
Theory and Philosophy (1997), Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, eds., Philosophy of Film
702 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

and Motion Pictures: An Anthology (2006) and Keith Barry Grant, ed. Film Genre Reader
(1986). Also:
Rick Altman, Film/Genre (1999)
David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (1989)
David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996)
Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (1996)
Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis,
Barbara Creed (2006)
Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (1995)
Andrew Dudley, The Major Film Theories (1976)
Richard Dyer, Stars (1982)
Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (1990b)
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (1993)
Anne Friedberg et al. eds., Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (1998)
Annette Kuhn, ed. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction (1990)
Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (1974)
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (1982)
Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: the Imaginary Signifier (1983)
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in G. Mast and M. Cohen, eds., Film
Theory and Criticism (1975), pp. 803–16
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989)
Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (1990)
Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures (1989)
Robert Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and
Culture (1997)
Robert Stam, ed., New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (1992)

Visual Institutions
Scientific, Medical and Technological Institutions Premised upon Visual Apparatuses
and Technologies
Nik Brown and Andrew Webster, New Medical Technologies and Society: Reordering Life (2004)
Lisa Cartwright, ‘Gender Artifacts: Technologies of Bodily Display in Medical Culture’, in Lynne
Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds., Visual Display (1995), pp. 218–36
Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (1995)
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973)
Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eigh-
teenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989)
Ludmilla Jordanova, 1999. Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760–1820 (1999)
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004)
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public (2005)
John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (1999)
Niklas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (2006)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine
(1991)
Mapping the Visual Field 703

Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (2007)
Andrew Webster, Health, Technology and Society: A Sociological Critique (2007)
Keith Wilder, Photography and Science (2009)

Visuality in Popular Culture

Visual Identities/Representations
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (1990)
John Fiske, Media Matters (1996)
John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995)
John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (1997)
John Frow, Genre (2005)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993a)
Paul Gilroy, ‘ “Jewels Brought from Bondage”: Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity’, in
Erin Striff, ed., Performance Studies (2003), pp. 137–51
Stuart Hall, ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture’, in Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular
Culture (1992), pp. 21–33
Mark Poster, The Mode of Information (1990)
Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (1995)

Celebrity Culture: Life in the Lens

Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (2003)
P. David Marshall, ed., Celebrity Culture Reader (2006)
Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, eds., Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (2007)
Chris Rojek, Celebrity (2004)
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1993)
Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (2004)

Postocular Theory
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)
Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and
the Dialectics of Seeing’, in D. M. Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993),
pp. 309–38
Lisa Cartwright, ‘Science and the Cinema’, in Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Cul-
ture (1995), pp. 1–16
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(1990)
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977)
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993a)
Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (1993b)
Martin Jay, ‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight’, in David Mi-
chael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993), pp. 143–85
704 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity (1992)
David Michael Levin, ‘Visions of Narcissism: Intersubjectivity and the Reversals of Reflection’,
in Martin Dillon, ed., Merleau-Ponty Vivant (1991), pp. 47–90
David Michael Levin, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993)
Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (1982)
W.J.T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992)
B. Sandywell, Dictionary of Visual Discourse (2011)
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nine-
teenth Century (1986)
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

The Sociology and Anthropology of Visual Art,

Techniques, Media and Communications (including
the use of visual technologies such as photography
and film in anthropological research)
The Social History of Visual Life
Mieke Bal, ‘His Master’s Eye’, in David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vi-
sion (1993), pp. 379–404
Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (1996)
Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (1999)
Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (2001)
Mieke Bal, ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture,
Vol. 2(1), 2003, pp. 5–32
Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (2001)
Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crew and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present
(1997)
John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (1997)

Visuality in Reflexive Anthropology

The concern for describing and representing the lived experience of other cultures has
been central to anthropology from its inception. However only recently have the actual
techniques and methodologies of anthropological representation become topics of re-
search in their own right. Anthropology today, however, has taken the ‘visual turn’ and
programmes of research across the world now include visual themes and methodologies.
It might be argued that the theme of reflexivity was first made central in critical anthro-
pology (e.g. by Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture) that dates back to 1986. The So-
ciety for Visual Anthropology was also founded around the same time (1984).
Richard L. Anderson, Calliope’s Sisters: A Comparative Study of Philosophies of Art (2004)
Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (1993)
Constance Classen, The Book of Touch (2005)
James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnogra-
phy (1986)
Mapping the Visual Field 705

Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (1999)

Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983)
Johannes Fabian, ‘Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing’, Criti-
cal Inquiry, 16, 1990, pp. 753–73
Clifford Geertz, The Intepretation of Cultures (1973)
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (1983)
Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn-of-the Century Visual Cul-
ture (2001)
David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2003)
David Howes, ed. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourebook in the Anthropology of the Senses
(1991)
Jay Ruby, ‘Visual Anthropology’, in D. Levinson and M. Ember, eds., Encyclopedia of Cultural
Anthropology (1996)
Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations in Film and Anthroplogy (2000)
Jay Ruby, ‘The Last 20 Years of Visual Anthropology: A Citical Review’, Visual Studies, 2005,
20, pp. 159–70.
Lucient Taylor, ed., Visualizing Theory (1994)
Stephen Tyler, ‘Postmodern Ethnography’, in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture
(1986)

Doing Visual Sociology: Visual Methods and Methodologies in Sociology

The sociology of visual culture has a chequered history in the discipline of sociology at
large. While the ‘philosophy of art’ has Hegelian roots, Marxist sociology is represented
by the writings of Arnold Hauser. In classical social theory art and visual culture can be
found in the ‘sociological aesthetics’ of Georg Simmel. Key figures in Critical Theory
would be Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Ernst Bloch. We
might also include the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (for example his Birth of Tragedy,
1872) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) in cultural history (Burckhardt’s Die Kultur
der Renaissance in Italien (1860), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and
The Greeks and Greek Civilization, 1872, in particular), Alois Riegl (1858–1905) (Late
Roman Art Industry, 1901), Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908), and
Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) in art history (his Principles of Art History: The Problem
of the Development of Style in Later Art, 1915). Benjamin’s materialist hermeneutic of art
and reproductive techniques is clearly influenced by the path-breaking work of Alois
Riegl. Consider one of the principles that Benjamin formulates in his ‘Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’: ‘During long periods of history, the mode of human sense
perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which
human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is de-
termined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century,
with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the
Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but
also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff,
who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been
706 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

buried, were the first to draw conclucions from them concerning the organization of
perception at the time’ (Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction’, in Illuminations, 1992, p. 216; see also Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility, 2008, pp. 19–55).
Later contributors to this genre of Kulturgeschichte and Kunstwissenschaft include
Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Wölfflin, Max Dessoir, Benedetto Croce, Aby Warburg,
Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst H. Gombrich, Ernst Robert Curtius, Paul O.
Kristeller, Arnaldo Momigliano, Georg Misch, Ernesto Grassi, Meyer Schapiro,
Benjamin Nelson, Lewis Coser, Robert K. Merton, Hayden White, Peter Gay, Florian
Znaniecki, among others.

Creative Visual Methodologies

The journal Visual Studies, a platform organized by the International Visual Sociology
Association, is probably the most immediate source for visual sociology. Its revised remit
of basic aims (from 2009) is:

•• Provide an international forum for the development of visual research

•• Promote an acceptance and understanding of a wide range of methods, ap-
proaches and paradigms that constitute image-based research
•• Reduce the disparity of emphasis between visual and written studies in the so-
cial sciences
•• Promote an interest in developing visual research methodology in all its vari-
ous forms
•• Encourage research that employs a mixture of visual methods and analytical ap-
proaches within one study
•• Critically reflect and contribute to the dialogue surrounding ‘the visual’ across
the social sciences and humanities
•• Provide an arena for in-depth explorations of various approaches, particular
methods, themes and visual phenomena.

One of the earliest conferences focussing explicitly upon visual culture was organized
by the Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Visual Knowledges
Conference, University of Edinburgh, 17–20 September 2003). For documentation see
John Frow, ed., Visual Knowledges (2003).
The First International Visual Methods Conference was held at the University of Leeds
(15–17 September 2009). The preconference literature contains the following paragraph:
‘A striking phenomenon of visual research two decades ago was its invisibility. There is
now a general awakening to the ubiquity of imagery and visual culture in contemporary
lives, which necessitates the development of visually orientated theoretical frameworks
coupled with the application of rigorous and complementary visual research methods’.
The Leeds Visual Methods Conference provided an inventory of themes ad-
dressed under ‘method’ as: researcher created visual data, participatory visual methods,
Mapping the Visual Field 707

arts-based methods, creative visual methods, visual representation, visual ethics and the
analysis of visual data. A related conference also took place in London from 15–17 July
2009, with a wider brief: ‘Visuality/Materiality: Reviewing Theory, Method, and Prac-
tice’. The stated aim of the conference was ‘to consider whether representation and the
need for a new interpretive paradigm coalesce/intersect’. The title of the conference
foregrounds the interaction of the material and the visual to provide a ‘dialogic space’
where ‘the nature and role of a visual theory can be evaluated in the light of materiality,­
practice, affect, performativity; and where the methodological encounter [sic] in-
forms our intellectual critique’ (from the Internet statement of purpose, http://www.
geography.dur.ac.uk/conf/visualitymateriality).
Further references and resources can be found in publications of Gillian Rose and
David Gauntlett (both also contributors to the present Handbook). For background see:
Mieke Bal, ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture,
Vol. 2(1), 2003, pp. 5–32
M. S. Ball and G. Smith, Analysing Visual Data (1992)
Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research (2001)
Marcus Banks, Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research (2008)
Howard Becker, Exploring Society Photographically (1981)
Howard Becker, Doing Things Together (1986)
Elizabeth Chaplin, Sociology and Visual Representation (1994)
Michael Emmison and Philip Smith, Researching the Visual (2000)
John Grady, ‘Scope of Visual Sociology’, Visual Sociology, Vol. 11(2), 1996, pp. 10–24
Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman, eds., Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and
the Sociological Imagination (2004)
Keith Moxey, ‘Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 7(2), 2008,
pp. 131–46
Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography (2001)
John Prosser, ed. Image-based Research (1998)
Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (2001)
Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt, eds., The Handbook of Visual Analysis (2001).
We should also not ignore the visual dimensions of sociologists like Erving Goffman,
for example in his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969) and Frame Analysis: An
Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974).

Visual Archives/Archiving/Curatorship
Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (2007)

Sociology of Visual Representation

Howard Becker, Art Worlds (1982)
Elizabeth Chaplin, Sociology and Visual Representation (1994)
Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman, eds., Picturing the Social Landscape (2004)
Bruno Latour, Science in Action (1987)
708 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (2004)

John Law and G. Fyfe, eds. Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations (1988)
Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (2000)
Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (1996)
Anthony Woodiwiss, The Visual in Social Theory (2001)

Recent Research in Institutional Visualization (statistics, medicine, social

embodiments, scientific visualization, bio-medical technologies, etc)
Lorrain Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004)
Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (1990)
Edward R. Tufte, Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions
(1997)
Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997)
Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001)

Ethnographic Perspectives
Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (2001)
Douglas Harper, ‘Visualizing Structure: Reading Surfaces of Social Life’, Qualitative Sociology,
Vol. 20(1), 1997, pp. 57–77
Douglas Harper, Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (1987)
Douglas Harper, Changing Worpp: Visions of a Lost Agriculture (2001)
Douglas Harper, Good Company: A Tramp Life ( 2006)
Paul Hockings, ed., Principles of Visual Anthropology (2003)
Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representations in Research (2001)
Sarah Pink, Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography (2004)
Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (2006)
Gregory C. Stanczack, Visual Research Methods: Image, Society and Representation (2007)

Visual Rhetoric
The classic account of ‘the rhetoric of the image’ is Roland Barthes’s essay ‘Rhetorique
de l’image’ (Communications 1, 1964), translated by Stephen Heath in Barthes’s Image-
Music-Text (1977).
Also see:
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design
(1996/2006)
Carolyn Handa, ed., Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook (2004)
Jen Webb, Understanding Representation (2009)

Perspectives in Visual Communication

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (1983)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (2000)
Mapping the Visual Field 709

Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (1982)

Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006)
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977/2002)

Graphs, Diagrammatics and Visual Communication

James Elkins, What Painting Is (1998)
James Elkins, The Domain of Images (1999)
James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003)
Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997)
Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001)

Politics of Visual Persuasion: Communication in Televisual Culture

Robert Allen, Channels of Discourse Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism (1992)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1984)
Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (1998)
Barbara Creed, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality (2003)
John Fiske, Television Culture (1987)
John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (2003)
John Hartley, Tele-ology: Studies in Television (1992)
Philip Schlesinger et al., eds., The Sage Handbook of Media Studies (2004)
Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (1994)

Architecture and Design

Architectural Theory
Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (1994)
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (2001)
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (2005)
Neil Spiller, Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (2007)
Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993)
Mark Wigley, ‘The Domestication of the House: Deconstruction after Architecture’, in Peter
Brunette and David Wills, eds., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (1994), pp. 203–27
Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (1996)
Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments-Surrounding Objects (2006)

Design and Visual Culture

Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design and Visual Culture (1998)
Vilém Flusser, Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (1999)
John Hartley, ed., Creative Industries (2004)
Guy Julier, Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Design since 1900 (1998)
Guy Julier, The Culture of Design (2007)
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (2002)
John A. Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (1997)
710 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Fashion
Malcolm Barnard, Fashion and Communication (1996)
Christopher Breward, Fashion (2003)
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (1988)
Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2001)
Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (1991)

Visual Cultural Institutions

Media, Communication and Culture: Practices and Technologies of Looking
David Barlow and Brett Mills, Reading Media Theory: Thinkers, Approaches, Contexts (2008)
James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (1989)
Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (1988)
John Fiske, Media Matters (1996)
Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (2000)
Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (1999)
Philip Schlesinger et al., eds., The Sage Handbook of Media Studies (2004)
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking (2001)
Liesbet van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies (1994)

Museums, Archiving, Curatorship and Cultural Memory

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995)
Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds., Visual Display (1995)
Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (2001)
Cynthia Freeland, ‘Money, Markets, Museums’, ch. 4 in Art Theory (2003), pp. 60–82
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (2000)
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (2008)
Donald Preziosi, ‘The Other: Art History and/as Museology’, ch. 9 in Donald Preziosi, ed., The
Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (1998), pp. 451–525
Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds. Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum (2003)
Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles
(1994)

Public Art, Spectacles, Spaces/Places

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)
Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
(1993)
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, Vol. 16(1), 1986, pp. 22–7
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (1994)
Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (1992)
Maurice Roche, Mega-events and Modernity (2000)
Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (1994)
Mapping the Visual Field 711

Photography
Readers interested in contemporary photography might begin with Susan Sontag’s On
Photography (1977/2002) and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. An important collection
of essays on the photographic image can be found in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Es-
says on Photography (1980).
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (1983)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (2000)
Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1996)
Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photographly (1982)
Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996)
Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006)
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2000)
Vilém Flusser, Writings (2004)
Helmut Gernsheim, The History of Photography (1955)
Helmut Gernsheim, The Origin of Photography (1982)
Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photogaphy (1986)
Rosalind E. Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (1985)
Martin Lister, ed. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1995)
Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (1997)
W.J.T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992)
Warren Neidich, Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (2003)
John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday (1998)
Don Slater, ‘Domestic Photography and Digial Culture’, in M. Lister, ed., The Photographic
Image in Digital Culture (1995), pp. 129–46
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977/2002)
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988)
John Tagg, ‘Globalization, Totalization and the Discursive Field’, in Anthony D. King, ed., Cul-
ture, Globalization and the World-System (1991), pp. 155–60
John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute (1992)
Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (1980)
Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction (2004)
Liz Wells, ed. The Photography Reader (2003)

Photojournalism: From the Analogue Camera to Film and Digital Multimedia

Howard Becker, Exploring Society Photographically (1981)
Howard Becker, Doing Things Together (1986)
Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (1998)
Jonathan Crary, ‘Modernizing Vision’, in Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (1988),
pp. 29–44
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (1990)
Scott McQuiare, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the
Camera (1998)
Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (1995)
712 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Advertising Discourse and Graphic Design

While advertising, perhaps, still remains ‘the official art of modern capitalist society’
(Raymond Williams); advertising discourse—the proliferating global institution of the
advertising industry—has come to include a range of interrelated thematics, includ-
ing questions of image-creation (visual and verbal imagineering), persuasive commu-
nication, the manipulation of consumer identities, consumerism and the exponential
growth of global consumption, the spread of advertising techniques to organizational
dynamics, politics and the wider society, and the impact of hyper-consumerist attitudes
and ideological formations upon wider ecological, political and cultural systems.
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)
Guy Cook, The Discourse of Advertising (2001)
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture
(1976)
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (1993)
Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (1976)
Scott Lash, Celia Lury and Deirdre Boden, Global Culture Industries: The Mediation of Things
(2007)
Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times (2005)
Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (2004)
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (1995)
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957/2007)
Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (2003)
Jonathan Schroeder, Visual Consumption (2002)
Robert A. Sobieszek, The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography (1988)
Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt, eds., Handbook of Visual Analysis (2001)
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (1978)

Global Consumerism
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986)
Zygmunt Bauman, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998)
Robert Bocock, ‘Consumption and Lifestyles’, in R. Bocock and K. Thompson, eds., Social and
Cultural Forms of Modernity (1992), pp. 119–69
Robert Bocock, Consumption (1993)
Philip Corrigan, The Sociology of Consumption (1997)
Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World (1999)
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture
(1976)
Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1988)
Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American
Culture (1992)
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991)
Jukka Gronow, The Sociology of Taste (1997)
Mapping the Visual Field 713

David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006)

Sott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (1994)

Leisure
David Chaney, Lifestyles (1996)
Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (1994)
Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (2004)
Hugh Mackay, ed., Consumption and Everyday Life (1997)
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987)
Chris Rojek, Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory (1995)
Chris Rojek, The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time (2009)
Rob Shields, ed. Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (1992)

Visual Experiences of the Social World

(imaginary formations as material objects,
cityscapes, domestic technologies, etc)
Visual Construction of the Social
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)
Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader (2009)
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1997)
David B. Clarke, The Consumer Soicety and the Postmodern City (2003)
Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World (1999)
E. Edwards and J. Hart, eds., Photographs, Objects, Histories (2004)
Vilém Flusser, Writings (2004)
Martin Hand, Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity (2008)
Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman, eds., Picturing the Social Landscape (2004)
Graham MacPhee, The Architecture of the Visible (2002)
Elizabeth Shove, Matthew Watson, Martin Hand and Jack Ingram, The Design of Eveyday Life
(2007)
Jo Spence and Patricia Hollands, eds. Family Snaps: the Meaning of Domestic Photography (1991)
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (2004)
Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (2005)
Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory (2007)

Cityscapes in Theory
Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998)
Graham Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (2002)
David Harvey, Consciousness and Urban Experience (1985)
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006)
Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1991)
Edward J. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989)
Edward J. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996)
714 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory (2007)

Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, eds., Postmodern Cities and Spaces (1995)
Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flaneur’, in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, eds., Post-
modern Cities and Spaces (1995), pp. 59–79

Nature Envisioned
Peter Coates, ed., Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (1998)
Peter de Bolla, ‘The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer’, in
Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (1995), pp. 282–95
Neil Evernden, Social Creation of Nature (1992)
Ludmilla Jordanova, Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760–1820 (1999)
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (2004)
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, no. 64, ‘Earthographies: Ecocriticism and
Culture’, guest editors Wendy Wheeler and Hugh Dunkerley
Peter Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture (2000b)
Marie-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992)
Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (1994)
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (1988)
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Ac-
count (1984)
Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (1996)
Keith Wilder, Photography and Science (2009)

The Tourist Gaze

Yiorgos Apostolopoulos et al., eds., The Sociology of Tourism (2001)
Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers, vol. 1 (1992)
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1999)
Tom Selwyn, ed., The Tourist Image (1996)
John Urry, ‘Cultural Change and Contemporary Holiday-making’, Theory, Culture and Society,
Vol. 5, 1988, pp. 35–55
John Urry, ‘The “Consumption” of Tourism’, Sociology, Vol. 24(1), 1990, pp. 23–35
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (1990)
John Urry, Consuming Places (1995)
John Urry, Mobilties (2007)
John Urry and Chris Rokek, eds., Touring Cultures (1997)

Images in/as Memory

Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crew and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present
(1997)
Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996)
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (1989)
Norbert Elias, On Time (1991)
Mapping the Visual Field 715

Elizabeth A. Grosz, ed., Becomings, Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures (1999)
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (1992)
Roger S. Schank, Dynamic Memory (1982)
Roger S. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into
Human Knowledge Structures (1977)

Representations of the Past

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (1983)
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985)
David Middleton and Derek Edwards, eds., Collective Remembering (1990)
Kevin Walsh, Representations of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Postmodern World (2007)
Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt, eds., Memory: An Anthology (2008)

Global Urban Cityscapes (visualizing urban landscape and social change)

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)
Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture (1990)
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (1993)
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (1989)
Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (1994)
Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern France
(1997)
Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (1989)
Sharon Zukin, Cultures of Cities (1995)

Technoculture and Visual Technology: The Global

Digital Revolution
Globalization of Media and Culture
John Beynon and David Dunkerley, eds., Globalization: The Reader (2001)
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996)
Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (1990)
Anthony Giddens, Runaway World (2002)
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005)

Digitalization, New Media and Cyberculture and Their Impact upon Visual Studies
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (2000)
J. Buick and Z. Jevtic, Cyberspace for Beginners (1995)
Lisa Cartwright, ‘Film and the Digial in Visual Studies: Film Studies in the Era of Convergence’,
Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1(1), 2002, pp. 7–23
716 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(1990)
Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (1995)
Mike Davis, Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, the Ecology of Fear (1992)
Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (1985)
Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (1990)
Don Ihde, Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context (1993)
Steve Jones, ed., Cybersociety (1994)
Lev Manovich, Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (1993)
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001)
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000)
W.J.T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye (1992)
Stephen Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (1985)
Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (London: Mandarin, 1993)
David Tomas, Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies (2004)

The Fate of Literacy in the Digital Age of Global Optics

Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997)
Charlie Gere, Digital Culture (2002)
George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technol-
ogy (1997)
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2002)
Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (1998)
John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age (2005)

Cyberspace as Cybervisuality: Digitalization, Virtualization and Cyberculture

Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps (1991)
Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin eds., Remediation: Understanding New Media (2002)
Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, Vol. 3 of The Information Age (1998)
H. U. Gumbrecht and M. Marrinan, Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age
(2003)
Steven A. Johnson, Interface Culture (1999)
Mark Poster, What’s Wrong with the Internet? (2001)
Mark Poster, Information please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (2006)
Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (1999)

Digital Telepresence/Virtualization/Cybercommunities
Roger Burrows and Mike Featherstone, eds., Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Tech-
nological Embodiment (1995)
Steven A. Johnson, Interface Culture (1999)
Barry Sandywell, ‘Monsters in Cyberspace’ (2006)
Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter, eds., Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security and
Identity (2005)
Mapping the Visual Field 717

Digital Image Culture(s) of Wired Capitalism

Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (2000)
Martin Lister, ed., The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1995)
Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997)
Kevin Robins, Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision (1996)
Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (1999)
David Tomas, Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies (2004)

Ubiquitous Everyday Visual Technologies (from the Walkman to mobile

multimedia technology)
Charlie Gere, Digital Culture (2002)
S. Johnstone, ed., The Everyday (Documents of Contemporary Art) (2008)
Mike Michael, Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity (2000)
Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (2006)
Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch, eds., Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Do-
mestic Spaces (1984)

Seeing and Being Seen in the Electronic Age/Surveillance Society

Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity (1990)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)
David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994)
David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (2001)
David Lyon, Surveillance as Social Sorting (2003)
David Lyon, ed., Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (2006)
Joseph Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (1985)
Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory (2007)

Screen Culture/s
Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (1982)
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (2006)
Martin Jay, ‘Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism’,
in Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality (1995), pp. 344–60
Jacques Lacan, Television (1990)
Jonathan Schroeder, Visual Consumption (2002)
Sherry Turkle, Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)
Siegfried Zieliknski, Deep Time of the Media: Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by
Technical Means (2008)

Telepistemology/Telerobotics
Bruce Damar, Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet (1997)
Stan Franklin, Artificial Minds (1995)
718 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Ken Goldberg, ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the In-
ternet (2000)
Sidney Eve Matrix, Cyberpop: Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture (2006)

The Politics of Vision

Many of the most recent works in visual studies can be viewed as transdisciplinary in-
vestigations of ‘political aesthetics’. In Jacques Rancière’s version this focusses upon the
social imaginary organization of ‘the visible’. Politics in Rancière’s work is constitutively
linked to the social organization of sensory, aesthetic life:
‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has
the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the pos-
sibilities of time’ (2006: 13).
This expanded conception of ‘politics’ relates visual studies to a critical theory of
everday life. His historicizing concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ becomes one
type of structuring regime of intelligibility determining the possible relationships be-
tween the visible, the sayable and the thinkable (2006: 60–1). From this more critical
perspective we can look back at some of the classics in the field and recover them as pre-
figuring the new transdisciplinary problematics (e.g. John Berger’s path-breaking Ways
of Seeing (1972)).

Visual Regimes
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (2000)
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (2007)
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993)
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1995)
Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the
Present Day (1993)
Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (1993)
Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Private Life, Vol. 3 (1989)
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books,
1975)
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols. (1982 and 1987)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1971)
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984)
Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (1994)
David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (2005)
David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001)
Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1991)
Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representationin English Visual Cul-
ture 1650–1800 (1997)
Mapping the Visual Field 719

The Digital Revolution and Its Impact upon the Visual Field
Timothy Druckery, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (1996)
Timothy Druckery and Peter Weibel, eds. Electronic Culture: History, Theory and Practice (2001)
Charlie Gere, Digital Culture (2002)
Charlie Gere, Art, Time and Technology (2006)
Charlie Gere and Hazel Gardiner, eds., Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2009)
Martin Hand, Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity (2008)
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990)
Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997)
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999)
Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (2009)
Barry Sandywell, ‘On the Globalization of Crime: The Internet and the New Criminality’, in
Yvonne Jewkes and Majid Yar, eds., Handbook of Internet Crime (2009), pp. 38–66
Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age (1994)

War and Militarization of Visuality

Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1992)
Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997)
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nine-
teenth Century (1986)
Paul Virilio, Pure War (1983)
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (1986)
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989)
Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991a)
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (1994)
Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture (1993)

The Politics of Seeing and Being Seen: New Social

Movements
The Cultural Politics of Class, Feminism, Race and Ethnicity
On the postmodern politics of identity and difference see:
Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (1994)
Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Epistemology and the Construction of Knowledge
(1991)
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991)
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (1989)
Michael Keith and Steven Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (1993)
Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity (1992)
Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (1994)
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
Richard Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth (1991)
720 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Rosemary Putnam Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (2008)

Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990)
Iris Marion Young, ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’, in Linda J. Nichol-
son, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (1990), pp. 300–26
Slavoj ŽiŽek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitch-
cock (1992)

Class, Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Visual Field

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory (1994)
Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document 1973–1979 (1999)
Mary Kelly, Interim (1990)
Mary Kelly, Gloria Patri (1992)
Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists’, in V. Gornick and B. K. Moran, eds.,
Women in Sexist Society (1971), pp. 480–510
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986)
Jacqueline Rose, ‘Sexuality and Vision: Some Questions’, in H. Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality
(1988), pp. 115–23

Racialized Seeing and Racialized Cultures: ‘Racial’ Difference, Subjectivities and

Identity Politics in a Multicultural Age
Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (2005)
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (1990)
Lisa Bloom, ed., With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999)
Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska, Feminist Visual Culture (2002)
Gen Doy, Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity (2000)
Emory Elliott et al., eds., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (2002)
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (1983)
John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in US Politics (1996)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993a)
Stuart Hall, ‘The Meaning of New Times’, in S. Hall and M. Jacques, eds., New Times: The
Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (1989), pp. 116–33
Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in J. Rutherford, ed., Identity (1990), pp. 222–37
Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in J. Donald and A. Ratansi, eds., ‘Race’, Culture and Difference
(1992a), pp. 252–59
Stuart Hall, ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-
Hsing Chen’, in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies (1996a), pp. 484–503
Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay, eds., Questions of
Cultural Identity (1996b), pp. 3–17
Stuart Hall and P. du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (1996)
Stuart Hall, ‘Culture and Power: Stuart Hall Interviewed by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal’,
Radical Philosophy, 86 (Nov/Dec 1997), pp. 24–42
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992)
Mapping the Visual Field 721

Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009)

W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (1994)
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen (1991)
Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994)
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994)
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (1999)

Gendered Visual Experience

Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1989, 1994)
Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987)
Susan Bordo, ‘Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender-scepticism’, in L. Nicholson, ed., Femi-
nism/Postmodernism (1990), pp. 133–56
Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000), Part 6, ‘Psychoanalysis and
Feminism’
Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis,
Barbara Creed (2006)
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (1987)
Joanna Frueh et al. eds., New Feminist Criticism (1993)
R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (1993)
Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830–1908 (1990)
Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992)
Lisa Tickner, Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffragette Campaign 1907–14 (1988)
Linda Williams, Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (1989)
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (1999)

Gay Culture/Queer Visualities

For a useful collection on feminism and film see Ann E. Kaplan, ed., Feminism and Film
(2000). For a reader in ‘queer visuality’ see Michele Aaron, ed., New Queer Cinema: A
Critical Reader (2004). Other texts include:
Teresa Brennan and M. Jay, eds., Vision in Context (1996)
Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (1987)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993)
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)
Judith Butler and J. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (1992)
Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (1994)
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics (1999)
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (2002)
N. Katherina Hayles, ‘Computing the Human’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 22(1), 2005,
pp. 131–51
Luce Iragaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985)
722 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003)
Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (1994)
Myra Macdonald, Exploring Media Discourse (2003)
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (1988)
Griselda Pollock, Avante-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art Theory
(1993)
Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (1999)
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986)
Steven Seidman, ‘Posrtmodern Social Theory as Narrative with a Moral Intent’, in S. Seidman
and D. G. Wagner, eds., Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory
(1998), pp. 47–81
Steven Seidman, ed., Queer Theory/Sociology (1996)

(Re)envisioning the Body: Embodiment, the Gaze, Visual Pleasure and Identity
Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon, eds., The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture
since the Renaissance (1993)
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (1993)
Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (2003)
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Conscious-
ness (1999)
Elizabeth A. Grosz, Sexual Subversion: Three French Feminists (1989)
Elizabeth.A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994)
Elizabeth A. Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (1995a)
Elizabeth A. Grosz, ‘Women, Chora, Dwelling’, in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, eds.,
Postmodern Cities and Spaces (1995b), pp. 47–58
Elizabeth A. Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, eds., Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism
(1995)
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992)
bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995)
bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (1996)
Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1995)
Drew Leder, The Absent Body (1990)
Susie Orbach, Bodies (2009)
Ted Polemus, Social Aspects of the Human Body (1978)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (1985)
Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1996a)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (2007)
Francisco Varela et al. The Embodied Mind (1991)

Pornography
Drucilla Cornell, ed. Feminism and Pornography (2000)
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981)
Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Margins of Modernity (1993)
Mapping the Visual Field 723

Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987)

Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. The Visual Culture Reader (1998), Part 6, ‘Pornography’
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (1999)
Linda Williams, Screening Sex (2008)

Prosthetic Identities
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (1988)
Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993)
Lisa Cartwright, ‘Gender Artifacts: Technologies of Bodily Display in Medical Culture’, in Lynne
Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds., Visual Display (1995), pp. 218–36
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations v. 6 (Zone 6) (1994)
Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998)
Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (1998)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (1995)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (2007)
Stephen Wilson, Information Arts (2002), section 2.5, ‘Body and Medicine’, pp. 148–200

Images of Class and Class Difference in the Organization of Visual Experience

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Cultural Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984)
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990)
David Harvey, Consciousness and Urban Experience (1985)
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (2006)
Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (1999)
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989)

Cyborg Culture and Biopolitics

Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1996)
Timothy Druckery and Peter Weibel, eds. Electronic Culture: History, Theory and Practice (2001)
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991a),
pp. 149–81
Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege
of Partial Perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991b),
pp. 183–201
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999)
Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (2002)
Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer (2005)
Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, ed. Technoculture (1991)
Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997)
Niklas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (2006)
Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)
Stephen Wilson, Information Arts (2002)
724 Developments in the Field of Visual Culture

Visual Pedagogy
Visual literacy—education in the competences involved in understanding visual ­culture—is
essential to training courses concerned with the role of images and visual experience in
contemporary culture. The bibliography in this area is now quite extensive. Among the
most accessible texts are:
Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (2001)
Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trisha Cashen and Hazel Gardiner, eds., Digital Art History (2005)
Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trisha Cashen and Hazel Gardiner, eds., Digital Visual Culture: Theory
and Practice (2009)
Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (2009)
Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds., The Object Reader (2009)
James Elkins, How To Use Your Eyes (2000)
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images (2006)
Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials
(2001)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1996a)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (1996b)
Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (2005).

Also:
Mieke Bal and Inge Boer, Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (1994)
Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (2004)
Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor, eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics (2009), Part III,
‘Aesthetics in Artistic and Curatorial Practice’
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture,
Vol. 1(2), 2002, pp. 165–81
W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (2006)
Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science, Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual
Education (1994)
Stephen Wilson, Information Arts (2002)
Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (1984)

(Re)envisioning the Public Sphere

For orientation and general background see back-issues of Culture Machine: Generating
Research in Culture and Theory (http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm).
Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (1996)
Richard Butsch, ed., Media and Public Spheres (2007)
Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (1993)
Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, eds., After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public
Sphere (2004)
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (1992)
Jim McGuigan, ‘The Cultural Public Sphere’, ch. 1, Cultural Analysis (2009)
Mapping the Visual Field 725

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986)

Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science, Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual
Education (1994)

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 name index

Aaron, Michael, 721 Bainbridge, Simon, xv, 160–1

Adler, Kathleen, 722 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14, 28, 352, 355
Adorno, Theodor W., 23, 24, 155, 159, 167, Bal, Mieke, 79, 284, 317, 490, 535, 542–4,
202, 306, 680, 686, 696, 698, 699, 705 547–8, 550–1, 696, 704, 707, 714, 724
Agamben, Giorgio, 43, 295 Balsamo, Anne, 723
Agger, Ben, 686 Banks, Marcus, 707
Alberti, Leon Battista, 348, 484, 618, 688 Banksy, 235, 239, 251
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 700 Barnard, Malcolm, xv–xvi, 35, 40–1, 42, 76,
Alhazen (Ibn al-Haitham), 688 389, 709, 710
Alpers, Svetlana, 10, 63, 105, 694 Barrett, Michele, 700
Alperson, Philip, 697 Barthes, Roland, 10, 23, 28, 35, 37, 41, 156,
Althusser, Louis, 70, 167, 314, 683 170, 173, 176, 312, 326, 392, 393, 394,
Anderson, Benedict, 469 399, 416, 428, 446, 448, 449, 486, 523,
Anderson, Helen, xv, 539, 607, 614 683, 684, 708, 711, 715
Andrew, Dudley, 490 Bataille, Georges, 351, 681
Appadurai, Arjun, 420, 429, 543, 548, 712 Battersby, Christine, 298, 721
Argenti, Nicholas, 621, 622 Baudelaire, Charles, 17, 407
Aristotle, 24, 560, 608, 620, 688 Baudrillard, Jean, 60, 116, 250–1, 295, 406,
Arnheim, Rudolph, 694 417, 517, 519, 526, 687, 688, 723
Arnold, Matthew, 167 Bauman, Zygmunt, 4, 377, 402, 472, 522,
Atherton, Margaret, 106 712, 718
Augé, Marx, 710, 712, 713 Baxandall, Michael, 10, 22, 608, 692, 694
Austin, J.L., 566 Bazin, André, 399, 448, 486
Awan, Fatimah, xv, 536, 538, 589, 602 Beardsley, Monroe, 695
Beck, Ulrich, 377, 397, 472, 688
Babbage, Charles, 17, 82 Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth, 397, 472
Bacon, Roger, 688 Becker, Howard, 549, 707, 711
Badiou, Alain, 43, 216n13 Beer, David, 575, 577
766 name index

Beiser, Frederick, 29 Braidotti, Rosi, 43, 720

Bell, Quentin, 409 Braque, Georges, 158–9, 166, 209–11, 288,
Bellour, Raymond, 313 367, 373, 378–9, 633
Belting, Hans, 683 Braudel, Fernand, 390, 406, 409, 411
Benedikt, Michael, 716 Brennan, Teresa, 721
Benhabib, Seyla, 724 Breton, André, 344
Benjamin, Andrew, 696, 698 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 348, 688
Benjamin, Walter, 14, 18–19, 23, 24, 28, 31, Bryson, Norman, 10, 14, 72, 78, 284, 317,
39, 44–5n9, 61, 109, 176–7, 185–6, 281, 509, 510, 542, 544, 552, 609, 696, 697,
290, 292, 296, 395, 458, 520, 559, 680, 698, 724
686, 691, 700, 705 Buber, Martin, 285
Bennett, Tony, 700, 701, 710 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 63, 105–6
Bentkowska-Kafel, Anna, 724 Buck-Morss, Susan, 23, 44n9, 686, 703
Berenson, Bernard, 699 Bukatman, Scott, 723
Berg, Kajsa, xvi, 539–40, 607, 618 Bürger, Peter, 695, 698
Berger, John, 8, 10, 19, 448, 683, 718 Burgin, Victor, 168, 179, 393, 446, 486,
Berger, Martin, A., 720 696, 697, 709, 711, 714, 717
Bergson, Henri, 107 Burke, Edmund, 222, 282, 297
Berkeley, George, 106, 690 Burke, Peter, 687, 701, 707, 724
Berman, Marshall, 377 Burkhardt, Jacob, 705
Bernal, Martin, 689 Burrows, Roger, xvi, 528, 537, 572, 573,
Berners-Lee, Tim, 561 575, 577, 583–5, 716
Bernstein, Jay M., 686, 689, 695 Butler, Judith, 43, 549, 700, 721
Bernstein, Richard J., 680 Butsch, Richard, 724
Bhabha, Homi K., 184, 703, 720
Blanchot, Maurice, 342, 684 Cadava, Eduardo, 521
Bloch, Ernst, 24, 686, 691, 705 Calhoun, Craig, 719, 721, 724
Bloom, Lisa, 720 Campbell, Colin, 416
Blum, Alan, 14 Candlin, Fiona, 724
Blum, L. A., 700 Caravaggio, 620–1
Böcklin, Arnold, 298 Carlyle, Thomas, 407
Bocock, Robert, 712 Caron, Amy, 540, 621
Boehm, Gottfried, 44n8, 216n13 Cartwright, Lisa, xvi–xvii, 10, 15, 16, 80,
Bois, Yve-Alain, 202, 217n23, 695, 699, 729 323, 361, 524, 544, 702, 703, 710, 715,
Bolla, Peter de, 64, 116, 714 723
Bolter, Jay David, 474, 716 Casey, Edward, S., 710
Bordo, Susan, 721, 722 Cassat, Mary, 314, 316
Bordwell, David, 481, 702 Cassirer, Ernst, 706
Borges, Jorge Luis, 108 Castells, Manuel, 43n1, 517, 688, 715, 716
Bourdieu, Pierre, 164, 174, 203, 284, 365, Castoriadis, Cornelius, 43, 713
372, 517, 520, 548, 584, 709, 711, 718, Cavallo, Guglielmo, 651
723 Cavell, Stanley, 34, 701, 724
Bourriaud, Nicholas, 156, 179–80 Caygill, Howard, 713
Bowie, Andrew, 699 Cazeaux, Clive, 695, 696, 698, 721
Boyne, Roy, xvi, 281–3, 290, 688 Certeau, Michel de, 23, 163, 236, 238, 240,
Braider, Christopher, 106–7 243, 248–9, 315, 548
name index 767

Cézanne, Paul, 23, 65, 201, 382n16 Darwin, Charles, 17–18

Chaney, David, 520, 713 Daston, Lorrain, 708
Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 619 Davey, Nicholas, xvii, 66–7
Chaplin, Elizabeth, 9, 707 da Vinci, Leonardo, 608, 618, 688
Charney, Leo, 482 Davis, Mike, 715, 716, 723
Chartier, Roger, 651, 718 Davis, Whitney, 96–7
Cheetham, Mark, 696 Deacon, Richard, 156, 170
Chekhov, Anton, 139 Debord, Guy, 31, 60, 115, 240–1, 281, 292,
Clark, Kenneth, 80, 699, 700 293, 301, 342, 347, 520, 688, 696
Clark, Simon, 689 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 43n1, 79–80, 106, 302,
Clark, T. J., 159, 206, 211–12, 288, 352, 684, 687, 688
370–1, 697 Derrida, Jacques, 77, 170, 173, 186, 192,
Classen, Constance, 11, 690, 704 536, 560, 565–6, 680, 684, 687, 690
Clifford, James, 629–30, 631, 704 Descartes, René, 23, 24, 63, 105–6, 347,
Cocteau, Jean, 136–7 352, 688
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 299 Dessoir, Max, 706
Collingwood, R. G., 141, 695, 733 Dewey, John, 401, 504, 511, 514, 680,
Comolli, Jean-Luis, 448 683, 695
Connerton, Paul, 714 Dickie, George, 2, 45n10, 698, 699, 736
Connor, Stephen, 696, 722 Dijk, José van, 451–2
Cooke, Lynne, 23 Dikovitskaya, Margaret, xvii, 59–60, 72,
Cornell, Drucilla, 722 75–6, 92, 134–5, 315, 323
Corrigan, Philip, 712 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 103, 112n2, 680, 706,
Coser, Lewis, 706 736
Craig-Martin, Michael, 431–3 Dix, Otto, 138
Crane, Diana, 413 Dosse, François, 683
Crary, Jonathan, 15, 106, 693, 703, 711, Douglas, Mary, 367, 385
716, 723 Dreyfus, Hubert, 680, 684, 736
Crimp, Douglas, 77 Drucker, Joanna, 697
Critchley, Simon, 686 Druckery, Timothy, 719, 723
Croce, Benedetto, 215n4, 706 Dryden, John, 297
Crossley, Nick, 724 Duchamp, Marcel, 239, 295
Crowther, Paul, 685, 698, 699 Dudley, Andrew, 702
Cubit, Sean, 491 Dufrenne, Mikel, 679
Currie, Gregory, 716 Dumas, Alexander, 371
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 706 Dupré, Louis, 693
Cytowic, Richard, 26 During, Simon, 700
Duro, Paul, 72
Dali, Salvador, 344 Duttlinger, Carolin, 23
Damar, Bruce, 717 Dworkin, Andrea, 722
Damasio, Antonio, 722 Dyer, Richard, 702, 703
Damisch, Hubert, 692
Dandeker, Christopher, 717 Eagleton, Terry, 511, 685, 686, 695
Dant, Tim, xvii, 391, 712, 713 Eco, Umberto, 683, 684, 699
Danto, Arthur, 14, 43n1, 45n10, 202, 699 Edgerton, Samuel, Y., 718
Darley, Andrew, 717 Edwards, Steve, 694, 696, 709, 711
768 name index

Eisenstein, Elizabeth E., 697 Gilloch, Graham, 713

Elbs, Oliver, 609, 610 Gilpin, William, 222–5
Elgar, Edward, 25 Gilroy, Paul, 687, 703, 720
Elias, Norbert, 693, 714, 718 Gitelman, Lisa, 7, 717
Elkins, James, 696, 709, 724 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 139, 351, 353,
Emin, Tracy, 41 355–6
Emmison, Michael, 707 Goffman, Erving, 35, 712
Ewan, Stuart, 712 Goldberg, Ken, 718
Goldstein, Kurt, 690
Fabian, Johannes, 632, 705, 720 Gombrich, Ernst H., 24, 608, 690, 694, 706
Farago, Claire, 700, 710 Goodman, Nelson, 683
Featherstone, Mike, 4, 518, 519, 520, 522, Goody, Jack, 697
524, 712, 715, 716, 719 Gormley, Antony, 304
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 293 Gorton, Kristyn, xviii, 395, 464
Fiske, John, 703, 709, 710, 720 Goya, Francisco, 621
Flusser, Vilém, 7, 281, 284–6, 326–40, 709, Grassi, Ernesto, 693, 706
711, 713 Green, Christopher, 694
Foster, Hal, 14, 92, 102, 688, 696 Greenaway, Peter, 108, 399, 488, 489
Foucault, Michel, 16, 17–18, 40, 42, 79, Greenberg, Clement, 167, 177, 178–80
108, 111, 290, 326, 353, 418, 548, 554, Gregory, David, 19
680, 684, 692, 702, 710, 717, 718 Gregory, Richard L., 43n1, 690
Frank, Robert, 156, 172 Griffith, D. W., 634
Franklin, Stan, 717 Griffiths, Alison, 705
Frazer, J. G., 628 Grimshaw, Anna, 540, 629, 631–2, 632–42
Freedberg, David, 609, 619, 620 Grossberg, Lawrence, 683, 685, 700
Freud, Sigmund, 568, 609, 633 Grosz, Elizabeth, A., 709, 715, 722
Friedberg, Anne, 284, 321, 398, 483, 702, 712 Grusin, Richard, 474, 480, 716
Frow, John, 703 Guattari, Felix, 684, 687, 688
Fuss, Diana, 719 Guins, Raiford, 724
Gutting, Gary, 42, 692
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 29, 45n11, 67, 132,
139–40, 143–4, 145, 146, 680–1 Habermas, Jürgen, 98n7, 142, 680, 724
Gardiner, Michael E., xvii, 64–5 Haddon, A. C., 628, 629
Garfinkel, Harold, 14, 384n32 Halbwachs, Maurice, 715
Gattegno, Caleb, 69 Hale, John, 693
Gauntlett, David, xvii–xviii, 536, 538, 589, Hall, Stuart, 10, 33, 42, 174, 393, 446, 517,
596, 603, 707 545, 596, 701, 720
Gay, Peter, 706, 718 Hand, Martin, xviii, 401, 516, 523, 713,
Geertz, Clifford, 46n13, 598, 629, 705 719
Gell, Alfred, 543 Hansen, Miriam, 296–7, 483
Gere, Charlie, xviii, 536, 559, 716, 717, 719 Haraway, Donna, 19, 76, 284, 322, 723
Gernsheim, Helmut, 711 Harper, Douglas, 594, 708
Gibson, James J., 690 Harrington, Austin, 148
Gibson, William, 566 Harris, John, 694
Giddens, Anthony, 4, 377–8, 397, 419, 472, Hartley, John, 683, 709
522, 715 Harvey, David, 526, 713, 715, 723
name index 769

Hauser, Arnold, 694, 705 Irvine, Martin, xix, 161–3, 235

Havelock, Eric, 698 Isaacs, Bruce, 489, 492
Hayles, Katherine, N., 575, 721, 723 Iversen, Margaret, 698
Hebdige, Dick, 174, 390–1, 427, 710
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24, 29, James, Henry, 505
190, 202, 293, 350, 364, 568, 685, 705 James, William, 391, 392, 427, 435–6, 505
Heidegger, Martin, 14, 23–4, 29, 62–3, Jameson, Fredric, 61, 93–4, 96–7, 115, 165,
103–8, 137–8, 143–4, 145, 146, 202, 171, 342, 519, 526, 582, 686, 688, 715
286, 343, 349, 440, 505, 560, 678–9, Jaspers, Karl, 103, 440
680–1, 691, 693, 703 Jay, Martin, xix, 8, 9, 19, 62–4, 80–1, 83,
Heller, Agnes, 128 102–14, 116, 127, 343, 344, 503,
Helmholz, Hermann von, 14, 690 504, 508, 633, 686, 689, 691–2,
Henry, Michel, 679 693, 703, 717
Heywood, Ian, xviii, 7, 23, 35, 43n1, 134–5, Jencks, Chris, 9, 43n1
158–60, 287–9, 698 Jenkins, Henry, 484, 486
Hirsch, Fred, 520 Jewitt, Carey, 707
Hirsch, Marian, 450 Jhally, Sut, 403
Hirst, Damien, 41 Johnson, Mark, 690, 699, 700
Hirstein, William, 608–9 Johnson, Steven, A., 716
Hjelmslev, Louis, 428 John the Baptist, 66–7, 136–40
Hobsbawm, Eric, 715 Jones, Amelia, 35, 310, 722, 723
Hockney, David, 693 Jones, Steve, 716
Hodge, Robert, 428 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 714
Hoffmansthall, Hugo von, 367 Joyce, James, 111, 295
Hoggart, Richard, 364 Judd, Don, 168–9
Holland, Patricia, 450
Hollander, Anne, 390, 411–12 Kahlo, Frieda, 320
Holly, Michael Ann, 71–2, 317 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 95, 142, 143–4,
Honneth, Alex, 686 149–50, 282, 297, 347, 568, 689, 698
Hooke, Robert, 14 Kaplan, E. Anne, 313, 721
hooks, bell, 720, 722 Keats, John, 161, 232–3, 299
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 27, 618 Kellner, Douglas, 302, 686
Horkheimer, Max, 159, 167 Kelly, Mary, 283, 314, 321, 720
Howes, David, xviii–xix, 6, 11, 26, 536, 540, Kelly, Michael, 695
628, 690, 705 Kemp, Martin, 690–1, 692
Hubel, David, 616 Kendrick, Walter, 723
Hume, David, 690 Kermode, Frank, 202
Hunt, Lynn, 722 Kern, Stephen, 22, 693, 715
Husserl, Edmund, 14, 23–4, 29, 285, 286, Kiefer, Anselm, 305
331, 391, 393, 427, 437–8, 678–9, 680, Kittler, Friedrich A., 7, 10, 14, 719
690, 691 Kivy, Peter, 699
Huyssen, Andreas, 93 Klages, Ludwig, 297
Klein, Naomi, 710
Ihde, Don, 391, 393, 427, 440, 693, 716 Klein, Stephen, 403
Ingold, Tim, 429, 442, 504–5 Koenig, René, 408
Iragaray, Luce, 687, 721 Koffka, Karl, 690
770 name index

Kofman, Sarah, 681, 692 Lowenthal, David, 715

Köhler, Wolfgang, 430–1, 690 Lucas, George, 484
Kollwitz, Kathy, 320 Luhmann, Niklas, 708
Konorsky, Jerzy, 615–16 Lukács, Georg, 686
Koons, Jeff, 156, 170, 175–6 Lurie, Alison, 415–16
Kostler, Arthur, 503 Lury, Celia, 403, 517, 519, 521, 524–5, 526,
Kracauer, Siegfried, 686, 705 528, 712, 713, 723
Krauss, Rosalind, 109, 490, 697, 711, 721 Lynch, David, 399, 488
Kress, Gunther, 683, 708, 724 Lyon, David, 717
Kristeller, Paul O., 706 Lyotard, Jean-François, 43n1, 61, 94–5, 684,
Kristeva, Julia, 43, 417, 682, 747 687, 688
Kruger, Barbara, 168, 179, 244, 245,
246, 284 MacCannell, Dean, 714
Kuhn, Annette, 450, 702, 722 McCarthy, Anna, 466, 549
Kuhn, Thomas S., 69, 691 MacDougall, David, 637–8
MacDougall, Judith, 637–8
Lacan, Jacques, 28, 192, 315, 449, 683, 684, MacDougall, William, 634–7
717 McGuigan, Jim, 701, 724
Landa, Manuel de, 43n1, 719 Machery, Pierre, 176–7
Landow, George P., 716 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 139
Lash, Scott, 521, 525, 526, 572, 573, 688, McLuhan, Marshall, 7, 40, 44n3, 284, 326,
698, 704, 712, 713, 718, 719 330, 331, 337, 691
Latour, Bruno, 64, 116–17, 440, 574, 688, McNeill, William, 24, 693
702, 707, 708 MacPhee, Graham, 713
Lauretis, Teresa de, 721 McRobbie, Angela, 721
Leavis, F. R., 33 Magritte, René, 344
Leder, Drew, 722 Mahler, Gustav, 25
Le Doeuff, Michéle, 43, 682 Maine de Biran, Marie-Francois-Pierre, 560,
Leeuwen, Theo van, 707, 708, 712, 724 690
Lefebvre, Henri, 19, 236, 241, 249, 281, Malinowski, Bronislaw, 407, 629, 644n4
286, 295, 342, 343–58, 686 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 372
Leiss, William, 403, 524 Malpas, Jeff, 22
Leroi-Gourhan, André, 560 Mandelstam, Osip, 16
Lessig, Lawrence, 716 Manet, Edouard, 166
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 354, 683, 684 Manguel, Alberto, 18, 43n1, 710
Levin, David Michael, 9, 342, 350, 692, 704 Manning, Erin, 720
Levinas, Emmanuel, 679, 691 Manovich, Lev, 7, 44n1, 399, 447, 487–8,
Levinson, Jerrold, 700 489–90, 491, 526, 716
Lindbergh, David, 691 Marcus, George E., 704
Lister, Martin, 711, 717 Marcuse, Herbert, 129, 167, 686
Locke, John, 690 Margolis, Joseph, 680, 698, 699
Longhurst, Brian, 701 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso, 281, 291
Longo, Robert, 156, 170, 171 Marks, Laura, 715, 716
Loos, Adolph, 413 Marriner, Robin, xix, 155
Lorraine, Claude, 160 Martin, Louis, 683
Lowe, Donald M., 9, 693, 704 Marx, Karl, 167–8, 293, 350, 359, 377, 680
name index 771

Massey, Doreen, 710 Neidich, Warren, 609, 610, 711

Massumi, Brian, 484 Nelson, Benjamin, 706
Matisse, Henri, 375 Newton, Isaac, 338, 688, 689
Maynard, Margaret, 391, 419, 421 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 122–3, 134, 137,
Maynard, Patrick, 711 342, 343, 349–50, 351, 369, 680, 705
Melville, Stephen, 9, 71–2, 696, 699 Nochlin, Linda, 283, 315–16, 318, 698,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15, 23, 24, 25–6, 718, 720
64–5, 90–1, 96–7, 115–29, 202, 286, Noë, Alva, 690
356–7, 391, 392, 427, 434–5, 435–6, Nussbaum, Martha, 700, 725
440–1, 548, 564, 678–80, 686, 690, 691 Nye, David, 282, 299–300
Merton, Robert K., 706
Metz, Christian, 102–3, 110–11, 173, 313, Ong, Walter J., 698
448, 691, 702 Onians, John, xix–xx, 15, 17, 34, 73–4, 539,
Meyrowitz, Joseph, 717 607, 609, 617, 694
Michael, Mike, 717 Opie, Catherine, 284
Michelangelo Buonarotti, 613 Orbach, Susie, 722
Miller, Daniel, 713 Osborne, Peter, 697, 714
Miller, Toby, 397, 546 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 620
Mills, Charles Wright, 579
Milton, John, 297 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 355, 504–5, 709
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 10, 34–5, 41–2, Panofsky, Erwin, 24, 347, 692, 694, 706
46–7n14, 60, 76, 78–9, 92, 132, 135, Parks, Lisa, 464–5
146–7, 323, 701, 715, 723 Penley, Constance, 723
Misch, Georg, 706 Phillips, Patricia, 545
Mitchell, W.J.T., 6, 10, 15–16, 25, 37, 60, Philo, Greg, 465
69, 74–5, 92, 447, 609, 683, 704, 711, Picasso, Pablo, 41, 136–7, 158–9, 166, 177,
716, 720, 724 189, 190, 209–11, 243, 246, 288, 367,
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 706 368–70, 378–81, 633
Mondzain, Marie-Jose, 692 Pinder, Wilhelm, 694
Monroe, Marilyn, 172 Pink, Sarah, 540, 590, 707, 708
Moore, Kathryn, xix, 400, 499, 514 Pippin, Richard, 4, 202
Morgan, David, 718 Plant, Sadie, 688, 717, 723
Morisot, Berthe, 314, 316 Plato, 17, 23, 24, 27, 28, 62, 104, 188, 190,
Morris, William, 33 327, 565, 688
Moxey, Keith, 72, 158, 205–6, 214, 284, Poggi, Christine, 159, 206, 208, 209, 210,
707 214, 288, 292, 368–9, 371–3
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139 Pointon, Marcia, 718, 721
Mulvey, Laura, 35, 312–13, 318, 399, 448, Polhemus, Ted, 391, 408, 421, 427, 722
471, 481–2, 486, 702 Polke, Sigmar, 155
Mumford, Lewis, 691 Pollock, Griselda, 19, 284, 316, 543, 546,
Myers, Charles, 634 697, 722
Pollock, Jackson, 246
Nakahara, Lisa, 320 Poster, Mark, 519, 526, 686, 703, 716
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 190, 536, 559, 562–4, Potter, Jonathan, 708
565–70, 684 Potter, Sally, 108, 418
Neale, Stephen, 716 Pound, Ezra, 337
772 name index

Preziosi, Donald, xx, 97, 156–7, 694, 710 134–5, 541, 648, 649, 661, 673, 674,
Prosser, Jon, 590 689, 693, 704, 716, 719
Proust, Marcel, 354 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 119, 286, 430, 679,
Putnam, Hilary, 502, 508 686, 691
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 169, 428, 682–3,
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 634 684
Ramachandran, V. S., 608–9, 621 Savage, Mike, 537, 572, 573, 578–80
Rancière, Jacques, 4, 61–2, 95–6, 236, Scarry, Elaine, 699, 700, 722
689, 718 Schama, Simon, 714
Rauschenberg, Robert, 170, 172, 244, 246 Schank, Roger S., 715
Readings, Bill, 9, 34, 287, 364–5, 696 Schapiro, Meyer, 706
Reckwitz, Andreas, 548 Scheler, Max, 691
Relph, Edward, 22 Schelling, F.W.J., 568
Rheingold, Howard, 716 Schiller, Dan, 710, 716, 717
Richter, Gerhard, 156, 158, 203–6 Schiller, Friedrich, 282, 298, 689
Ricoeur, Paul, 67, 680 Schiller, Herbert, 396, 468
Riegl, Alois, 694, 705 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 22, 353, 704
Rivers, W.H.R., 540, 628, 629, 630–1, Schlesinger, Philip, 701, 709, 710
632–4 Schostakovich, Dmitri, 25
Robbins, Kevin, 717 Schroeder, Jonathan, 712, 717
Roberts, John, 711 Schutz, Alfred, 391, 392, 427, 436–7, 438,
Roche, Maurice, 710 679
Rodowick, David N., 79, 83, 398–9, 481, 490 Schwartz, Frederic J., 694
Rogoff, Irit, 19, 33, 41, 77–8, 547 Schwartz, Vanessa, 482–3
Rojek, Chris, 703, 713 Scruton, Roger, 699
Rombes, Nicholas, 492 Sebald, W. G., 23, 43n1
Rorty, Richard, 24, 105, 401, 508, 680, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 322
691, 719 Sedlmayr, Hans, 694
Rosa, Salvator, 160 Seidman, Steven, 722
Rose, Gillian, xx, 23, 535, 536, 542, 551, Sennett, Richard, 713
707, 724 Serra, Richard, 303
Rose, Jacqueline, 105–6, 108, 283, 314–15, Serres, Michel, 548, 690, 758
682, 720, 722 Seurat, Georges, 166
Rose, Niklas, 723 Shakespeare, William, 139, 412
Ross, Andrew, 723 Shapiro, Gary, 42, 692
Roth, Nancy, xx, 284–6 Sheringham, Michael, 717
Rothko, Mark, 610 Sherman, Cindy, 284
Ruby, Jay, 705 Shields, Rob, 713
Ruskin, John, 33, 167 Shohat, Ella, 25, 30
Rynck, Patrick de, 694 Shove, Elizabeth, 713
Shusterman, Richard, 685
Said, Edward, 721 Sibley, Frank, 699
Saito, Yuriko, 32, 696, 697 Silverman, Kaja, 448–9, 682, 684, 721
Salle, David, 155 Silverstone, Roger, 717
Sandywell, Barry, xx–xxi, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, Simmel, Georg, 379, 389, 390, 409, 705
23, 24, 31, 35, 40, 45–6n11, 46n13, Simonides, 27
name index 773

Simson, Otto Georg von, 692 Thompson, E. P., 364

Slater, Don, 517, 522 Thompson, Evan, 690
Smith, Adam, 405–6 Tilley, Charles, 22
Smith, Dorothy, 722 Tomas, David, 716, 717
Smith, Marquand, 701 Toulmin, Stephen, 693
Smith, Shawn Michelle, 723 Trachtenberg, Alan, 693, 711, 715
Sobchack, Vivian, 321–2, 394, 448, 723 Tudor, Andy, 683, 701
Socrates, 327, 620 Tufte, Edward R., 708
Soja, Edward J., 12, 19, 713, 715, 723 Turkle, Sherry, 717
Solso, Robert L., 690 Turner, Graeme, 701, 703
Sontag, Susan, 8, 10, 18, 23, 28, 98n3, 393, Turner, J.M.W., 145
395, 448, 455, 520, 700, 709, 711 Twombly, Cy, 244, 246
Sorensen, Roy, 690 Tylor, E. B., 628
Soussloff, Catherine M., xxi, 60–2, 696
Spence, Jo, 450, 713 Uprichard, Emma, 583–4
Spencer, Herbert, 635–7 Urry, John, 160, 521, 526, 713, 714, 718
Spicer, Andrew, xxi, 398, 480, 482
Spiller, Neil, 709 Varela, Francisco J., 44n1, 722
Spivak, Gayatri C., 77, 316, 687 Vasari, Giorgio, 688, 689
Stacey, Jackie, 703 Vattimo, Gianni, 44n1, 685
Stafford, Barbara Maria, 10, 24, 31, 43n1, Veblen, Thorstein, 389, 390, 408–9, 517, 518
214, 505, 609, 690, 702, 703, 714, 722, Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 391, 393, 427, 440
723, 724, 725 Vertov, Dziga, 634
Stallybrass, Peter, 390, 412 Virilio, Paul, 9, 17, 44n1, 282, 684, 685,
Stam, Robert, 25, 30, 702 719
Steiner, Wendy, 699 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 619
Stephens, Mitchell, 716 Vischer, Robert, 608, 619, 690
Stephenson, Robert Louis, 505 Vogel, Steven, 714
Stevenson, Nick, 701
Stewart, Garrett, 491 Walsh, Kevin, 715
Stiegler, Bernard, 560 Warburg, Aby, 694, 706
Storey, John, 702 Warhol, Andy, 156, 171–2
Strauss, Leo, 109 Wasko, Janet, 719
Sturken, Marita, 16, 323, 361, 524, 544, Weber, Max, 377, 389, 578
710 Weber, Samuel, 191, 686
Sudjik, Deyan, 140–1 Webster, Andrew, 702, 703
Sue, Eugène, 371 Weiss, Gail, 690
Sullivan, Graeme, 724 Wellmer, Albrecht, 686
Summers, Fiona, xxi, 393, 445 Wells, H. G., 407
Sweetman, Paul, 418, 590 Wells, Liz, 711
Welsch, Wolfgang, 696
Tagg, John, 393, 446, 693, 711 White, Hayden, 706
Tarantino, Quentin, 492 Wiesel, Torsten, 616
Taylor, Charles, 44n1, 680, 693, 704 Wigley, Mark, 709
Terranova, Tiziana, 7 Wilder, Keith, 714
Tester, Keith, 715 Williams, Brandon, 600, 603
774 name index

Williams, Linda, 721, 723 Woods, Paul, 694

Williams, Raymond, 68, 76, 364, 396, Wordsworth, William, 160, 220, 299
469–70, 691 Worringer, Wilhelm, 705
Williams, Rosalind, 693 Wundt, Wilhelm, 690
Williamson, Judith, 35, 712
Willis, Holly, 488 Xenophon, 618, 620
Wilson, Stephen, 47n17, 723, 724
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 608, 689 Yoshida, Komiko, 284, 321
Wind, Edgar, 694
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23–4, 106, 609, 680 Zahavi, Dan, 680, 691
Wolff, Janet, 77, 284, 317, 700 Zee, Anthony, 700
Wölfflin, Heinrich, 24, 608, 619, 694, 706 Zeki, Semir, 608, 616, 690
Wollen, Peter, 23, 313, 314, 697 Zielinski, Siegfried, 7, 481, 717
Wollheim, Richard, 25, 698, 724 Žižek, Slavoj, 10, 687, 688, 720
Wood, Christopher S., 694 Znaniecki, Florian, 706
Woodiwiss, Anthony, 708 Zukin, Sharon, 715
Woods, Lebbeus, 719 Zumthor, Peter, 709
 Subject Index

Bold page references indicate chapter-length treatment of the topic.

absence, 73, 76, 83, 370, 545 advertising, 37–8, 251–2, 403–4, 517–18,
dialectic of, 296, 354 712
material objects, 103, 111, 238, 430 see also consumerism/consumer culture
signifiers of, 246 aesthesis/aisthesis, 32, 343, 349
of women, 283–4, 314 aestheticization, 9, 403
absolute, 74, 127 of everyday life, 1, 403–4
artist, 96 of politics, 403
idea of art, 97 aesthetic(s), 695–700
knowledge, 510 classical, 42, 44n6
relativism, 116 commodification, 669
space, 286, 344–5, 346 contestation, 670
spectator, 119 demystification, 203
values, 565 distanciation, 14–15, 670
abstract, 25, 115ff., 520 eighteenth-century, 689
reason, 343 of everyday life, 13, 389–90, 550
space, 286, 693 experience, 510
Abstract Expressionism, 245, 695 Greek, 618, 689
Abstract Formalism, 695 hermeneutical, 21, 66–7, 131–51
abstraction, abstract/concrete, 25–6 hybrid, 42
of modern life, 370–1 machines, 17–18
see also concrete, the see also visibility machines
act, 20–1, 544, 554, 650 material/materialist, 201–2
action, 7, 12–13, 16, 19, 20 object-centred, 201–14, 490
seeing as, 650–1 philosophical, 131–51, 610, 674–764,
action-based sociological research, 698–700
589–606 political, 718–19
776 Subject index

aesthetic(s), (continued ) sensory, 32, 214

sociological, 705–6 triumph of, 519
subject-centred, 148–50 visible, 66, 403
turn, 95–7 apperception, 426–44
Aesthetics (G.W.F. Hegel), 29, 202, 685, 689 defined, 435–7
Aesthetic Theory (Theodor W. Adorno), 696, in phenomenology, 392–3, 427, 435–7,
698, 699 436–40
affective intentionalities, 658 apprehending, 426–7
affectivity, 471–5, 657 as understanding, 427
and art, 540 see also appresentation
and emotional life, 472–3, 619–20 appresentation, 426–44
and empathy, 474–5, 539–40, 618, 619 in everyday life, 426–7
see also neural, mirroring and pre-theoretical knowledge, 437–40
and interpersonal relations, 620 in Schutz’s phenomenology, 392–3, 437–8
agency, 516, 522–3, 526–7, 541, 573, 670–3 and typifications, 437
alienation, 125–7, 147, 281–2, 293, 520 architecture, 499–515
as Bodenlos, 328–30 and art, 281
Cartesian, 147–8 and design, 499–515
cultural, 149, 294–5, 378–90 landscape, 499–515
effect, 13 theory, 400, 709–10
as loss of being in the world, 505 art
social, 293, 348–9, 449 as dialogical field, 253–6
technological, 440–1 and ideology, 656
alterity, 123–7, 671, 690 and interpretation, 656
as difference, 671, 658 and its other, 171–5
ontologies of, 123ff., 358, 655–7, and judgement, 13, 15, 66, 95, 132, 138,
679, 680 297, 367, 512
Althusserian Marxism, 314, 322 as knowledge, 671
Analytical Philosophy, 29, 678, 698 as love, 222, 304, 343, 357, 441, 489,
of art, 698 649
Angel of the North, 305 as reflection, 21
anthropology, 628–47 and science, 43n1
cultural, 73–4, 429, 540 and sense-making, 20–1
and film-making, 628–47 as social engagement, 21
reflexive, 704–5 and technics, 560, 567–8, 569
re-visualizing, 628–47 and value(s), 362–6, 671
sensualizing, 637–42 and visuality, 1–2
textualizing, 629–31 art, philosophy of, 357–8
and visual art, 704–8 art criticism, 694–5
visualizing, 631–2 artefact(s), 13–14, 16–17, 20–1, 656–7,
see also ethnography 667–8
anti-aesthetics, 696–7 cultural, 82–3, 93, 109, 174, 658–9
appearance, 14, 16, 210, 315, 507 digital, 566, 664
of being, 62 domestic, 13, 657–8
modes of, 667 everyday, 33, 207–8, 371, 657
production of, 136–7 as extensions of the self, 40–1
Subject index 777

visual, 28, 33, 36–7, 39, 73, 91, 214, 380, natural, 401–2
393, 658 see also landscape
artefactuality thesis, the, 541, 656–61 objective or subjective, 506
art history, 540, 618, 694–700 return of, 401, 699–700
and British universities, 78 and the sublime, 283, 298–9
and connoisseurship, 544–8 theories of, 699–700
and cultural studies, 3, 10, 80–2, 490 being, 20, 27, 38, 62, 64, 65, 103, 143–5,
new, 694, 696 563
traditional, 20–1, 71–3 Martin Heidegger on, 62–3, 103–4
and visual culture, 10–11, 696 modes of, 79, 104, 105, 161
art object(s), 2, 66–7, 131ff., 666–8, 689, primordial, 123–7
698–9 being-in-the-world, 65, 104–8, 120, 121–2,
art and politics, 667, 667–8, 669–70, 718 212, 321, 352, 368, 490, 505, 568,
art practice, 3, 289 652, 658, 671, 678, 680
and feminism, 319–20 bibliography of visual studies, 674–764
art theory, 695 Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, 33,
radical, 697 42, 317
see also art worlds body, corporeality, 19–20, 286–7
artwork, 22–3, 134–50, 545–6, 560, 668–9 body-subject, 286, 322
art worlds, 164, 667–8 body-without-organs, 352
see also historicity; historicity thesis, the fashioned, 417–18
attention, 435, 617 in fashion studies, 404–22
field of, 434–5 the grotesque, 352
audience/audience research, 589–606 image, 20
active, 535–6, 543 images of, 722–3
videos in, 596–8 multisensory, 157, 322, 351–7, 536, 642
aura, 295–300, 453–4 as object of vision, 449–50
in art/aesthetic objects, 281 re-envisioning, 722
death of, 282 scanners, 17, 622–3
and technical reproducibility, 296–7, see also gender; sexuality
461n12, 520–1, 527–8, 705–6 brain
autonomy, 26, 208, 370 complexity of, 607, 612–13, 622–3
aesthetic, 62, 70, 155, 167–8 dynamics, 614
challenged, 70, 168–71, 175, 483–4 functioning, 612
autopoiesis, 667–8 mapping, 622–3
avant-garde(s), 21, 156, 159, 162, 172, 177, networks, 623
200–1, 237, 244, 292, 313, 337, organization, 614–15
343, 366, 372–3, 374, 375–9, 399, plasticity, 623
484, 488–9, 694–5, 695 scanning/scanners, 539
structure, 623
baroque reason, 63, 106–8 visualizations of, 623
beauty see also neural, mirroring; neural, plasticity;
and aesthetics, 656, 699–700 neuroscience
see also aesthetic(s) branding, 401–3, 471, 524–5
discourse of, 656 see also consumerism/consumer culture
female, 298–9 British cultural theory, 317, 364–5
778 Subject index

camera, 445–63, 464–79 and politics, 235–78, 361–86, 373–6

as extension of the eye, 459–60n2 see also Cubism
lens, 634, 638 colour
Camera Lucida, 46n13 in everyday life, 430–5
camera obscura, 17–18, 106, 349, 665 in Matisse, 617–18
Camera Obscura (journal), 284, 313, 317, as non-sensory presence, 434–5
318 in painting, 617–18
camouflage, 136–40 phenomenology of, 434–5
and painted surfaces, 138–42 variation/variability, 242
capitalism commodity/commodification,
and commodification, 346–7, 401–2, see consumerism/consumer culture
516–17 commodity fetishism, 516–32, 522–3
culture of, 93–4 communications studies, 33, 285–6
as mass visual culture, 201, 202, 402 communication systems, 665–6
and modernity, 159, 362–4, 518–19 conceptual art, 695
multinational, 94, 215n6, 475–6 concrete, the, 8, 11, 14, 20–1, 25, 64–5, 67,
and nihilism, 377–81, 669, 672 95, 118, 122, 125, 203, 288, 346,
reflexive, 518, 526–9, 671 353–7, 392, 520, 526, 540, 648,
as wired capitalism, 536, 671–2, 717 651, 654, 655, 660, 668, 690
Cartesian, 30, 67, 148, 352 connoisseurship, 535, 544–8
dualism, 27, 104, 118, 502–3 consciousness
perspectivalism, 62, 105–6 fragmenting, 503–5
thought, 104–8 historical, 326
Cartesianism, 27–8, 116ff., 352–7 of images, 648ff.
celebrity culture, 703 materialized, 650
certainty of perception, 435 visual consciousness, 326–41
Chora (in Plato), 565–6 constitution, 572–3, 654
cinema consumerism/consumer culture, 401–2,
digitalization of, 399 516–32
end of, 491–2 active, 521–2
and metacinema, 489–90 and advertising, 401, 521–5, 712
as spectacle, 281–2 and capitalism, 517–18
technologies, 15, 398–9 and commodification, 517–21
see also film; film theory, film studies and commodities, 518–20
cities consuming images, 60, 517–18, 712
and aesthetic culture, 235–78 and design, 401
global, 162, 235, 241–2, 253–4 global, 16, 712–13
phenomenology of, 253–4 consumption, 404–24, 417, 516–21
re-writing, 240–3, 248–9 conspicuous, 409, 518
and urban street art, 161–3, 235–38, visual, 516–17
235–78 see also consumerism/consumer culture
cityscapes, 713 context(s), 535–6
and social theory, 713–14 architectural, 499–515
and visual media, 713–15 biographical, 442
collage, 361–86 cultural, 281, 483–4, 541, 649
and images of modernity, 254–6 geographical, 549
Subject index 779

ideological, 311 as embodied meaning, 667

material, 311, 368–70, 400, 426–7 everyday, 666–7
media, 337–40 low and high, 164–83
physical/environmental, 239–41, 400 as memory, 651–2, 714–15
place, 546–8, 549 phenomenology of, 667–8
political, 281–2, 311, 541 in ruins, 363–6
social, 281, 311–12, 377–9 as way of life, 68, 364
see also practice(s) culture industry/cultural industries, 4, 6,
craft, 560–1, 665 84n2
as handiwork, 560 global, 670–3
see also technê; touching (tactility) cultures of visibility, 22–3
crisis of art/aesthetics, 202–3, 686 see also visibilization; visual culture
critical-reflexive paradigm, 541, 648–73 cybercommunity, 716–17
critical theory, 20, 24, 33, 670, 678, 680, cyberculture, 672–3
685–7 studies, 6, 715–18
and aesthetics, 698–9, 705–6 see also digital; digitalization; new media;
criticism, 8, 546–8 technoculture
critique, 29, 552–3 cybernetics, 561–2, 671
as defamiliarization, 41, 282, 287, 393, cyberspace, 5, 9, 10–11, 693, 716
441, 552–3 cybervisuality, 716
as distance, 553 cyborg, 536
as engagement, 553–4 and biopolitics, 723
of everyday life, 282, 392–3, 441, 550 culture, 536, 723
as intervention, 552–3 see also cyberculture
in visual studies, 542, 542–58
Cubism, 200–19, 361–86 Dada, 239, 246, 668
collage (synthetic Cubism), 158–9, 200–1, and street art, 238–41
201–15, 361–86, 364ff. Dasein, 104–5
and modernism, 23, 366–7, 695 death
and modernity, 158–60, 362–3, 633 of art, 215n4
cultural of the author, 156, 170, 176
analysis, 68–89 of cinema, 480
anthropology, 3 Deconstruction, 11, 29, 33, 684–5
constellations, 35–6, 553–4 in visual theory, 685
geography, 6, 29 defamiliarization, 13–15, 16, 41
praxis, 651 in art/aesthetics, 41–2
theory, 674–764 of everyday life, 15–16
turn, 70–1, 315–17 denigration of vision, 9, 51, 88, 111, 129,
see also bibliography of visual studies 343, 519, 632, 692, 703
culturalism/cultural relativism, 116, 117, description/the descriptive turn, 537, 573,
130, 508 572–88
Cultural Studies, 3, 4–5, 33, 35, 46n12, design/graphic design, 405–25, 499–515
674–764, 700–4 and advertising, 712
culture and art, 709–10
defined, 667 the art of, 131–51
as disembodied, 670 critical, 513–14
780 Subject index

design/graphic design, (continued ) studies, 701–4

discourse, 512–14 see also new media
pedagogy, 502, 506–7 digitalization, 47n16, 559–71
philosophical basis of, 400–1 and consumer culture, 525–9, 715–16
practice, 500–2, 512–13 and everyday life, 536, 537
pragmatic approach to, 140–50, 401, 506, and feminist cultural studies, 321
508 global, 403–4, 572–3, 715–18
the process, 502, 510–12 and photography, 452–4
see also fashion, fashion theory, fashion studies process, 585, 559–71, 572–88
designed environments, 499–515 and television, 464–5ff.
desire, 668–9 disciplinarity, 3, 86n10, 92, 133, 195–6
diagram/diagrammatics, 651–2, 709 as conceptual construction, 650
diagrammatization, 666–7 see also interdisciplinarity
diagrams in visual research, 592–3 discourse, 19–20, 24–5, 535
and drawings, 592–3 analysis, 29–30, 285–6, 535–6, 553–4
dialectics, 26–7 networks, 30, 285
the dialectical turn, 97 see also text
in the work of Flusser, 285–6 disembedding, 377–9, 383–4n30
dialogical, dialogism, 28, 33, 131–2, 163 radical, 378–9
and street art, 240–1 Downcast Eyes (Martin Jay), 9, 80, 105–7,
see also hybridity/hybridities 111, 129, 343, 691–2
dialogics of seeing, 28, 64, 115–30 dualism, see Cartesian
dialogue, 285–6, 337–40, 629–30 duality, 503
Dichtung, 652
Dictionary of Visual Discourse ecophilosophy, 6
(Barry Sandywell), 693 eidos, 104
differance, 77, 363 ekphrasis, 26
difference, 30–1 electronic age, 36, 717–18
digital see also surveillance/surveillance society
the age, 559ff., 561 embodiment, 18, 20, 321–2, 448, 564–5
and analogue, 16–17, 393, 447, 536, and fashion, 405–6
559–60 and the gaze, 119, 448–9
art, 164–83, 536–7, 559–71 and identity, 20, 448–9
cinema, 480–98, 487–9 and photography, 448–9
culture, 458–9, 559–60 and pleasure, 471–5, 668–9
data, 6–7, 559–60, 574–5 and research, 536
empires, 468–9 empirical sociology/social research, 537,
film aesthetics, 487–9 573
imaging, 403–4, 717 crisis of, 573–4
imperialism, 467–9 empiricism, 312, 579
media, 445–63, 559–71 Enlightenment, 4, 21, 24, 41, 73, 116, 187,
mediations, 525–9 192, 299, 347, 349–50, 686, 691
objects, 334–7, 459, 576–7 epic theatre, 668
revolution, 1, 9–10, 11, 18, 161–2, 403, epochalism, 537, 572–3
719 epoché, 285, 658
sharing, 451–4 essence, 692
Subject index 781

ethics, 5, 35, 96, 97, 192, 195, 331, 590, feminist

653, 656, 658 aesthetics, 310–25
ethics of seeing, 591–2, 658, 681, 700, 707 art criticism, 321
ethnographic methodologies, 391, 407–8 art history, 315–17
ethnography, 23, 391, 554 art practice, 319–20
of everyday life, 391, 550–2 art theory, 8, 310–25
reflexive, 540–1, 552–4 critique, 591–2, 670
of seeing, 589–606, 628–47 visual culture theory, 8, 20, 35, 283,
ethnomethodology, 14 310–23
Euclidean geometry, 347, 693 fetishism, 522–3
Eurocentrism, 8–9, 34, 42, 193–4, 196n2 figure, see body
everyday artefacts, 40 film, 480–98
see also artefact(s) and modernity, 482–4
everyday life, 669–73 and visual culture, 489–90
as ‘home’, 329, 346, 486 film theory, film studies, 480–98
theories of, 673 crisis in, 480–2
as topic and resource, 15–16, 673 feminist, 312–14
transformation of, 673 multi-national, 398–9
everydayness, 13, 33 turn to history, 482–4
as invisible, 13 and visual culture, 4, 10, 34
as topic, 15 form
evidence, 18, 74, 105, 138, 458, 482, 514, generating, 511–12
619, 637, 690, 707, 708 as Gestalt, 430–5
experience politics of, 371–3
and brain plasticity, 613 significant, 29
as culture, 391, 393, 427, 648, 652 as structure, 1, 5, 13, 29, 85–6
phenomenological, 19, 20, 26, 119, 121, formalism, 166, 695
174, 238, 344, 351, 400, 437, 490, frame(s), framing, 104–5, 368–70
592, 596–7, 600, 678–9, 704 reframing, 184–6, 368, 666–7
of the visual, 77, 471–5 functional magnetic resonance imaging
eye, 426–7, 458–9, 607–8 (FMRI), 17, 608, 665
functions, 38
fashion, fashion theory, fashion studies, fusion of horizons, 45–6n11, 66–7
405–25 Futurism, 281, 290, 291–2
and class differences, 390, 405–6
and dress, 405–25 gay and lesbian studies, 678, 721
and globalization, 419–22 gay culture/queer visualities, 721–3
history of, 389–90, 407–9, 410–12 gaze
and identity, 389, 390–1, 404–7, 412–15 in art history, 318–19
neglect of the visual in, 416–17 female, 318, 722
and social status, 405–6 in film studies, 318–19
theoretical perspectives, 389, 409–18, 710 male, 102, 119, 283, 318
fashion business/industry, 405–25 photographic, 394, 448–9
Fauvism, 695 theory of the, 314–15, 318–19,
feminism, 310–25 722–3
feminism and visual culture, 310–25 see also look(ing); seeing
782 Subject index

gender, 290–309 historicity thesis, the, 9, 541, 648–56

politics, 283, 290–309 history, 8, 10, 63, 82, 90–1, 192–3, 326ff.,
studies, 21, 29, 310–11, 721–2 648–56
in the visual field, 310–23, 721–3 of aesthetic objects, 10
see also feminism of art, 82–3
gendered visual experience, 21, 311–12, 721–3 representations of, 715
genealogy, 649, 680, 692 of scopic regimes, 63–4, 102–14
geodemographics, 572–88, 581–5, 583–4 Hollywood, 398, 480–1, 668
geodemographics industry, 581–2 industrial system, 398–9, 400, 485–6
geography, 3, 5, 6, 29, 243, 282, 311, 329, hybridity/hybridities, 161–3, 491–2
446, 707 cultural, 235–8, 491
Gestalt, 119, 126–7, 427, 430–1, 434 and globalization, 235, 687
Gestalt theorists, 427, 430–1, 434, 690 and street art, 161, 235–78, 235–8, 240
Gestell (frame), 104, 349, 666 see also street art
gestures, 330–3 hyperreality, 60, 447
grafitti as critical, 235–78
globalization, 1, 4, 9, 10, 16, 40, 78–9, 97, icon, 21, 24, 26, 109, 140, 434, 654, 660–1,
311, 475–6, 536, 562–3, 671–2 662–3, 664, 668, 671–2, 673,
Google, 671, 672 683
Google Earth, 562, 570 iconic turn, 200–19
graffiti see also Cubism
New York, 238–41, 241–2 iconography, 27
and street art, 235–78 identity, 18–20, 722–3
see also street art visual, 703
grammar, 661 ideographic/nomothetic, 694
cultural, 661 ideology, 5, 24–5, 70, 135, 184, 283, 525,
of images, 661–2 655–6, 691
Guernica (Pablo Picasso), 189 image(s)
Guerrila Girls, 320, 324 Bild, 103, 104, 139, 286, 338, 355
configurations, 27, 36–7, 658–9
hegemony of vision, 9, 347, 668, 675, 680, consciousness, 648ff.
689, 692 consuming, 517–18
hermeneutical aesthetics, 131–51 Cubist, 200–19, 361–86
hermeneutic interpretation, 21 digital, 717
hermeneutics, 21–2, 66–7, 131–51, 678, haecceity of, 6, 23, 384n32, 544
680–1, 691 history of, 71–3
context-sensitive, 535–6, 540–1 image-based research, 24ff.
Gadamerian, 29 in/as memory, 451–2, 714–15
Heideggerian, 25, 29 materiality of, 429, 542, 653, 665–6,
Materialist, 705 668
ontological/philosophical, 66–7 ontology of, 37, 66–7, 91–2, 529–30
hermeneutic theory, 131–51 phenomenology of, 662
heteroglossia, 8, 28 politics of the, 667, 717–23
historicity, 9, 29–30, 44n10 production, 37, 91
historicity (of seeing and visual knowledge), regimes, 24–5
648–73 technologies, 91
Subject index 783

imaginary, 39, 91, 103, 161, 207, 251, 318, knowledge, 20–1, 24–5, 42–3, 74, 77, 642,
485, 489, 652, 654, 657–8, 668, 706–7
671, 679, 692, 693, 713, 718 figures of, 74–5
imagination, 430, 651–2 models of, 502–3
visual, 693 Kunstwissenschaft, 694
imagined communities, 469
imagineering, 31, 712 Lake District (the English Lake District),
industries, 671–2, 712–13 220–34
virtual, 32, 671 landscape, 220–34, 499–515
visual, 42–3, 670–3 architecture, 499–515
Impressionism, 695 and art, 160–1
in-disciplinarity, 672–3 and the picturesque, 222–5
informatics, 526–9 representations of, 22
information and Romanticism, 160, 220–2
arts, 47n17 and the sublime, 222–5
ontological, 572–3 language, 401–2
systems, 40 of art, 662–3, 694–5
visual culture as, 529–30 of design, 513–14
institutional turn, the, 1–3 everyday, 401
institution(s) field of, 661
aesthetic, 2–3 metaphor of, 427–9
social, 18–19 of photography, 663
systems, 464–5 language thesis, the, 541, 661–5
visual, 702–3, 710–13 Lego, 538–9, 600–2
intentionality, 22, 24 leisure, 713
intercorporeality, 342–60, 678–9 industries, 713
interdisciplinarity, 3–4, 10–11, 34–5, 83–4, life-style, 389, 403, 420–22, 471–5, 520–21,
93–4, 164, 541, 674 524
see also transdisciplinarity see also consumerism/consumer culture;
International Visual Sociology Association, design/graphic design; fashion,
706 fashion theory, fashion studies
Internet resources, 677 life-style television, 473–5
Internet studies, 6, 669, 673 life-world (Lebenswelt), 193, 285
Interpreting Visual Culture (Ian Heywood and life-worlds, 19–20, 35, 40, 537, 649
Barry Sandywell), 7, 9, 35, 42, 43n1, structures, 436–7
134–5 linguistic perspectives, 3, 6–7, 24, 74–5,
intersubjectivity 391, 401, 427–9
in everyday life, 437–9 linguistic turn, the, 24, 205–6, 400–1
neural basis of, see neural, mirroring literacy, literate culture, 326–41
in philosophy, 115ff., 126–7 visual, 714
see also alterity in visual culture, 716
intertextuality literary theory, 3
and authorship, 176–7 logocentrism, 2
see also text see also text
Logological Investigations (Barry Sandywell),
journals in visual culture, 676–7 45n10, 46n13, 692, 693
784 Subject index

look(ing) metaphor
everyday, 552 of language, 427–9
as social act, 536, 553–4 of mind, 691–2
at things, 542 in social research, 539, 599–602
metaphors of seeing, 538–9
map, map-making, mapping metaphysics of presence, 350
cognitive, 30 methodology
informational, 582–3 creative visual, 538–9, 589, 591–2, 706–8
neural, 539 hegemonic, 543
and power, 18 immanent, 22–3
visual research/theory, 674–764 implicit, 525, 543–4, 544–8
see bibliography of visual studies practice-based, 535
mapology, 609–10 reflexive, 26–30, 535, 538, 589
Marxism, 29–30, 33, 35, 283, 312, 671, strategic, 1, 5, 7, 25–6, 30, 36, 38, 39, 97,
678, 685–7, 698, 705 133, 244
Althusserian, 20, 70, 314–15, as topic, 535, 542–4, 555n1
322 methodology, interactive/creative, 538,
British, 33, 317, 364 589–606, 706–8
critical, 23–4 see also reflexivity
Gramscian, 33, 42 Microsoft, 671, 672
post-, 519–21 militarization of visuality, 719
Structural, 20 mimesis, 24, 286, 540
mass communication(s), 665–6 mind-body dualism, see Cartesian
material, materiality, 22 Minimalism, 695
of art, 22–3 mirror, mirroring, 29
of culture, 499–514 in art, 29, 411
of everyday life, 402–3 in Greek culture, 618, 620–1
things, 426–44 in human behaviour, 618
of visual experience, 440–2, 653 as metaphor, 19, 29, 105, 126, 411, 536,
media 666, 691
globalized, 9, 670–3, 715–18 of nature, 105, 691–2
history of, 327–8 neurons, 25, 539, 540, 608, 613, 618,
as instruments of self-understanding, 619–20, 621
39–40, 40–1 see also neural, mirroring
mixed, 25, 671–3 modernism, 4, 5, 21, 165ff., 177–80, 295–6,
transformations, 665–7, 670–1, 373–5, 377–9
673 modernist art, 164–83
ubiquitous, 526–9, 673, 717 and visual culture, 164–83
mediascapes modernity, 102–14, 377–9, 383n28
and global flow, 396–7, 469–71 as the age of the world-picture, 103–8, 350
see also cityscapes and culture, 42, 362–3, 377–9
media theory/studies, 10–11, 33 images of, 376–9
mediation, 34, 381, 438–9, 442, 517–18, and visual culture, 186–90, 287–8, 693
596, 642, 650 morph/morphing, 487–8
digital, 525–9 mountaineering, 220–34
memory, 74, 451–2, 651 and the picturesque, 222–5
Subject index 785

and spectacle, 160, 229–32 object

and the sublime, 222–5 constitution, 572, 654
and visual experience, 160–1, 225–7 fields, 666–7
multidisciplinary visual studies, theoretical, 665
see interdisciplinarity objectify, objectification, see alienation
museological space, 184–99 objective world
see also museology phenomenology of, 436–7, 438
museology, 184–99 objectivity, 437–8, 509–10, 629–30
crisis in, 184–99 observation, 629
and cultural studies, 21, 14–15 disembodied, 637
museum(s), 184–99 ethnographic, 628–9
and archiving, 178, 179, 710 objective, 509–10, 629
and collecting, 313, 320, 390, 710 see also seeing
as cultural memory, 184–99 ocularcentric, ocularcentrism, 24–5, 119–20,
and curatorship, 178, 204, 235, 239, 247, 286, 669–70
336, 410, 457, 707, 710 consumer, 518
and modernity, 186–7 see also scopic regimes
as a social institution, 18–19 ocularphobia, 401, 504
as topic of cultural analysis, 184–99 Ordinary language philosophy, 678, 680
Orientalism, 687
nature Other, the, see alterity
as object, 714 others
as spectacle, 715, 220–34 pain of, 454–5
nature envisioned, 658, 714
Neo-Kantianism, 67, 132–3 painting, 17, 201–14, 357–8, 378–81
neural, 539 pantograph, 157, 188–90
mirroring, 539–40, 613, 618–22 paradigm(s), 7, 8, 10, 15, 18, 21, 24, 26,
plasticity, 539, 613, 614–18 32–3, 34, 40–1, 70, 93, 116, 119,
neuroaesthetics, 539, 607–27, 610 126, 147, 160, 168, 175, 205, 235,
neuroarthistory, 43n1, 539, 540, 609 312–14, 322, 485, 513–14, 521, 541,
see also neuroaesthetics 590, 609, 623, 648–73, 700, 706–7
neurophysiology, 653–4 perception
neuroscience, 539, 607, 622–3, 653 as apperception, 427–9, 430–5
applications, 612–13 see also apperception
history, 608–11 as embodied process, 427ff., 434–5
photography 43n1 as field of presence, 434
research, 611–12 as intelligent practice, 499, 509–10
neuroscience and visual culture, 607–27 as interpretation, 499–500, 508–9
new media, 2–3, 321, 395–6, 398–9, 475–6, multisensory, 286, 322, 351–7, 642
481–2, 536, 664–5, 670, 715–18 as privileged sense, 24–5, 343
newspapers, 371–3 reworking, 508–10
New Visual Studies, 3–7, 35–41, 90–101, as seeing, 24, 426–7, 630–1
648–73, 648, 652, 673 as temporal, 649–50
dimensions of, 35–41, 648–73, 672–3 theories of, 502–3
see also reflexive visual studies/self-reflexive as world appropriation, 344, 649
visual studies; reflexivity see also sense-perception
786 Subject index

perception, phenomenology of, 115–30, digital, 37, 393, 447

426–44 as document and witness, 446, 454–5
philosophy of, 115–29, 440–1, 502–5, everyday, 18, 447–51
690 and everyday life, 37–8, 447–51
performance, performativity, 11–12, 91–2, family, 450–1, 536, 551–2
535–6, 548–53, 549–60, 642 and fashion, 405–25
period eye(s), 22, 608, 692 history of, 15–16, 327–8
perspectivalism, 62–3, 105, 106, 119–23, and ideology, 446–7
128 as memory/memorializing, 450–4,
perspective(s), 649–50 455–8
metaphysical, 186, 502–3, 508, 513–14 and power, 446
pragmatic, 441, 502ff., 506–7, 514 semiotic analysis of, 446–7
Renaissance, 348–9, 539 social functions of, 448–51
theoretical, 68–89, 674–764 tourist, 451, 714
phallocentrism, 665 in visual research, 445–63
phallus, 665 photojournalism, 711
and power, 665–6 pictorial
pharmakon, 196n2 arts, 32–3
phenomenological reduction (epoché ), 285, signs, 74–5
331–2 turn, 9, 23–31, 44n8, 69–70, 158–9,
phenomenology, 14–15, 22–3, 391–2, 540, 205–6, 216n13
622, 678–80, 691 also see visual turn, the
classical (Husserlian), 14, 24, 29, 392–3, pictures, 60, 69, 74, 78, 165, 288, 300, 335,
678 364, 371, 376, 426, 438, 537, 562,
embodied, 20 593, 631ff., 693
of everyday life, 391 place(s), 22, 547–8, 549
existential, 440–1 see also context(s)
Flusser’s, 331–3 pleasure, 397, 668–9
material, 657 economy of, 657
Merleau-Ponty’s, 64–5, 115–30 viewing, 397–8, 722
post-, 693 poiesis, 651–2, 665–6
Schutz’s, 426–44 point of view, 122, 126, 213, 316, 363, 393,
social, 20, 392 434–5, 446
Phenomenology of Perception (Maurice political thesis, the, 541, 669–70
Merleau-Ponty), 115–30 politics, 4, 24, 373–6, 546, 666–7, 669–70,
philosophy, 10, 347–8 717–18
ancient, 327, 343, 688 cultural, 42–3, 86n11, 669
of art, 33, 193, 698–9, 705 defined, 718
modern, 674–764 new social movements, 718, 719–23
multisensory, 540, 642 politics of vision, 11, 24–5, 32–5,
of perception, 64–5 546–7, 667, 669–70, 718–19,
of reflection, 64–5 719, 720–23
and visual culture, 10–11 pornography, 318–19, 348, 722–3
Western, 23–4, 502–3, 560, 649, 692 postcolonialism, postcolonial theory, 678,
photographic image, 18, 285–6, 660–1 687
photography, 445–63, 711 postdisciplinary, 3–4, 6–7
Subject index 787

postmodernism, postmodernization, 4, 5, public sphere(s), 669

8–9, 15, 94–5, 156, 38n2, 572–3, interactive, 342–60
668–9, 678, 687–8 intimate, 354, 397–8, 454, 473
see also epochalism re-envisioning, 724–5
postmodernity and street art, 235–78
and visual culture, 8, 34, 78–80, 86n9, 93–4, see also street art
196n1, 361–2, 519–21, 668, 687–8
postocular theory, 703–4 Queer Theory, 678, 721–3
post-phenomenology, 441 Questionnaire on Visual Culture (October 77),
post-photography, 447 42, 84–5n3, 167, 180, 196n1
see also photography
post-postmodern aesthetics/visual culture, ‘race’
34–5, 254–6 and ethnicity, 719–20
poststructuralism, 29, 42, 540, 678, 684–5 in the visual field, 720–1
power, 548, 692 racialized seeing, 720
and knowledge, 548–9, 692 reading, 37–8, 427ff.
relations, 554 as critique, 248–9
practice-oriented methodology, 525–6, as interpretation, 37
548–53, 552–4 and seeing, 37, 427–8
practice(s), 2–3, 36–7, 548–53 realism, 509
constellations of, 553–4 common sense, 509–10
defined, 548–9 reality, 24
of everyday life, 6–7, 35–6, 235–78 reality television, 397, 473
methodological, 525, 548–9 real virtuality, 32
as multidimensional networks, 651 reflection, radical, see social theory
situated, 525, 548 reflection, reflective
practices of seeing, 14–15, 16–18, 19–20, analytical, 356–8
139–40, 310–11, 430–5, 441–2, hermeneutical, 21
544, 548–9, 648–56 hypochondriacal, 202–6
Pragmatism, 680 phenomenological, 115–30
praxis, 441, 651, 665–7, 670–1 philosophy of, 115–30
see also practice(s) reflective distance, see defamiliarization
presence, present, 37, 434, 441–2 reflexive praxis thesis, the, 541, 670–73
as co-presence (appresentation), 437–9 reflexive sociology (Bourdieu), 288
embodied, 540 reflexive visual studies/self-reflexive visual
as visibility, 37–8 studies, 2–3, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 23–4, 72–3
see also embodiment; perception; visibility reflexivity, 5, 23, 535–6, 550–2
prosthetic identities, 723 critical, 541
Prosthetics, 18–19 logological, 45n10
psychoanalysis, 33, 283, 312, 348, 681–2 methodological, 535–6
Lacanian, 33–4, 342, 449 systematic, 38–9
psychoanalytic theory, 33, 312–13, 678 remediation, 474–5
public art, 235–78, 290–309 Renaissance, 390, 539, 688
and architecture, 281, 303–6, 555n5 aesthetics, 21, 348–9, 617, 663
and space, 710 Florence, 539, 617
see also street art humanism, 692
788 Subject index

Renaissance, (continued  ) selfhood, 19–20, 157, 394, 655

Venice, 539, 617 self-reflection, 11, 541, 550–2
visual space, 693 self-relation, 652
representation, 24, 29, 211–14, 286, see also reflexivity; selfhood
517–18, 691 self-transformation, 652
critique of, 525–8, 529–30 semiology, 35, 410, 427, 682–3
modes of, 20–1, 715 analysis of meaning, 415–16, 427–8,
origins of, 540 553–4
and politics, 525–530 and visual meaning, 416, 428–9, 544–5
representationalism, 21, 27, 29 semiotic(s), 3, 20, 33, 35, 155, 312, 317,
reversibility, 119–23, 125–6, 127 392, 517–18, 670, 678, 682–5
rhetoric(s), 29–30 see also semiology
visual, 29, 708–9 sensation(s), 436, 504–5, 642
rhetorics of the visible, 30 distribution of, 718
Roman art industry, 705 sense-perception, 342–60
Romanticism, 21, 116, 351 senses, 11, 84n1, 286, 353–7
Romantic poets, 33, 160 and intelligence, 499–500, 503–5
interrelated, 640–2, 652
science measuring the, 634–7
as seeing differently, 650–1 multiple, 642
vision in, 80, 322 sensory
vision in the history of, 690–1 environments, 503
scopic regimes, 19, 47n16, 62–4, 102–14 interface, 504, 505
competing, 111 revolution, 11
history of, 691–3 totality, 84n1
multiple, 108–11 turn, 20, 639–40
pre-modern, 692–3 sexuality, 348–9
scopic regimes revisited, 102–14 see also gender
Screen (and Screen Education), 317 shock, 41, 291–2, 654–5
screen/screen culture, 395–60, 717 see also defamiliarization
seeing, 12–15, 426–7 sight
biomechanical accounts of, 426–7 as privileged sense, 115, 650
as dynamic, 650–1 see also hegemony of vision; senses
as learned behaviour, 510 sign
as map-making, 652 pictorial and linguistic, 74–5
as meaning-making, 648 signifiers, 169–70, 427–9, 682–3
as performative act, 650 simulacrum/simulacra, 116
as signifying event, 649–50 singularity, 23, 98n4
ways of, 391–2, 716–18 of art, 22–3
self, 11, 40, 654 as event, 544
aesthetic of, 95 as exception, 669, 671
analysis, 11–12 as unique individual(s), 669
haptic continuum of the, 355 situated
implied self, 18–19 acts of seeing, 544
see also subject, subjectivity imagination, 652
self-cognition, 654–5 practices, 535–6
Subject index 789

situation, 544 lived, 19, 22, 344ff.

Situationism, 98n1, 162–3, 239, 281, 290 mountain, 220–34
and revolution, 240–1 see also mountaineering
and street politics, 162, 239 optical, 347
see also Dada; Society of the Spectacle; phallic, 287, 348
street art the production of, 19, 249–53, 342–58,
skills, 509–12, 514 342–60
see also craft social, 286
social class, 719–20 uniform, 693
images of class/class difference, 719, 720, urban, 235–78, 240–3, 376–81
723 spectacle, 290–309
social construction/constructionism, 609, cinematic, 300–2
652–3 consumer, 519–20
of art and artefacts, 40 interactive, 303–5
social media, see new media spectator, spectatorship, 10, 19, 20, 80,
social relations, 658–9 290–309
see also practice(s) in film, 480–98
social theory in mountaineering, 220–34
radical, 665–7, 672–3 in television, 464–79
society, 76–7 in visual studies, 10, 80
visual constitution of, 76, 572, 654, specular, 24, 65, 78, 119, 127–8,
665–7 689
Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord), 31, 61, specularization, 9, 78
79–80, 115–16, 281, 282, 292–5, specular society, 5, 32
520, 671–2 spimes, 537, 577–8
and alienation, 293 street art, 235–78
see alienation; Situationism and art sub-cultures, 236–8
sociocultural thesis, the, 541, 667–9 genealogy of, 238–41
sociological imagination, 579–80 politics of, 254–6
sociology, 33, 537 as surface aesthetic, 240–3, 244–5,
commercial, 538, 578–80, 581–3 248
doing visual, 705–6, 706–8 as urban culture, 250–4
reflexive, 541 and visual culture, 238–41, 249–53
sociology of art/aesthetics, 78–9 see also graffiti
sociology of visual culture, 704–8 Structuralism, 3, 20, 29, 33, 427–9,
sociology of the spectacle, 290–309 682–5
space/spatiality, 342–60 Structural Marxism, 20
absolute, 345–6 structures of phenomenality, 649–50
and Chora, 565–6 subject, subjectivity, 19–20, 39–40, 449,
concrete and abstract, 343 553–4
disembodied/homogeneous, 693 and misrecognition, 449
and embodiment, 287, 343–5 and object, 125–6, 353–7, 508
geometric, 287, 347–50, 663, 693 and reflection, 449, 550–2
and heterotopias, 346ff. subjectivation/objectivation, 18–19, 20, 39,
isotropic, 693 354
and landscape, 500–2 subject-object dualism, 115–30
790 Subject index

sublime, the, 282, 295–300 touching (tactility), 536, 619, 636

technological, 299–301 as primary sense, 560
see also beauty tourism, 160, 161, 221, 483, 501, 714
substance, 38, 123, 213, 511 tourist gaze, 160, 714, 222–3, 714
Surrealism, 286, 343–4 traditions, theoretical, 68–89, 674–764
surveillance/surveillance society, 10–11, transdisciplinarity, 541, 666, 718
80–1, 717 transdisciplinary
symbolic/symbolism approaches, 4–5, 6–7, 541
goods, 520–1 concepts, 4, 541, 666, 672–3
Schutz’s theory of, 393, 439–40 future of, 670, 672–3
symbolpoiesis, 658, 664 research, 41–3, 673, 718–23
synaesthesia/synesthesia, 18, 25 visual analysis, 1, 41–2, 673
transformations, 5–6, 541, 666–7, 670–1
Tate Modern, 178, 179, 254, 283 transverse problematics, 11–12
technê, 665–6 truth
see also technopoiesis; technopoiesis content, 669
thesis, the photographic, 336
technoculture subjective and objective, 503
global, 9 universal, 506, 509–10
see also digital; digitalization visual, 509
technology, 9, 11, 14, 322, 484–7, 665–7 Truth and Method (Hans-Georg Gadamer),
technopoiesis, 665 147
technopoiesis thesis, the, 541, 665–9 truths, see perspective(s)
telepistemology/telerobotics, 717–18 typifications
television, televisual media, 464–79 as appresentation, 436–7
Americanization of, 467–9 in everyday knowledge, 437
in everyday life, 464–79 see also apperception
as global visual medium, 395, 464–7 typography, 697–8
as mass communication, 469–71
temporality, 649 unconscious, the, 18
see also time, temporality cultural, 507
text, 445, 629 optical, 109, 458
textual bias (of cultural studies), 6, 24–5, unoptical, 632–3
86n6, 391, 540, 629, 692 university, 11, 34
textualism, 6–7, 85–6n5, 391, 540, 547–8, critiques of, 94–5, 135–6, 287, 364–5
629, 629–31, 692 University of London, 628
textuality University of Rochester (USA), 313, 321
and vision, 39–40 University of York (UK), 47n17
theatre, film and television studies, 3 ut pictura poiesis, 27
theoretical frameworks, 30, 68–89, 678–88
theoria, 24, 333 value(s)
‘Theory’, 3–4, 42–3, 59–60, 155, 169–70, in aesthetics, 94–5
196n1 in art, 362ff., 671
theory wars, 3, 34 cultural, 5, 362–4
Timaeus (Plato), 565–6 judgements, 505
time, temporality, 19–20, 430–5, 649–50 in social life, 362, 420–2
Subject index 791

videological bias, 669 visualization

viewing, see look(ing); spectator; specular of the brain, 607–27
violence, 67, 143, 246, 319, 348, 371, in culture, 541, 655–8
456, 634, 650, 660, 692, 700, internal, 75
701 logic of, 347–50
virtual existence, 37 methods, 573, 580
virtualization, 32–3, 37, 716–18 regimes, 668
see also digital; digitalization techniques, 580, 665–7
visibility, 249–53 visual life
conditions of, 16, 33, 76, 80, 231, 237, as embodied, 19–20
653, 656–7, 666, 668 see also embodiment
contest of, 249–53 and learned behaviour, 13
as field, 1–56 neural basis of, 607–27
as topic of visual studies, 1–56 plasticity of, 607–27
visibility machines, 15–19 visual media
visibilization, 15–18 as languages, 427–9
Visible and the Invisible, The (Maurice visual metaphor(s), 538
Merleau-Ponty), 23, 90–1, 117ff., visual methodology, 542–58, 589–606
120, 126, 128, 129, 679 creative, 538–9, 591–3, 706–8
visual art, 7–8 film/video making, 593–4, 596–8
visual construction of the social field, 16, 76, mixing methods, 598–9
609 photographs in, 593–4
visual consumption, 402, 516–32, 517–18 sociological, 537–8, 589–90, 707–8
see also consumerism/consumer culture telling stories in, 594–5
visual cortex, 539–40, 611, 615–16 visual pedagogy, 724
visual culture, 2–3, 22–3, 31–5 visual performance, 21–2
defined, 34–5, 75–6, 80–2, 91, 135–6, see also performance, performativity
311, 491 visual production and consumption, 417,
field of, 1ff., 10, 12–15, 91–2 516–32, 518–21
history of, 668–94 visual quality/qualities, see phenomenology
redemptive value, 90–101 visual regimes, 718–19
resources in, 674–764, 675–7 social history of, 691–3
Western, 692–3 see also scopic regimes
visual engagement, 19–21, 22 visual sociology
visual inscription devices, 537–8, 580–5 emergence of, 589–90
visual intelligence, 499–515 visual studies, 1–10, 31–5, 310–11
in everyday life, 12–13, 310 bibliography, 541, 674–764
as practical skills, 13, 509–10 interdisciplinary, 34
in practice, 430–5 object oriented, 538–9
visuality, 2–5, 7, 12–13, 115–29 visual technologies, 14, 15–18, 665
hegemonic, 342–60, 355–8, 503–4, as apparatus, 16, 334–7, 665–7
669–70 everyday, 35–6
in Merleau-Ponty, 115–30 history of, 14, 656–7
ubiquitous, 516–17, 717–18 and scopic regimes, 693
see also visualization; visual theory; specialized, 665–6, 693
visual turn, the see also visibility machines
792 Subject index

visual theory, 1–56, 68–89, 674–764 work of art, see art

mapping, 674–764 world
traditions of, 674–764, 678–87 being in the, 121–2
visual turn, the, 68–89, 90–101, 102–14 and body/embodiment, 118–19, 120,
and interdisciplinarity, 3–6, 34–5 115–30
and postmodernity, 5, 18–19 making, 67, 142–3
and visual research, 23–31, 69–70 material, 426–44
sensory, 121ff.
wallpaper, 371–3 visual, 13
walls World Art Studies, 73–4
cultural walls, cultural wall system, 241, world cinema, 484–7
243, 247–8, 252, 254–5 World Trade Center, 282, 454–5
as sites of art, 237, 238–41, 243–4, 245 world-view/world-picture, 62–3, 104–8,
see also street art 671–2, 692
war, 719 World Wide Web (the Internet), 78–9, 90–1,
see also militarization of visuality 162, 399, 536, 559, 661
Ways of Seeing (John Berger), 8, 718 as rhizomatic system, 460–1n10
Web/Web culture, 32–3, 162–3, 561–2 writing, 75, 697–8
Web 2.0, 452–3, 528–9, 536, 538, 575, 585, about visual culture, 664
661, 672–3 demise of, 326–7
Welt, 103ff. dominance of, 428–9, 506
Weltanschauung, 103 invention of, 284, 327
Weltbild (world-picture), 104–8, 350, 536 and linear consciousness, 284–6
We-relation, 439–40
Western Marxism, see critical theory, zones
post-Marxism of actual reach, 437
wilderness, 160–1 of encounter, 21–2
Wire, The, 537, 579–80 of engagement, 22
word-oriented thinking, see textualism of theory, 11
work, see praxis; skills; technê