See it My Way: Defining Visual Culture

This blog post will serve as a place to clarify my stance on certain topics that are important to my research. Rightfully, I should begin with visual culture. I take the combination of two words to mean, ‘the intellectual meeting place where users, viewers, and critics gain information, meaning, and pleasure from visual events as they engage with visual technologies within social relations.’ This definition is drawn from Nicholas Mirzoeff’s definition (i.e. ‘visual culture is concerned with visual events in which the user seeks information, meaning or pleasure in an interface with visual technology’) in Mirzoeff (1999). I chose his definition, because it was the most inclusive of the elements of visual culture beyond visual perception. His definition furthers my variation, because I intend to emphasize that visual culture is not solely an intellectual enterprise within the domain of academia. Hence, my addition of ‘social relations’ to my definition, which locates the visual in the lived reality of not only the analysts of the field, but also the users, viewers, consumers, and producers of it.

As a field, it suggests that the acts of visualizing (e.g. looking, viewing, gazing, spectating, observing, peering, imagining, remembering, etc.) involve certain elements (e.g. subject, identity, subjectivity, ideology, discourse, etc.) that account for how we envision social reality (i.e. visuality). In this case, the visible in culture is determined by a politics of what can be seen, and its elements that suggest meanings. For example, film alone is a vital aspect of modern popular culture providing audiences with ideas about culture, fashion, language, identities, music, etc. 

The meaning of this claim can be gleaned from what Jacques Rancière calls, “distribution of the sensible,” which suggests a socio-political essence of the visual. Following the logic of Rancière’s theory, visibility is a system of confirming commonality while also delineating certain parts and their functions (see Rancière [2004]: 12-13). What this means is that the visible in culture is determined by a politics of what can be seen, and its elements that suggest meanings. Film is a distribution system of the visual, and contemporary new media is an emerging stage in the evolution of media communication.

Sources

1) Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Visual Culture Reader, 1st Edition (New York: Routledge, 1999)

2) Rancière, Jacques (Gabriel Rockhill, trans). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004)