Читать книгу A Concise Companion to Visual Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 12

A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, and Catherine Zuromskis

This volume brings together the work of established and emerging scholars working across visual studies. Also called visual culture, and sometimes visual culture studies, visual studies is an interdisciplinary field that takes as its subject visual objects and practices of vision and visuality. For our purposes here, we identify visual studies as the interdisciplinary field that takes as its object the diverse and dynamic arena of visual culture. Whatever terminology one uses, we contend that the field and its objects of study are necessarily bound up with each other in ways that are inherently political. This interrelation is one of the fundamental premises on which visual studies was founded: that acts of looking and acts of making things visible (or invisible) matter.

Visual studies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a way to connect Marxist, feminist, poststructural, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theories to the study of art, film, and media and to visual objects and the practices of visuality itself, broadly conceived of. Its genesis was informed by a number of revolutionary developments in humanities scholarship in the late twentieth century, including the cultural studies of the Birmingham School for Social Research (demonstrated in the work of scholars such as Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, and Raymond Williams), psychoanalytic film theory (as exemplified by Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz), the Marxist and feminist turns in art history (embodied in the work of Meyer Schapiro, T. J. Clark, Griselda Pollack, and Linda Nochlin, among others), the translation and popularization of key texts in French cultural theory (such as those of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan) and Frankfurt School philosophy (represented by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Juergen Habermas, and Sigfried Kracauer). Pioneers of visual studies similarly imagined it as a renegade field, pushing at the boundaries of formal disciplines to challenge established paradigms of looking and seeing. Also central to the foundation of visual culture as a field of inquiry was the political project of postmodernism. Theorists of postmodernity (among them Jean Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Frederic Jameson) highlighted the demise of grand narratives, the importance of identity and relative subject positions, and the contingency of art and culture on the economy and politics. The sense of urgency to contextualize and politicize culture, to understand our own agencies and biases as authors, and to construct histories alternative to those written within traditional disciplines led to a sense of progressive political possibility in the study of media, art, and culture.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, visual studies began to become institutionalized. Academic programs were established in the United States and England, and the publication of foundational textbooks and readers helped to delimit the parameters of the field and to establish the key tropes of visual culture (see, for example, Bryson, Holly, and Moxey 1994; Mirzoeff 1998; Evans and Hall 1999; Sturken and Cartwright 2001). These concerns include the dynamics of the gaze, technologies of vision, the politics of representation, conceptions of space and surveillance, and changing notions of the body, subjectivity, and identity. By the turn of this century, professional organizations such as the College Art Association and the American Studies Association had established visual culture caucuses to showcase emerging work in the field, and visual studies saw strong representation at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Modern Language Association as well. In 2011 the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture was developed, transforming scholarly communications and publishing platforms for born‐digital and performance‐based material.

The collaboration that produced this volume is itself a product of the institutionalization of visual studies as an interdiscipline. We, the editors, met in the Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS) program at the University of Rochester in the early years of the twenty‐first century. VCS was founded in 1989 as a program in Comparative Arts (the name was changed to Visual and Cultural Studies program in 1991). Drawing together faculty from the departments of Art History, English, Modern Languages and Cultures, and Anthropology, the program’s founders shared an interest in poststructuralism. Founding faculty member Michael Ann Holly presents the genesis of the program as organic—a congregation of like‐minded scholars who, as D. N. Rodowick, another former faculty member, put it, sought to “get outside one’s field and exploit other resources” (Rodowick, quoted in Dikovitskaya 2005, 93).

Joan Saab joined the VCS program in 1999 as a junior faculty member with degrees in American studies and material culture studies. Aubrey Anable and Catherine Zuromskis came to it as doctoral students with backgrounds in women’s studies and film studies and in art history and cultural studies respectively. VCS was a space for all three of us to pursue avenues of inquiry that might not have been possible in more traditional programs. This experience informs our current teaching and writing on film, studio art, art history, media studies, game studies, material culture, performance, and space and the built environment. Because of our shared background, we come to the study of visual culture with a particular perspective, one shaped by the influential ideas of key faculty members in the VCS program—some of whom contributed to this volume—and nurtured through our participation in this dynamic scholarly community. This perspective emphasizes the infusion of activism and political urgency into humanities scholarship, the importance of engaging objects and discourses beyond film and art, and the necessity of interdisciplinarity to the study of certain kinds of visual objects and practices. We bring this perspective to the construction of the present volume.

Over the past thirty years, visual studies has matured and moved away from the margins. It is today an academic field established nationally and internationally, and is represented in the work of an increasingly diverse group of scholars with a broad range of social, cultural, and generational perspectives. This is in part due to a growing understanding, in a variety of disciplines (art history, literary studies, film and media studies, etc.), of the limitations of conventional cultural categories and traditional modes of disciplinary inquiry. Consequently, visual studies has intersected in vital ways with fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, new materialism, and posthumanism. Yet the broader acceptance of visual culture as an intellectual project has also generated resistance within the academy. In 1996, the journal October published its now notorious “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” which was deeply critical of visual studies, suggesting that it was “helping, in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 1996, 25). Relatedly, the very concept of interdisciplinarity has become fraught. While it offers sites of tremendous potential for exciting and transformative scholarship, it is also an all‐too‐convenient excuse for the neoliberal restructuring of university curricula without the infusion of new resources. Visual studies as a field is no exception. Some understandably wonder whether the institutionalization of the field has dulled its critical bite. As W. J. T. Mitchell argues in this volume, “I am all for visual culture studies serving as a source of ideas and tactics for the critical exposure of the spectacle. But I don’t see it as uniquely positioned as a form of political action—not any more than other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.”

Also at issue are the limitations of vision as a framework for cultural inquiry. With the increasing ubiquity of images as a phenomenon of contemporary digital life, the sheer volume of visual culture in the present moment is so vast and its content so ephemeral and mutable as to almost defy comprehension. Visuality can seem at times too broad and overdetermined a concept through which to grasp the present. Some media scholars, for example, have rejected visual studies, arguing that computers are fundamentally non‐optical technologies and that attention to the visual distracts us from the “real” sources of power, which are in the opaque, or even invisible realms of code, or in datasets so vast that they exceed human perception (see for example the work of Alexander Galloway and Friedrich Kittler). Given these critiques and important insights, we might well ask: why visual studies now? What is the urgency of a visual culture reader in the present moment?

Our answer is this: given the challenges and complexities of these new realities, the intellectual and political project of visual studies is especially necessary. Many of the political goals that drove the study of visual culture remain unfulfilled. Even as scholars mark the end of postmodernism as a set of historical conditions, it is apparent that many of the issues that postmodern criticism found to be most urgent are still awaiting resolution. At the time of this writing, we are witnessing the resurgence of hypernationalist demagoguery on a global scale, a looming climate change disaster, the escalation of anti‐immigrant rhetoric, the revitalization of white power, increasing economic disparities in first‐world nations, the co‐opting of poststructuralism and postmodernism to promote “alternative facts,” and, most recently, the widespread effects of a global pandemic. We cannot begin to address these threats, much less combat them, without understanding how they operate through visual (and other) forms of culture.

Moreover, while the rapid proliferation of new kinds of digital platforms and technologies in recent years has made the study of visual culture more challenging than ever, we believe that turning away from visual analysis reinforces the problematic idea that digital media are distinct from other forms of human cultural production. By contrast, we believe that these contemporary conditions underscore the continuing relevance of the questions that have always animated visual studies: What is the relationship between seeing and knowing? How do looking and visibility structure power relations? The chapters in this volume bear out the ongoing urgency of these questions. And while visual culture, particularly in the present moment, works both for and against us, we cannot retreat from visuality just because it makes us vulnerable. To paraphrase the words of Douglas Crimp, visual culture continues to offer a site of possibility for getting the culture that we deserve, as scholars and, more broadly, as cultural consumers. It is the playing field, and it is crucial that we understand how it operates, for good and for ill.

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This book is organized as a series of non‐traditional keyword essays (Part II) preceded by an introductory Part I, which we call “Scenes from the Institutionalization of the Field.” The preliminary material in Part I offers a brief history of the formation of visual studies; and it does so through a series of essays, interviews, and personal reflections from key figures in its foundation, dissemination, and critique. These “scenes” present various accounts of the influences, interests, and conflicts that determined the emergence and establishment of the field and shaped it over the past thirty years.

The keyword essays in Part II are grouped into five sections whose subject headings are “History,” “Ecologies,” “Mediations,” “Agencies,” and “Politics.” These subject headings and the keywords grouped under them as chapter titles are intended to be neither mutually exclusive nor comprehensive. Instead, these terms highlight the fertile and interrelating elements of visual culture scholarship in the present moment. The keywords are intentionally broad and, in choosing them, we sought to avoid jargon or particular scholarly trends. Rather than presenting traditional keyword essays that offer surveys of the existing literature or seek to conclusively define their terms, we invited contributors to approach their topics creatively, to propose their own takes, or to present case studies that connect a given keyword to their own scholarly interests. Ultimately, we hope that these essays will produce a dialogue between ideas and areas of inquiry that will enrich and expand our understanding of visual culture and its operations, from its historical origins to its present manifestations and its possible futures.