What is the Problem with Visual Culture?
Dr. Afitap Boz
Abstract
This article is on methodology of visual culture studies, in which based on the assumption of post-modernity and post-structuralist thought. Discourses of visual are appeared as a necessity to understand the post-modern culture, which defined as visual, in last decade. And in some thought of visual analyst, understanding the visuality of new epoch of culture based on thought of Foucault and Derrida. By deconstructive methodology, search for understanding visuality of post-modern culture has been extended to entire Western thought. Thus, by discourses of vision not recent increased usage of image in cultural field but applying the methodology to analyse it becomes a very important intellectual effort since it has been thought as a mere out put of the past. As a result, discourses of vision are appeared as a practicing of deconstructive methodology for its own sake rather than understanding the new epoch of culture.
Key words: culture, visual, post-modernity, post-structuralism
Post-modernity is celebrated as a new epoch and observed by various 'turns' in the social, economic and cultural sphere1. In 1980's post-modern culture was defined as a transition towards social pluralism that paved the way to evaluate cultural sphere through identities and indeterminacy. On the other hand, starting in the 1990's the new epoch of culture is understood in astonishing growth and pervasiveness in the mass media of communication and particularly visual media. Thus, cultura 15115k106p l expression of increased usage of images became a warrant for its description as "post-modern" or "visual culture".
As Mirzoeff's work on visual culture informed us, the disjuncture and fragmented culture called post-modernism is best imagined and understood visually: "...human experience in now more visual and visualized than ever before from the satellite picture to medical images of the interior of human body"2. Hawkes pointed out that post-modern economic development also has taken place alongside a corresponding rise to cultural prominence of the technological media of representation: "...the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented explosion in number of kinds of images to which people are exposed every day."3.
The assumption of visual culture as a new epoch also legitimized that can't be found in any of past epochs. Mirzoeff pointed out "This is visual culture. It is not just a part of every day life; it is your life...for observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it. Indeed, the gap between the wealth of visual experience in contemporary culture and ability to analyse that observation marks both the opportunity and the need for visual culture as a field of study"4. On the other hand, under the effect of contemporary visual climate, in some other thoughts, this very modern epoch extended to entire Western culture as it appears in Levin's question: "Can it be demonstrated that, beginning with ancient Greeks, our Western culture has been dominated by an ocular centric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision centered interpretation of knowledge, truth and reality?" 5
The definition of visual culture also took shape by fragmenting the methodology of cultural critique along with the theory of post- modernity. In cultural studies, culture has been defined as signifying practices by structuralist methodology and by increased stress on meaning also the image has been understood as a signifying practice. So, image as a mass media of modern culture has been taken into account through its cultural function. Up until the fragmentation of the theory of ideology, image was understood as a site of ideology. But re-conceptualization of ideology by the post-structuralist theories paved the way for a new understanding of culture and Western culture.
The post-structuralist methodology has been applied to cultural studies as a transition from the notion of ideology to power that is based on three assumptions. First, Althusser's assumptions of ideology, which indicates the social binding functions of ideologies that makes, people carriers of social structure by interpellation. Second, Foucault's notion of power, in which he explains that societies have been integrated on the basis of power but not on the basis of a single ideology. He assumes that power is mediated through the dominant discourses of the period. And third, the assumption of discourses as inter-textual in which discursive practice works as differentiated systems.
This framework is applied to image in terms of making meaning through the social institutions and groups6. On the other hand, in some other thought, which I try to analyse here, the emergence of the theory of post-modernity and deconstructionism opened a brand new way to approach the same subject. This brings us into the post-modernist view of language and historicism. Foucault's notion of discourse in relation to power has been applied to cultural analysis because it served to extend the limits of the practice of representation towards the social groups and apparatuses of power. But the new way of understanding of language and historicism provide a different context for some social and cultural analyst of visual, which mainly based on the thoughts of Derrida and Foucault.
In his method of deconstructionism Derrida explains how the discourse of metaphysics has been articulated to the discourse of science by his assumption of a sequential chain of linked signifiers. By starting this assumption, he also emphasizes not only the science, but also the entire daily language that has become the language of Western metaphysics 7. Foucault also attacks any notion, which pretends to be metalanguage, or metatheory that all things can be connected, or represented that cause understanding of sequentially. As he explains how to stand against it in his Archeology of Knowledge:
" ...History, in its traditional form, under took to 'memorize the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces...in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments...archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by past...and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse..." 8
Both Derrida and Foucault attack the previous assumption of continuality in search for meaning. In structuralist thought, understanding the meaning of cultural forms based on continuality of meaning which is breaking apart and re-attaching in a new combination. Against this assumption, deconstructive methodology shows the different elements of a composed form in fragmentation of meaning by seeing culture not a connected whole but as an intersecting text.
In this framework the methodology for understanding the present is shaped by Derrida's notion of differance and Foucault's understanding of genealogy. Derrida brings the notion of differance to avoid the discourses of metaphysics for the search of the present. Differance plays neither the role of a "concept" nor simply of a "word". But it works as a proto-type that remains unperceived in language:
"Since it can not be elevated into a master-word or a master concept, since it blocks every relationship to theology, differance finds itself enmeshed in the work that pulls it through a chain of other "concepts", other "words", other textual configurations"9.
Foucault recognizes genealogy as precisely anti-science that what it does is to entertain the claims, to attention of local, discontinues, disqualified, illegimate knowledge against the claim of a unitary body of theory or subjected knowledge10. Foucault understands genealogy as an effective history, which is written in light of the issues of the present moment. Henceforth, Foucault defines that analyzing the forms of rational discourse according to their material and historical conditions as archeology, and he understands the search for what kind of political relevance of our past is making "objective conditions" of our social present in its unquestioned rationalities as genealogy.
First, by this new way of analysis the whole knowledge up until post-modern theory is seen as a mode of understanding without any categorization. Thus, deconstructive methodology defines rigidly what is "present" to start with and what is "past" to apply the methodology. Second, in the same context, the notion of culture has been extended to the entire Western thought, that is to say, knowledge and culture are seen as one unitary body of Western history to avoid taking into account any discipline of knowledge as if it is noble. And in this context every discipline is analysed as a discourse of a certain historical era.
By this new turn of critique, understanding the new epoch of culture is flourished in a variety of discourses of vision in the last decade. First, understanding the visuality of the cultural sphere shifted from signifying practice to the relation of seeing and knowing. Second, all effort for understanding the new epoch shifted from contemporary culture to the search for ocular centricity of entire Western culture, which brought analysis of visual culture into the philosophical culture as Derrida mentions11.
Mirzoeff celebrates Rene Descartes' Discourse on the Method as a very first text of modern Western visual studies, in terms of modern notion of vision or search for truths of medieval and early modern philosophy.12 Judovitz recognizes Descartes' thought in relation with power and prestige of vision. Judovitz interprets Descartes' thought in terms of power of vision and rationalism and concludes that there are dimension of vision not reducible to thought and his philosophy exemplifies ocular centrism.13
I will try to provide more variety of discourses of vision here to show how it embraces the entire past to understand the visuality of contemporary culture. McCumber argued that Derrida's metaphors of light and vision are central to the text of metaphysics in his article titled "Derrida and Closure of Vision". And Derrida's deconstruction of absolute boundaries could not entirely break with tradition since there is continuity and Hegel already changed the vision's predominant tendencies by attacking the modeling of knowledge on vision.14.
Flynn emphasized that Foucault rejected not only the detached, contemplative, spectatorial vision of Platonism but also the domination-oriented gaze of modernity. According to Flynn, in his archaeology Foucault mainly focused on making visible the correlation between vision and truth and in his genealogy he concerned himself with making visible the correlation between vision and power. Flynn argued in his article titled "Foucault and Eclipse of Vision" that Foucault's post-modern critique of vision and the epistemology behind it, are ocular too. 15.
Blumenberg questions that hegemony of vision is shaping our present world by searching for the history of metaphors of light from Parmenides to Cicero, from Heidegger to Foucault. And Blumenberg acknowledges us that today by the "technologies of light" the connection between vision and freedom is being dissociated yet our modern culture is still "ocularcentric". And what changed is that vision which is no longer a path to wisdom but a technology, a new darkness.16
Mirzoeff seeks to examine the central role of visual in modern life by following Foucault's genealogy. He seeks to create what Foucault termed the genealogy of visual culture: "...the task at hand is not a futile quest for the "origins" of modern visuality in past time but a strategic reinterpretation of the history of modern visual media understood collectively, rather than fragmented into disciplinary units...In place of the traditional goal of encyclopedic knowledge, visual culture has to accept its provisional and changing status, given the constantly shifting array of contemporary visual media and their user."17 While Mirzoeff holds on to post-structuralist methodology, first this methodology allows him to see modernity as past, second it legitimizes the search for origin by ignoring the disciplinary future of the era. Thus, the entire Western culture becomes the only source to understand what is visual now, at the very present.
Under the same intellectual fashion, all efforts to understand visuality took shape in direction and framework of Derrida and Foucault's thought. As it appears Rogoff's framing of the field of visual culture: "Thus visual culture opens up an entire world of inter-textuality ...Derrida's conceptualization of differance and its achievement takes the form of critique of the binary logic in which every element of meaning constitution is locked into signification in relation to the other...the field of vision, is to begin with a vastly over determined one. In the West, it bears the heavy burden of post-Enlightenment scientific and philosophical discourses..."18 And Rogoff assumes that visual culture provides the visual articulation of the continuous displacement of meaning in the field of vision by following the thought of Derrida.
Thus, discourses of vision gain their meaning by questioning the visual in a framework that is structured by Foucault and Derrida. And as a result rather than questioning the visuality of culture, to find out the way to apply the methodology to the subject became an important intellectual effort. By the theory of post-modernity and the methodology of post structuralism first, "now" and "past" is strictly fractured. Second, "future" has become unpredictable. Thus the past as an element of present became the only unitary source to search for. By this, it became legitimate yet natural to raise history above all disciplines as a metascience to excavate the given past or to search for the origin of the present. So everything up until post-structuralism is seen as a part of history or a given unitary whole for the same methodology 19. Thus, by the end of projection of future, what is happening at the present try to understand only as an outcome of the past, yet critique turned to analysis of Western history.
In this framework, visual culture as a warrant of post-modernity is locked into the past. And the search for visuality turned to be an effort to apply the new methodology to the new epoch of culture. Henceforth, the methodology itself rose above past theories as a post-metatheory, yet became legitimate by assumption of post-modernity. So, in discourses of vision not the recent increased usage of image in the cultural field but applying the methodology to analyse it becomes a very important intellectual effort. By this effort, carrying out the methodology for its own sake has become more important than uttering today's problem. Thus, in these approaches, deconstructive methodology is to give an account for the new epoch of culture becomes a dense veil to look at the present into face. And while philosophy faces the world problems, the discourses of vision remain as attributes without an essence.
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1 The assumption of post modernity has been understood in many different ways. As much as Marxist version of the theory, they all agreed that the Marxist terminology is not able to embrace the new social, economic and cultural order. M. Poster reinterpreted Marx' thought as a study on male workers in comparison with the Kurdish movement in Iran, Islamic movement in Bosnia, Green movement in Germany, Black women movement in the US or the Bask movement in Spain. And by this critique he underlined the definition of cultural diversity in post modernity M. Poster, The Second Media Age (USA: Blackwell Pub. 1996) p.97-99 F. Jameson pointed out that the post-war assumptions of "end of ideology" and "post-industrial society" defines post-modernity. F. Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism", The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, (New York: Verso, 1998) p.33-436 M. Foucault celebrated the assumption of post modernity as a new appearance of thought or being world in his Order of Things. (trans. Les Mots et les choses, New York:Vintage Books, 1994) J. F. Lyotard interpreted post modernity as a new phase of capitalism compared with classic capitalism and also an ideological abandons of modernity. And he also thought that this idea indicates the degeneration of modernity rather then being against modernity itself. F. Jameson, "Theories of Postmodern" The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, (New York: Verso, 1998) p. 21-27
2 N. Mirzoeff, "What is Visual Culture", The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998) p.3
3 D. Hawkes, "Ideology and the Postmodern", Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996) p.3
4 N. Mirzoeff, "What is Visual Culture", The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998) p.3
5 D. M. Levin, "Introduction" (Hegemony of Vision, Berkeley: UC Press, 1993) p.2
6 In similar framework, Pier Bordieu seeks to give an account for what type of discourses and institutions constitute the meaning of photography. And through his theory of "cultural boundaries", he defines photography as an aesthetic of middle class and worker class. P. Bordieu, Photography (trans. S. Whiteside, California: Stanford University. Press, 1990) p.73-98 John Fiske in his article "Videotech" focuses on the social function of the surveillance cameras and he questions the usage of them as color base discrimination devices through the questions of what they are for to protect and who they are for to discriminate and harass? And through his political analyse, he points out that the technological engagement in the social struggle never takes place on equal terms and even technology never operates outside of social determinants. J. Fiske, "Videotech", Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998) p.153-62
7 J. Derrida, "Semiology and Grammatology", Positions (trans. A. Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981) p.19
8 M. Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge & Discourse on Language, (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) p.7
9 J. Derrida, "Positions", Positions (trans. A. Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981) p.39-40
10 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, K. Soper, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) p.78-108, 145
11 In Margins of Philosophy, Derrida mentions philosophy in general as "philosophical culture". J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (trans. A. Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982) p.211
12 N. Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1999) p.52
13 D. Judovitz, "Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes", Hegemony of Vision (ed. D. M. Levin, Berkeley: UC Press, 1993) p.273-86
14 J. McCumber, "Derrida and Closure of Vision", Hegemony of Vision (ed. D. M. Levin, Berkeley: UC Press, 1993) p.234-51
15 T. R. Flynn, "Foucault and Eclipse of Vision", Hegemony of Vision (ed. D. M. Levin, Berkeley: UC Press, 1993) p.273-86
16 H. Blumenberg, "Light as a Metaphor for Truth", Hegemony of Vision (ed. D. M. Levin, Berkeley: UC Press, 1993) p.30-62
17 N. Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1999) p.13
18 I. Roggof, "Studying Visual Culture", The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998) p.14-26
19 Here I understand by "a given unitary whole" in terms of it described in post-structuralist thought. It is given since it is described as a subject to search for.
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