Myth about visual culture
4. Visual culture implies that the difference between a literary text and a painting is a non-problem.
Words and images dissolve into undifferentiated representation.
counter-theses on visual culture
1. Visual culture encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art, visual and verbal
signs, and the ratios between different sensory and semiotic modes.
Visual culture is an emergent discipline that combines cultural studies, media studies, rhetoric,
communication, art history, and aesthetics. It is less neutral than visual studies and is deeply involved
with human societies, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and epistemology. It is a research topic and a field that
needs to be tested and understood in context to fully understand its meaning.
Visual studies can be a dangerous supplement to art history and aesthetics, but it's important not to
romanticize or underestimate its danger. Derrida's canonical figure of the dangerous supplement,
writing, can be seen in the study of language, literature, and philosophical discourse. Writing invades the
domain of speech, undermining the authentic presence of the voice and phonocentric core of language.
This led to concerns about the potential collapse of human sciences and knowledge into a new field
called grammatology. The boundlessness of visual studies may be a replay of earlier panics about textual
boundaries. Grammatology and iconology are connected by their emphasis on visuality and spacing.
Grammatology promoted visible signs of written language, from pictographs to hieroglyphics, and
challenged the primacy of language as an invisible, authentic speech. Both fields evoke fear of the visual
image, with anxieties about rendering the invisible spirit of language in visible forms and the danger of
the immediate and concreteness of the visible image being spirited away by the dematerialized, visual
copy. This fear of imagery is evident in Martin Jay's history of philosophical optics and Mitchell's
explorations of iconology.
Visual culture refers to the dissolution of the distinction between artistic and non-artistic images, often
referred to as the democratic or leveling fallacy. This concept is criticized by some, but celebrated by
theorists of visual culture. It involves concerns about the leveling of semiotic distinctions between words
and images, digital and analog communication, art and non-art, and different media types or artifacts.
Many people believe that the distinction between high art and mass culture is disappearing, or that
distinctions between media and verbal and visual images are being undone. However, this is not the
case. The boundaries of art/non-art only become clear when one looks at both sides of this ever-shifting
border and traces the transactions and translations between them. The opening out of a general field of
study does not abolish difference, but makes it available for investigation, as opposed to treating it as a
barrier that must be policed and never crossed. The author has been working between literature and
visual arts for the last three decades, and has never found themselves confused about which was which.
Distinctions between the arts and media are ready-to-hand, but the difficulty arises when trying to make
these distinctions systematic and metaphysical.
The author talks on the show-and-tell activity used in American primary school, which emphasises the
act of looking. In order to make visual culture seem alien and foreign, students are taught to frame their
presentations as ethnographers reporting to a civilization lacking visual culture. The audience must
accept the fiction that the world does not exist even if they live in it. By instructing the audience to close
their eyes and listen just to the lecture or by feigning to have prosthetic visual organs but not yet being
able to see with them, students create an enabling fantasy.
