Visual Culture
The Future Of Visual Culture And Visual Studies
It seems clear that visual culture is not about to disappear but, rather, with the growing perception that visuality is one of the profound operators of our times and therefore a site of the twenty-first century's most important questions, we may expect critical approaches to visual culture to develop quite rapidly and with tremendous diversity. The American theorist Lisa Cartwright has written about medical imaging and its sociocultural implications in Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture. The legal scholars Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and Garry Peller have written on the evidentiary character of amateur video and the way in which racist, state, and aesthetic ideologies overcode the image. Writers from Raymond Williams to Lynn Spigel have analyzed television's reorganization of social space. Linda Williams considers pornography to be of central importance. Political scientist Armand Mattelart and sociologist Manuel Castells discuss the manner in which media and information flows are linked to the movement of capital and the restructuring of imaginary and built environments. Still others (such as the philosopher Douglas Kellner) have written on the connections between commercial television, ideology, and the waging of war. The theorist and artist Lev Manovich has written on the possibilities and implications of digital cinema, and Cubitt has broached the questions of digital aesthetics with tremendous insight and erudition. The media theorist Lisa Parks has written on "satellite and cyber visualities."
Looking toward the future and toward possible forms of the institutionalization of what he pointedly calls visual studies, the art historian James Elkins suggests that visual literacy courses should include history of Western art and mass media, but also an understanding and analysis of multicultural as well as multidisciplinary image making processes, including non-Western aesthetic productions, and scientific and satellite imaging. This author's view is that visual studies will amount to little more than an accommodation to shifting conditions of domination and the intensification of global inequality unless it is also imbued with the commitment to demonstrate both the preconditions for the production of images as well as the consequences of different modes of reception of these images.
See also Aesthetics; Arts; Cinema; Cultural Studies; Media, History of; Other, The, European Views of; Postmodernism; Propaganda; Third Cinema.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
Andersen, Robin. Consumer Culture and TV Programming. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Beller, Jonathan. Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalism and the World-Media-System. Manila, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004.
——."Kino-Eye, Kino World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production." In The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 2002.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.
Boyle, Deirdre. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bryson, Norman. "The Gaze in the Expanded Field." In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.
Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams, and Garry Peller. "Reel Time/Real Justice." In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. London: Sage, 1998.
Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Debray, Régis. Media Manifestos. Translated by Eric Rauth. London: Verso, 1996.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Elkins, James. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press: 1967.
Foster, Hal. "Scopic Regimes of Modernity." In his Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77. Translated by Colin Gordon, et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Hall, Doug, and Sally Jo Fifer, eds. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York: Aperture, 1991.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. London: F. Pinter, 1987.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Translated by Alain Sheridan. London: Hogarth, 1977.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1972.
Mattelart, Armand. The Information Society: An Introduction. Translated by Susan G. Taponier and James A. Cohen. London: Sage, 2003.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Rafael, Vicente L. White Love: And Other Events in Filipino History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World." In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, 2 vols., edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976–1985.
Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
——. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1974.
Jonathan Beller
Additional topics
- Visual Culture - Bibliography
- Visual Culture - Visuality, Mediation, Simulation, And Cybernetics
- Other Free Encyclopedias
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Verbena Family (Verbenaceae) - Tropical Hardwoods In The Verbena Family to WelfarismVisual Culture - The Visual Turn, Visuality, Historical Emergence Of The Field Of Vision As A Site Of Power And Social Control