30 Visual Cultures and New Literature

Dr. Soma Mukherjee

Introduction

Modern world has been shaped and consistently reshaped by two great revolutions; i) Industrial Revolution and ii) Information Revolution. Human life, relationships, communication, culture, economy, idea of identity and community are greatly influenced by these revolutions. Understanding everyday life and culture is also changed due to these inevitable dynamic revolutions. From the theories of Culture, Mass/Popular Culture, Cyber culture, we are heading towards Visual culture, a distinct way of understanding everyday life. Visual culture is egressing as a raising and significant interdisciplinary field of study. Visual culture considers ‘images’ as cardinal point to the agency of signification in the modern world. The lurch towards visual culture is developing for many reasons, but important among all would be, an acknowledgement that affluent nations are considered as “a society of the spectacle” (Debord, 1967) or a society “of surveillance” (Foucault, 1977), and most importantly there society has also chosen “a visual turn” or a “pictorial turn” (Mitchell, 1994). Image has suddenly has become very central to the creation and distribution of knowledge and also construction of the identity. There is an attempt to aestheticise image production which is easy to create and manipulate with cutting edge technology. In the age mechanical reproduction, images are self-referential and immensely seductive.

Increasingly, everyday life in post-industrialized societies is experiencing incessant video monitoring from closed-circuit (CC) cameras in public spaces such as highways, buses, shopping malls, banks, ATMs and various other important spaces that attract the masses. Not only monitoring by various agencies (State, Police and multi-national corporations, etc.), even people ‘see’ themselves more and more through various technological devices (smart phones and web cameras) and that ‘seeing themselves’ radically changes the way their identity is constructed. Moreover, everyday life (work or leisure) is growingly revolved around visual media. Hence, Everyday life and experience is immensely visualized from the X-ray and various medical images of our body to Satellite images, and selfie. In this nascent age of visual culture, seeing ourselves and our viewpoint is focal point of discussion. Increasingly, life in advance capitalists countries everyday life is shaped and mediated by Film, Television and smart phone and the same trend immanent in developing countries such as India, especially urban areas. Cultural theorist, Mirzoeff observes this emerging culture argues that “In this swirl of imagery, seeing is much more than believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life.” (1999: 1).

Why Visual Culture?

After looking at the changing scenario and the role of image and visual practices in the modern world, one would like to consider whether we can treat visual culture as field of study. We find that postmodernism fails to cover everyday visual practices seriously while looking at the potential of visual experience in the modern world. Mirzoeff argues that “Postmodernism has often been defined as the crisis of modernism. In this context, this implies that the postmodern is the crisis caused by modernism and modern culture confronting the failure of its own strategy of visualizing. In other words, it is the visual crisis of culture that creates post-modernity, not its textuality.” (1991: 3). He also takes up Appadurai idea of post-modernism and argues that “The disjunctured and fragmented culture that we call postmodernism is best imagined and understood visually, just as the nineteenth century was classically represented in the newspaper and the novel.” (ibid) So this gives immense scope and opportunity to consider and establish visual culture as serious research area of study with a strong interdisciplinary approach from sociology, literature, art history, film, and television and media studies.

What is Visual Culture?

Visual culture is primarily deals with visual practices in which information is gathered and disseminated, construct meanings, and deliver various comforts and pleasures that are mediated through visual technology to the consumer. Through this visual technology, increasingly, everyday life is often understood through natural/enhanced/manipulated visuals of ‘looked-at-ness’. Though the presence of visual practices are predominant, the print culture would not be disappearing, however, it needs to negotiate with visual technologies and juxtapose print with visual practices and generate new meanings and understandings through phenomenon of Kindle reader, blogs, news apps and digitisation of older texts, etc. Mirzoeff attempts outline the aim of the visual culture as “… history of visual culture would highlight those moments where the visual is contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of social interaction and definition in terms of class, gender, sexual and racialized identities.” (1991:4). Many critics defined visual culture as a broader category that deals with all kind of images with absence intense focus. To some extent, this proposition holds water since post-modern world is immensely obsessed with image and visuality and it is difficult to pin point particular practice as visual culture. Since the phenomenon is so dynamic, one cannot study it through the prisms of conservative disciplines that predominantly exist in the universities. As argued by Mirzoeff, western culture has always given more importance to speech or spoken word and considered visual experience/practice as always below speech as ‘second-rate illusion of ideas’. But with the foray of visual culture this prevalent idea about speech is contested severely. Critics like W. J. T Mitchell developed the idea of ‘picture theory’ where he argues that western philosophy and science is disseminated pictorially rather than textually. This notion contests the theories of structuralism and post- structuralism which argue that written text and language are important for making of meanings. Mitchell’s picture theory argues that “the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that ‘visual experience’ or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable in the model of textuality” (1994, as cited in N. Mirzoeff, 1998). This proposition gives rise to the new slogan ‘world-as-a-picture’ from ‘world-as-a-text’. Though these pictures may not be purely visual in a modern technological sense but this hypothesis contests theories of culture that are understood purely in linguistic terms.

Visuality of everyday life

One of the significant characteristics of this visual culture is increasing trend to visualise practices that are not necessarily visual. As I mentioned above, new technologies made possible to ‘see’ things that are hitherto not possible such as medical scans, satellite images, telescope to see of galaxies and planets. Martin Heidegger, acclaimed German philosopher discussed this growing trend of seeing the world through pictures. He opined that picture doesn’t mean the image of the world map or countries but how world is perceived and constructed through pictures. And he also argues that this visual culture does not alter ancient societies into modern rather the world becomes picture through which we understand it. (Heidegger, 1977). Mirzoeff gives an example of how picture/visual plays very important role in everyday modern life while citing driving on the highways in developed societies. He says that

“The progress of the vehicle is dependent on a series of visual judgements made by the driver concerning the relative speed of other vehicles, and any maneuvers necessary to complete the journey. At the same time, he or she is bombarded with other information: traffic lights, road signs, turn signals, advertising hoardings, petrol prices, shop signs, local time and temperature and so on. Yet most people consider the process so routine that they play music to keep from getting bored. Even music videos, which saturate the visual field with distractions and come with a soundtrack, now have to be embellished by textual pop-ups.”

Hence, we witness significant effort to understand, comprehend, and interpret visual information by the driver that indicates how we are heading very fast from industrial society to informational society. In a sense, pictures, signs, visual objects have become part of life that guide and construct meanings and assist everyday life in a significant way. This visualization makes modern life quite dissimilar to ancient and medieval worlds. Though some way or the other, visuality had always existed in the world but it has become essential in the modern world which makes visual culture more relevant than ever.

However, there is equally growing criticism of role of visuality and its authenticity in everyday life. Major intervention in this regard is collapse or destruction of reality in the age of visual mass media. Questions of authenticity of the photographs that are appropriated by the people to construct their meaning to suit tier own political, social and cultural contexts are highlighted. This lead to outright denial of photographic image as a representation of reality, as it is prone to manipulation to twist and turn the ‘actual’ events. But critics also cite television as an important visual platform that creates a parallel universe that distorts reality through popular soap operas. Despite of these concerns, visual practice is not just medium of information and mass culture but it brings forth ‘sensual immediacy’ which can never be matched by the print media.

How to study visual culture?

One of the fundamental projects of visual culture is to interpret how these complex visual practices are juxtaposed and making meanings. One of the key aspect of visual culture is visual practices are not created or manufactured at one place. This phenomenon takes us away from our conservative approach of academia. While staying away from ‘structured formal viewing settings’ like the cinema and art gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life, visual culture looks at more dynamic practices that happen in everyday life which doesn’t differentiate various activities rather juxtaposes as one. The structured formal settings such as movie viewing, television or attending art exhibition would always facilitate us to look at the trends through the prisms of older theories of spectatorship which narrowly looks at our activities in isolation. However, most of our visual experience even in these structured locations takes place away from these formally structured moments of seeing. It is argued that “A painting may be noticed on a book jacket or in an advert, while television is consumed as a part of domestic life rather than as the sole activity of the viewer, and films  are as likely to be seen on video, in an aeroplane or on cable as in a traditional cinema.” (Mirzoeff, 1999: 7). Like the way cultural studies attempts to interpret ways of creating meanings in the consumption of mass cultures and literature is understood and deciphered through various literary theories, visual culture too looks at everyday visual experience, images, and video conversations. It is very important to understand these visual practises like any other activity produces some meanings which should be considered as texts to understand deeply and decipher further to lay foundation for broader visual cultural studies.

The first step to understand visual culture studies is an acknowledgement that the visual image/practice is not static but alters its relationship with external continuously its relationship to exterior reality. And this representation of reality fades and another takes place without displacing the other; hence, it is a continuous process. Mirzoeff brings this idea of reality and capturing the same through visual practices. He argues that

“The traditional image obeyed its own rules that were independent of exterior reality. The perspective system, for example, depends upon the viewer examining the image from one point only, using just one eye. No one actually does this but the image is internally coherent and thus credible. As perspective’s claim to be reality lost ground, film and photography created a new, direct relationship to reality such that we accept the “actuality” of what we see in the image.”

In a sense, the image is essentially dialectical since it establishes a symbiotic relationship between the “viewer in the present and the past moment of space or time that it represents.” (ibid) Hence, visual culture is historical subject since it converses fluently between the past, present and the future establishing credible dialectics. Moreover, visual images are ‘perspective images’ through which world is made more comprehendible from a particular stand point. That is why photographs are considered democratic with its ability disrupt the existing power structures through its perspectives.

Power and pleasure of visuality

Most theorists agree that dominance of the image is one most striking characteristics of the postmodernism. With the continuous propelling of various internet technologies, cyber culture, television, cinema and virtual reality. Despite its dominance, visual culture has been underrated when compared to the written text. Right from Plato who argued arts are far from truth since they only represent shadow of truth. In a sense, everything that we see and experience is copy of real world. Probably this notion continuously carried for decades and settled as any reproduction is bound to be manipulative and suspicious. This hostility to the image and reproduction gradually reduced, but not disappeared, with the foray of cultural studies as a serious discipline. Discussions about high art and low art, popular culture and elitist culture gained momentum. Cultural practices started to be looked and interpreted closely like any other text. However, I would not like to position visual culture as a study or visual culture as a practice in superior position compare to its contemporary studies. Moreover, to understand visual culture, one needs to look at collective nature of it instead of looking at sub categories such as art, film, television or video. As a dynamic activity that consistently throws various challenges, visual culture is primarily defined by the interaction between viewers and viewed, this in turn, may be called as a visual event. This visual event is understood as “… an interaction of the visual sign, the technology that enables and sustains that sign, and the viewer.” (14) In order to understand this ‘multiple interaction’, sophisticated interpretive tactics such as Semiotics. Semiotics as a science of signs, developed as framework formulated by the linguists to examine and interpret the written text and spoken word. This approach brings forth sign as an important component in meaning making and further to understand sign, two important concepts called, the signifier, that which is seen and the signified, that which is meant.

This unique interpretative tactic engineers great potential for exploring broader cultural phenomena. Theory of signifier and signified attained great importance from its rejection of any essential or casual relationship between the two halves of the sign and argued that the relationship between signifier and signified is purely arbitrary. For instance, an image of dog is taken to signify a dog not because it essentially is in some way dog-like but because the perceiving audience admits that it as exemplifying as a dog. Hence the image of dog and language that is deployed to explain dog does have arbitrary relationship. So it has potential change the modes of illustration over time or to be questioned by other ways of representation. Precisely, ‘seeing is not believing but interpreting’ (ibid). In the same way, visual images succeed or fail concordant to the level that one can construe them successfully.

The theory that understands culture through signs has been important component of western semiotics. And it has been developed in last four decades by the anthropologists and linguists who attempted to study society and kinship structures while using sign as an agency of interpreting the multi-layered structures of society. Initially, theorists with the help of sign theory started to affirm that any interpretation was a derivative of reading through signs. Hence, gradually, any interpretation of visual culture started with considering visual practice as “texts” and they are supposed to be “read” in order understand interpret deeper structures of meanings. But the problem with this strategy is that use of a sign as a representative of the total language system. Theorists of structuralism attempted to interpret the methods in which people deploy individual signs in order that understand the “deep structures” of society. Structuralism, as theory, is propagated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, promised to bring out the deep structures that underlie in all communities and cultures.

Though sign theory contributes immensely to the study of visuality of everyday life,  however, visual practices have to be studied and interpreted with the individual instances but not the total system. Moreover, in post modern world, one sign system can never be regarded as closed because new meanings and ways of understanding meaning are invariably useable to any language user. If the system in totality or in its entirety cannot be understood, then there is no point insisting on one sign as a manifestation of entire system. Therefore, the sign turns highly depended on and should only be understood or interpreted in its historical context. Visual culture, like any other, entails of sign analysis, ought to engage with historical contexts.

Future of visual culture

In the information age of television, internet, Social networking sites, CC TVs, High definition surveillance technologies, visual practices and its meaning making is here to stay for long. Studying or interpreting these visual practices through the prism of pure modernism or any conservative literary theories would be gross injustice to its field of study. Growing crisis of representing reality would eternal question to grapple with, however, focussing on the way visual images work in everyday life and understanding the dynamics of it would be rather intelligent way to deal with this new phenomenon. For this endeavour, one needs to go beyond traditional interpretation to “…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 disciplines at will.” (Mirzoeff, 1999: 11). To capture the true essence of this phenomenon and approach to study visual culture has to be a tactic rather than an academic discipline.

Reference

• Baudrillard, J., & Poster, M. (Eds.). (2002). Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (2nd ed.). Stanford: Stanford Uinveristy Press.
• Debord, G. (1977). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black & White.
• Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan Trans.) Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin
• Mirzoeff, N. (1998). “What is visual culture?”  In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.), The visual culture reader (pp. 3–13). NewYork: Routledge.
• Mirzoeff, N. (1999). An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge.