46
III: Locating the Field
By suggesting the visual has come to inhabit a central position in understanding
contemporary social phenomena we also infer that sociology, as a discipline, cannot be
without a concept of the visual. Although this position has been voiced time and again by
hands-on practitioners, visual sociology, or so the argument goes, remains a marginal
sub-discipline. Typically this marginal position is taken to reflect the neglect of
mainstream sociologists to address the ocular conventions of culture and social relations.
For some, such as Chris Jenks, the sad and subsequent result of this longstanding neglect
is that sociologists “have become inarticulate in relation to the visual dimensions of
social life.”102
Although this may be true in some respects, it is also much too broad and
presumptuous a statement.
First of all, the notion of longstanding neglect is and cannot be anything other
than relative to the shared expectations of those who routinely propose the urgency of
facilitating a rehabilitation of the visual in the social sciences. Secondly, there is a vital
distinction to be made between how hands-on and logo-centric practitioners deal with the
concept of the visual. The notion of longstanding neglect is not, in other words, a precise
and developed critique of the field but rather a symptom that reflects the lack of
(inter)relations between hands-on and logo-centric practitioners. Emmison and Smith
(2000) conjure a similar point when they write: “There have been notable problems in
connecting up with visual sociology as a subfield to the central theoretical traditions and
debates of social science. A symptom of these shortcomings is the widespread tendency
to use visual materials (photographs) in a purely illustrative, archival or documentary
way rather than giving them a more analytical treatment. One result is that most other
sociological researchers aren’t interested in what visual sociologists have to say.”103
That
is to say, the problem of acceptance that visual sociologists face in social science is
genealogical because it lies with the acknowledgement that the level of ones success (and
acceptance) is proportionate to the level whereby one acknowledges and incorporates into
ones work the simple insight that the primary function of central theoretical traditions is
to enable communication between scientists (see also Thomas Kuhn (1996) and Jeffery
102
Chris Jenks, The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction. In Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks
(London: Routledge, 1995), 1-25. 103
Emmison and Smith, Researching the Visual : Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural
Inquiry, ix.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
47
Alexander (2002)).104
Hence, the wanting acceptance of the work of visual sociologists
and their inability to produce visual representations that go beyond illustration are
symptoms of their failure to connect to the theoretical traditions of sociology. This
symptom is not without a cure; on the contrary, it beckons its own alleviation by unifying
superficially disparate yet commensurate practices of hands-on and logo-centric
traditions.
The Analytic Divide
As already noted, there is a significant difference in how the visual is conceptualized and
perceived by hands-on and logo-centric oriented practitioners of the field. In the broadest
sense of the term we find the claim that hands-on oriented practitioners tend to operate in
a limited field of vision, while theoretical oriented logo-centric practitioners tend to
operate in an expanded field of vision. In more concrete terms and according to Emmison
and Smith (2002), Douglas Harper (1998), and Elizabeth Chaplin (1994) to name a few,
this divide pits hands-on practitioners’ somewhat narrow fixation on documentary
photography against those who adhere to a theory driven and logo-centric practice – a
practice that more broadly conceptualizes vision and its many modes of representation as
sites of culture and knowledge production.
However, as indicated earlier this divide is also geographical in its origin. It
conjures the fact that the hands-on approach to visual sociology is an inherently North
American invention that began in the mid 70s while the logo-centric tradition of visual
inquiry has its roots in continental European sociology (Simmel, Adorno, Benjamin,
Freund, Marcuse and Foucault) and more recently in British cultural studies (Stuart Hall,
Dick Hebdige, Terry Eagleton, Sarat Maharaj, W.J.T. Mitchell and Raymond Williams).
Generally speaking, the hands-on approach to visual sociology is driven by an
ethnographic, grounded theory mode of inquiry most notably associated with the Chicago
school of sociology and Howard S. Becker (the founding father of visual sociology) in
particular.1 With its inductive approach to generating contextually sensitized concepts
and theories the theoretical allegiance of hands-on practitioners lies with the ethos of
symbolic interactionism and is reflected in the redundancy of theoretical abstraction, as
well as the lack of conceptual generalization. Hence, when set in contrast to their logo-
104
J. Alexander and P. Smith, The Strong Program of Cultural Theory – Elements of a Structural Hermenutics ed.
Jonathan H. Turner, Handbook of Sociological Theory (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002), 135-
50.
48
centric continental European and British Cultural Studies counterparts, hands-on
practitioners tend to exhibit a scarce interest in conceptualizing ambiguous and abstract
theories of power and conflict.
In hopes that a contextual understanding of visual inquiry will come to fruition, a
brief and somewhat annotated linking of the three traditions (Continental European
Sociology, North American Sociology and British Cultural Studies), will be presented by
tracing the theoretical heritage of each. However neither of these traditions are as easily
or neatly partitioned, as their headings would have them be. In fact many of the persons
that we are able to link to different approaches are also linked to one another, either
through mutual interests and common struggles, as student/teacher, or as a source of
inspiration, etc. Hence, the divide is instructive and practical as a conceptual organization
of knowledge rather than definitive and absolute. The overall guide to contextualizing
these are thus granted by the observation that the intentionality of the producer defines
the nature and therefore also the allegiance of one’s knowing.
Continental European Sociology (the logo-centric tradition)
When we comb through the annals of sociological thought, we find that logo-centric
visual inquiry was first made explicit at the turn of the 20th
century by George Simmel.
Not only did Simmel, who lived and worked in Berlin, write in a vivid and stylish prose,
he also published an important essay on the human senses in which vision was given
primacy in matters of human interaction. This keen sense of vision is powerfully
reverberated throughout his work and is perhaps most vividly represented in his essays on
style, fashion and adornment.105
Simmel’s influence was to be thoroughly felt in
continental European sociology and particularly in what would later come to be known as
the Frankfurt School. It was through his student Siegfried Krackauer, who was Theodore
Adorno’s tutor and a close friend of Walter Benjamin that Simmel’s ideas would
disseminate and find their most fertile ground.106
Although scarcely represented in the
work of hands-on practitioners, the Frankfurt School constitutes the quintessential logo-
105
Georg Simmel, Sociology of the Senses in Simmel ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, Simmel on Culture :
Selected Writings (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997). 106
E.g. in what would have been Benjamin’s Magnus Opum The Archcades Project the only sociologist quoted is
Simmel! See also David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity : Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer,
and Benjamin, 1st MIT Press ed., Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1986).
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
49
centric progenitors of visual inquiry.107
What is not readily known about the Frankfurt
School, and to which I will return in detail later, is that many of the concepts and ideas of
its most illuminating writer, Walter Benjamin, are heavily indebted to his encounter with
key figures of the Surrealist movement during his exile in Paris in the 1930s. In recent
times, two of the most prominent continental European figures linked to the legacy of the
Frankfurt School are Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. Although both have written
extensively about other topics, they have also consistently engaged the visual dimensions
of contemporary life.108
North American Sociology (the hands-on & logo-centric approach)
In North America, Robert E. Park, a founding member of the Chicago School, was a key
figure in bringing the ideas of German sociology to Chicago. While this import had no
immediate effect in terms of exploring visual phenomena, it sparked a renewed interest in
the ethnographic and interpretative approach. Or as David Lee and Howard Newby write,
“it was not Weber but George Simmel, Weber’s enigmatic contemporary with whom
Park had studied and who remained the major influence on Park when he returned to the
USA.” (1994: 319).109
This influence was to be felt in Park and his contemporary, W.I.
Thomas, whose inquiry into new forms of sociation and social change were seen as part
of a larger question of what made society possible.110
In simple terms, this kind of
inquiry, which would come to be the hallmark of mainstream interactionist thought,
reflected Simmel’s quest to construct models of different forms social relations, or
“sociation,” which he believed characterized particular social groups or whole societies.
Or as Simmel also wrote, “Society, is merely the name for a number of individuals,
connected by interaction.”111
Hence, it is with some irony that Jon Prosser recalls how
Park, who was also “a ‘concerned’ journalist by profession interested in social change did
not foresee the potential of photojournalism in the newly evolving qualitative
107
The most notable contemporary visual sociologist to engage the Frankfurt School is Elizabeth Chaplin. 108
See also J. Habermas, Modernity - an Incomplete Project, 1st ed., The Anti-Aesthetic : Essays on Postmodern
Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983) and Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983). 109
D. Lee and H. Newby, The Problem of Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), 319. 110
For an in-depth account of the Interactionst legacy see Berenice M. Fisher and Anselm L. Strauss, Interactionism,
ed. T. B. Bottomore and Robert A. Nisbet, A History of Sociological Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 111
Simmel in T. B. Bottomore and R. A. Nisbet, "Structuralism," in A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. T. B.
Bottomore and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 589. Simmel in Georg Simmel, "The Sociology of
George Simmel. Glencoe, Illinois," (The Free Press, 1950), 10.
50
tradition.”112
This missed opportunity, however, was remedied by Chicago School
prodigies Howard S. Becker (1974) and Erwin Goffman’s (1976) use of images. While
Goffman ‘only’ used the images of others (see Gender Advertisements (1976), Becker, as
I have shown, was the first to connect the dots and applaud the sociologist’s eye as a
legitimate producer of images.113
British Cultural Studies
Like its continental European counterpart, British Cultural studies is strongly
interdisciplinary in its orientation. The brainchild of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies ((CCCS), 1964-2002), also known as the Birmingham School, which
was one of the first research traditions to apply French nouvelle vague theorizing (e.g.
Lévi-Strauss, Barthes & the early Foucault) outside the hothouse Parisian environment,
melds the Neo-Marxists understanding established by Gramsci about the role played by
cultural hegemony in maintaining cultural relations with ideas about cultural texts.114
It is
therefore only natural that major figures of critical theory, such as Lukacs, Benjamin,
Krakauer, Adorno and Marcuse, who developed the idea that art reflects social
organization and the class structure that produces it, also feature prominently in the work
of cultural studies practitioners. Although many of the early texts by practitioners of
Cultural Studies centered on traditional sociological themes such as work, the state, crime
or deviance, its ongoing destabilization of disciplinary boundaries, as well as its
commitment to confronting existing social inequalities patterned around race, class,
sexual orientation and gender through visual themes has pushed the orientation of the
field toward the arts. This push is not coincidental, but occurs simultaneously with the
emergence of what has been dubbed New Art History.
112
J. Prosser, "The Status of Image-Based Research," in Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative
Researchers (London ; Bristol, PA: Falmer Press, 1998), 104-5. 113
In Gender Advertisements (1976) Goffman forcefully argued that advertisements subscribe to gendered
idealizations of conduct. Among other things it is in this remarkable work that Goffman introduced the concept of
“licensed withdrawal,” i.e. the tendency to depict women in ways that suggests they are away or not consciouly
connected to context in which they are depicted. Note: Gisele Freund (1908-2000) who studied under Karl Manheim
and Norbert Elias is not only the first, but also the most accomplished sociologist to use a camera. Freund was a
founding member of Magnum Photo Agency. Her 1936 dissertation Photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle
was pubished in 1968 under the title Photographie und bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Eine kunstsoziologische Studie and
later as Photography and Society (1974). 114
See also D. Harper, "An Argument for Visual Sociology," in Image Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative
Researchers, ed. Jon Prosser (London: Falmer Press, 1998)., Alexander and Smith, The Strong Program of Cultural
Theory – Elements of a Structural Hermenutics
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
51
New Art History came into existence during the late 1970s and 1980s and posed a
serious challenge to an otherwise notoriously conservative field - a field whose sole
concerns until then had been with ‘style, authenticity, dating, rarity, reconstruction, the
detection of forgery, the rediscovery of forgotten artists and the meaning of pictures.’ In
contrast, New Art History and changing art practices embraced a sociological
perspective, and so instead of beginning with art and working its way outwards, the new
form reversed the procedure by looking from the social fabric to the art it produced. Here,
the social aspect of art and the strong emphasis on theory are what dominate cultural
practice, hence the snug cultural studies fit.115
In terms of theoretical influence, it is worth
noting the wide-ranging confluence (and import) of theoretical interest that New Art
History has with Cultural Studies, i.e. Marxian perspectives such as feminist theory,
queer theory, race theory, critical theory and quintessentially all things psychoanalytic
and post-(modern/structural/colonial/etc.). Cultural studies has since drifted further into
the terrain of art, and it no longer makes sense to distinguish the work of its practitioners
from those of New Art History, as their interests basically are the one and same.116
The Turn to Diversification
While American cultural sociology is characterized by its poorly developed links to other
disciplines (Smith 1998), hands-on practitioners have looked to visual anthropology and
documentary photography as an important source of inspiration. Its outlook, however,
has also been marked by some of the same forces that shaped an emergent American
cultural sociology, hence the discourse of its followers remain very strongly tied to
disciplinary themes and debates, with the primary audience consisting of a peer group of
scholars within the same sub-area of the same discipline; a feature that no doubt lends
explanation, as perceived by its practitioners, to the marginal status of the field. While
much of the development of visual sociology can be seen to run parallel to American
cultural sociology, recent events such as the renaming and moving of the main journal
Visual Studies from the US to England in 2001 along with the increased popularity of
115
See A. Pryce, "Visual Imagery and the Iconography of the Social World: Some Considerations of History, Art and
Problems for Sociological Research," Methodological Imaginations. London: MacMillan (1996): 99. J. Harris, The
New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001). 116
This turn of events and the drifting of cultural studies into art is perhaps best exemplified by the curators of
Documenta XI. Every four years Documenta is held in Kassel, Germany. It is a massive event and is for visual art what
the Olympics are for athletes. Hence the fact that prominent cultural studies professors organized and curated the show
indicate the degree to which cultural studies is embeddedness in the field.
52
visual sociology at universities throughout Europe signals that the theoretical influence of
the field may now be shifting toward European traditions of sociological inquiry.117
In contrast it is interesting to note that the continental European model of
sociological inquiry has always demanded an interdisciplinary and occasionally mass
audience. Here, the task of exerting the widest possible influence on intellectual life by
engaging multiple spheres of public debate and even, in some cases, various media of
cultural production (e.g. novels, drama, visual art as well as academic texts) are what
define academic prestige.118
Nevertheless, it is in academic texts that the contrasting
expectations and audiences of the three traditions become apparent. For example, in the
works of continental European sociologists such as Adorno, Habermas, Foucault or
Bourdieu, frequent references are made to philosophy, linguistics and aesthetics. While
American cultural sociologists might “draw upon these fields in developing theory,”
Smith notes that, “few would feel motivated or qualified to develop a sustained critique
of a Noam Chomsky or a Susan Sontag or a Sigmund Freud,” just as “the American
cultural sociologist is also less likely to produce work as an ‘intervention’ in ongoing
political and social movement struggles.”119
In more general terms, Smith reminds us that
academic work in North American sociology is “narrower in its scope, more limited in its
ambitions, more cautious in its claims, and more precise in its formulations, if less
visionary in its diagnosis.”120
Hence, the common observation that North American
sociologists are less engaged in abstract theoretical issues and public debate than they are
discussing key issues within their academic subfield. These ‘insular’ traits are manifest in
the primacy given to methodological discussions in the hands-on approach, just as they
are reflected in the ethnographically dense and theoretically thin discourse of its
practitioners.
After the cultural vacuum left by Parsons and functionalism, American
sociologists once again began to embrace culture. Untainted by vice of association with
functionalism, European structuralist and poststructuralist thought provided new and
exciting models of culture. Smith notes, “This new knowledge was ‘pure’ rather than
‘polluted’ and allowed theorists to conduct cultural research without fear of stigma. Yet
117
Visual Sociology, 1991-2001 (US) → Visual Studies, 2002- (UK). See also, D. Harper, "What's New Visually?," in
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (London: Sage Publications Inc,
2005), 748. 118
E.g. both Jean-Francois Lyotard and Bruno Latour have curated major art exhibits. 119
Philip Smith, The New American Cultural Sociology, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies (Cambridge [England]:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6. Re: the debacle with Small and the visually oriented social reformers are an
early sign of the tendency to denigrate interventionist practices. 120
Ibid.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
53
although foreign ideas about culture were taken up with the greatest enthusiasm, they
were reworked in a distinct, American style.”121
This style arose from the organization
and culture of the North American sociological field and is above all characterized by its
“preference for empirically grounded, middle-range research.”122
Nonetheless, one can
only speculate whether it is the lack of theoretical anchoring that made early visual
sociologists blind to the structuralist and poststructuralist waves from abroad. Under any
circumstance, it would not be wrong to assume that the preference of North American
sociologists for empirically grounded, middle range research provides us with a clue to
the ethnographic character of early visual sociology, its proclivity for photographic field
studies and its disinterest in theoretical cannons. However, it is equally plausible to
assume that the pioneers of visual sociology were so preoccupied with trying to adjust
their endeavors to the mainstream doxa of North American sociology that they missed
out on the visual orientation of their European counterparts (e.g. the Critical Theorists
and the CCCS in Birmingham).123
Consequently, instead of thinking the visual in
philosophical or political interventionist terms, they thought of it as an ethnographic tool
for gathering information; hence the frequent quasi-positivistic references made to visual
imagery as ‘data’ and the marginal status of the field.
The problem, therefore, lays not so much with the fact that hands-on practitioners
of visual sociology are without a concept of the visual but rather with the fact that their
knowledge of vision and visuality is characterized by being narrowly defined and
unreflexive. The attempt to compile a history of visual culture within the context of a
hands-on approach to visual sociology is therefore primarily an effort to broaden how
vision and visuality are put to use, so that we may arrive at a point where visualization is
no longer exclusively bound to documentary modes of photographic representation but
instead to much more playful, free-spirited and reflexive modes of visual investigation.
This said, the intent of this thesis is not to render documentary and other forms of
naturalistic inquiry invalid, but rather to present some of the key historical and theoretical
concepts of vision and visuality so that these can be used to contextualize and make
possible a fusion of hands-on and logo-centric approaches.
121
Ibid. 5-6 122
Ibid. 10 123
For a detailed account of the differences and import of European theory into North American cultural sociology see
Smith, The New American Cultural Sociology.
54
IV: Visual Culture – Finding Common Ground
There exists an abundance of texts written by or on contemporary visual artists that
establish sociology as part and parcel of much of what they do. Under normal
circumstances one would be compelled to draw-up comparisons between visual art and
visual sociology either on the basis of examples or through grand hermeneutical readings
that establish the former as a social and critically engaged discipline. Neither are
particularly well suited for what I have in mind. Primarily because it severely limits of
the kinds of arguments that can be made, i.e. examples of how the work of this or that
visual artist is informed by sociological knowledge does not amount to establishing
contingency between the two disciplines, it only illustrates that visual artists (with
varying degrees of success) are capable of incorporating sociological knowledge in their
work. Secondly, because the topics and means whereby visual artists incorporate
sociological content into their projects is too overwhelming and diverse to categorize or
interpret as a meaningful whole.
Luckily, there exist an other more viable path for establishing contingency
between the two disciplines; a path from which visual sociology has the potential to
emerge as a theoretically vibrant and visually diverse discipline. To begin, the logo-
centric traditions of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies along with various strains of
postmodern thought draw a great deal of inspiration from the field of visual art, just as
contemporary visual artists, critics, curators and art historians (e.g. New Art History)
draw a great deal of inspiration from sociological theory. Secondly and expressed in
equally generalizing terms the connection between the disciplines of these two modes of
investigation condense in and around notions of visual culture; a guiding concept, that
broadly speaking illuminates how contemporary societal concerns and social phenomena
are figurations of historical and contextually specific visual regimes and cultures. Last
but not least practitioners in both fields are acutely aware that new technology is an
important vehicle for bringing about social change, just as they are aware that the impact
and use of such technology is paramount for staging interpretations of such change. For
example, the proliferation of images made possible by the advent of photography,
exacerbated by the invention of film, and distributed on an previously unimaginable scale
by their digitization, can be seen as a key characteristic of contemporary social
organization, because it facilitates the lifting out of social relations from local contexts
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
55
and the reorganization of these across vast tracts of space and time.124
The point being,
that our understanding of visual culture as a means of addressing society and social
phenomena is characterized by an alignment of sociological and artistic concerns.
The Sociological Relevance of Visual Culture
Visual culture implies the existence of particular structures for the gaze, for seeing and
for the excitement, desire, voyeurism or fear of looking. It also captures a physical and
psychical space for the individual to inhabit as a bearer and producer of meaning. As
such it is not uncommon to find that the study of visual culture involves a semiotic
exploration of the codes and conventions of non-linguistic symbol systems and the ways
they work to bring meaning to fruition in everyday life (e.g. Pierce and Barthes).
However, there are also less schematic ways of going about. For example one might as
Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault set out to explore sociologically how subjects
occupying particular social, cultural and temporal positions, are constituted through and
are actively engaged (or disengaged) in the production of meaning. Bourdieu for example
has spent a great deal of his intellectual life studying how the field of visual art, or as he
dubbed it, the field of restricted cultural production, (re)produces cultural legitimacy by
keeping those at bay ‘who cannot apply any other code to works of scholarly culture
other than that which enables them to apprehend as meaningful object of their everyday
environment.’125
For Foucault, on the other hand, contemporary life is characterized by
an ever-increasing capillarization of disciplinary power, which he sees exercised through
anonymous modes surveillance and control. In this sense it is somewhat ironic to note
that the work of Foucault has acquired an almost omnipresent status among theoreticians,
urban planners and artists who seek to unveil the mechanisms that underwrite
contemporary power relations.126
Yet another equally common way of conceptualizing
visual culture is through the use of psychoanalytic concepts of misrecognition to conjure
124
Naturally these technologies would not be possible or have a mass impact if it weren’t for the invention and
presence of other ‘non-visual’ technologies. For examples of how visual artists and theoretical practitioners have
conceptualized new technology see Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, Ctrl Space Rhetorics of
Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), 2002). 125
Pierre Bourdieu and Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production : Essays on Art and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), 217-18. see also A. Amtoft, "Freedom Ready-Made: A Critique of Contemporary
Visual Art " (Copenhagen: Dept. of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, 2004). 126
In 1973 architect and urban planner Oscar Newman published a widely influential book titled ‘Defensible Space –
Crime Prevention through Urban Design’ which changed the way architects and urban planners worked. This
exceptional book was published 4 years before Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – the birth of the prison. With its
prescriptive techniques for planned surveillance it makes an excellent accompaniment to the penetrating critique of
Foucault.
56
how the subject’s relation to significant others and the external world is founded. Here
the visual takes on an unconscious dimension as it is situated in an economy of pleasure
and power, desire, domination and submission – thus bringing a psychoanalytic
awakening of the optical unconscious as a site of social critique and understanding of
‘self’ to the fore.127
Along with semiotics this mode of conceptualizing visual culture
figures prominently in both feminist and post-colonial discourse.128
An important contemporary figure who addresses the notion of visual culture by
incorporating and mixing semiotic, sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives is
W.J.T. Mitchell. Unlike many others Mitchell has made a career out of reminding
scholars that there is a whole world of vision that lies beyond the realm of fine art; a
world that undoubtedly is much more important for our understanding of the human
condition because it poses the simple question of how people see the world, how they
mediate the world through various forms of representation and how images come into
being and circulate. From this perspective, Thomas Edison’s invention of the
incandescent light bulb is seen to be just as important (if not immensely more so) than the
art it illuminates.
The comprehensive perspective outlined by Mitchell is not just a matter of adding
to images the technology that sets their staging, but also how we as humans interact with
and create meaning through seeing. In this sense visual culture is equally conceptualized
as a matter of spectatorship, and as spectators we look at many things that are not images:
for instance, architecture, landscapes, fireworks, other people, food, traffic lights, clouds,
watches, texts, passports, money, speedometers and ‘occasionally’ our selves. Indeed
everyday practices of looking are as much about finding similarity, identification,
eroticism and wonderment as they are about discerning difference, particularity, prowess
and discrimination. Hence, an inevitable topic of visual culture is to explore how the gaze
corroborates discourse that stereotype and caricature roles of gender, race, sexual
orientation, class, religious or cultural identity. Equally important, at least by
contemporary and historical standards, is the fact that vision and visualization have
attained, with the help of technology, a high degree of abstraction. Except for the most
remote and isolated indigenous peoples, the field of vision is no longer bound to
127
E.g. typically this strategy is exemplified by the Surrealist movement. 128
For examples see Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall [Post-Colonial theory]. Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose
[Feminist theory] all in Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, Visual Culture : The Reader (London ; Thousand Oaks: SAGE
Publications in association with the Open University, 1999). See also the anthropologist and visual artist Trinh Minh-
Ha for a compilation of these perspectives.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
57
experiencing our immediate surroundings.129
Rather it is increasingly besieged by images
of phenomena and of distant events and places that are either hidden from view or
entirely artificial.130
Hence, visual culture and the process of visualization is as much a
matter of making visible that, which cannot be seen as it is about rendering copies and
instances of that which can. This suggests that the visual process, i.e. the process of
visual observation, interpretation, and visualization is as crucial to cultural production as
it is to understanding.131
Striking a more radical vein we find postmodern theorists such a Jean Baudrillard
who conceptualize visual culture in terms of seduction, simulation and hyper-reality. For
Baudrillard the postmodern condition is characterized by an increasingly fast paced
bombardment of seductive forms of communication (e.g. globalized mass media).
According to Baudrillard these forms have steadily morphed into a hyper-reality where
the real is effaced by the signs of its existence as simulacra. Meaning and meaning
production are thereby displaced to a wholly artificial realm in which the emptying out of
real-world content of its notions of true and false, right and wrong, fact and fiction,
brings with it an interpretive vertigo whose effect reveals the illusion of ontological truth.
For Baudrillard, then, power lies not with the ideological but with the seductive economy
of simulacra and its ability to reinscribe ad infinitum an image of itself onto reality as
reality.132
The hyper-reality thus conjured is not unlike the dystopic science fiction film
The Matrix (1999) whose narrative plots a future (present) in which the real has become
virtual and man ‘lives’ in a dreamworld created by machines he does not control. While
Baudrillard’s eccentric style and provocative ideas have made him a controversial figure,
129
Because of the global flux of peoples and products, and as anthropologists have argued for some time, the isolation
of indigenous peoples from ‘outside’ exposure have become a rarity. 130
E.g. optical instruments like microscopes, telescopes, and specialized cameras enable images to be made of things
that are too small, too far away, too slow moving, or too fast moving to be seen or noticed with the naked eye. While
such images can be said to be prototypes for one widely recognized mode of scientific visualization, they do not
exhaust the field. Some figures, like the drawings of duck-rabbits and reversible cubes in perceptual psychology texts,
act as templates for elucidating perceptual effects. Hence, a reversible cube is not just a line drawing of a three-
dimensional figure, it is a textual artifact with which the viewer interacts to produce a visible effect. An other less
exotic example, and therefore also more abstract, is the telescoping of vision into television, ‘live’ real-time and
otherworldly! Also computer games are entirely artificial constructs. The pun “Out of sight, out of mind” has become
contentious to say the least. 131
See also W. J. Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? : The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005). and Mitchell, W. J. Thomas in Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture : The Study of the Visual
after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). Dick Hebdige, Subculture, the Meaning of Style
(London: Methuen, 1979). 132
M. G. Durham and D. Kellner, "Introduction Part V," in Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, ed. M. G. Durham
and D. Kellner (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 513-21. and Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of
Simulacra," in Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
58
it is safe to say that his highly original work continues to be a rich source of inspiration
for those engaged in the discourse (and practice) of visual culture.133
The above are but a few and admittedly very brief examples on how visual culture
has and can be conceptualized. What is important to latch on to, however, is that
whatever strategy or combination of strategies are applied, the notion of visual culture
always comes back to the ways in which vision and visuality are embedded in systems of
representation and how different representational forms (advertisement, architecture,
communication and surveillance technologies, mass media, documentary photography,
religious icons, movies, fashion, graphic design, visual art, scientific data, etc.,) are used
to set meaning in motion. The crucial link here being how these forms and systems enter
into a complex set of relations with the cultural practices of looking and interpretation,
practices that are at the other end of the meaning chain and which situate, as Stuart Hall
notes, “the subjective capacity of the viewer to make images signify.”134
However, one
thing is to ascribe meaning to the world in which we live, another is to engage in this
process reflexively and self-consciously.
Reflexivity as a Site of Discovery and Epistemic Questioning
There is a significant body of knowledge that suggests that changes in how we make
sense of the world, are directly linked to changes in sense perception and vice versa. Here
the common and singularly profound observation is that technology (esp. visual
prosthetics, i.e., devices that apprehend our sense of sight) plays an integral role in the
making and shaping of the observer and the observed.135
For when the object of our
knowledge is constituted through what we see and do, then a reconfiguration of how we
see and do things is also a reconfiguration of our knowledge of that thing. Or put
differently, when new ways of seeing and doing things are discovered (as is often the
case in scientific revolutions) we find ourselves responding to a different world. In the
natural sciences, which rely a great deal on visual prosthetics, we find an abundance of
133
For examples see also Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, www.ctheory.net; Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of
Signs and Space (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994). [Theory]. Dan Perjovschi, Jon Kessler, Thomas
Hirschhorn [Visual Art]. Utopie (1967-78); James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere : The Rise and
Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). [Architecture & Urban Planning]. 134
S. Hall, "Introduction Part 2," in Visual Culture : The Reader, ed. J. Evans and S. Hall (London: SAGE
Publications, 1999), 310. 135
I.e. technology shapes both our physical surroundings and our knowledge of the world in which we live.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
59
discoveries that have changed how we make sense of the world.136
Such moments of
discovery are fittingly described as moments of eureka! To a varying degree the same can
be said to apply to sociology and visual art. Nevertheless, the difference between how
natural scientists as opposed to sociologists and visual artists acquire knowledge of the
world is given by the difference of their object of study. For when the object of sociology
(and visual art) is that of society and social phenomena, one cannot claim that the
knowledge or methodologies extracted from such an inconsistent realm possess the same
kind of homogeneity as found in classical natural science.137
While this difference does not exempt sociologists from acquiring new
knowledge through use of technology (e.g. camera’s, computers, GPS, etc.,) it does
exempt natural scientists from acquiring the same kind of knowledge that sociologists
gather because the object of the former subscribes to an innate homogeneity that is
constituted independently of sense perception.138
What is suggested then is that when the
object of sociology changes so does the sense perception of the sociologists or visual
artist. Societal transformations, for example, tend to bring changes in sense perception, as
was the case of nineteenth century urbanization and industrialization processes when
people had to readjust their senses to metropolitan life, and as is the case of the current
situation where people increasingly have to transition their outlook from analogue life to
a life infused with digital communication technology. From this perspective social
transformations not only reconfigure social relations they also entail new ways of seeing
and doing things.139
The ability to understand and pinpoint how these new ways of seeing
and doing things affect us is essential to the task of being able to meaningfully interpret
what social transformations entail.
To this, the diverse body of knowledge of how vision and visuality have been
configured throughout history provide ample opportunity for hands-on practitioners to
explore how seeing by other means can be gainfully (and consciously) employed for
interpreting society and social phenomena in new and exciting ways. Thus, intimating
that somewhere in this body of knowledge lies a eureka moment awaiting to be
discovered by a hands-on practitioner, a decisive moment that will lead him or her to see
136
See for example Thomas S. Kuhn, "Revolutions as Changes of World View," in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 137
See also Theodor W. Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976), 77. 138
It is precisely because of the features of its object that natural science is near impossible to imagine without visual
prosthetics whereas sociologists and to a lesser degree visual artists can easily do without prosthetic aids. 139
In this sense it could be worth speculating whether the attractiveness of ubiquitous computing and free for all Wi-
Max lies with the fact that the mobility it offers is also one that offsets our sense of being ‘chained’ to a screen.
60
and do things differently. As I will now briefly show Gestalt psychology provides us with
an elementary prototype of how and why this switching occurs.
The Visual Gestalt: An Elementary Prototype of How We Make Sense of the World
In Gestalt psychology ambiguous visual pictures such as Joseph Jarrow’s (1899) duck-
rabbit and Louis Albert Necker’s (1832) cube are classical prototypes of how fluctuations
in visual perception influence how we make sense of the world and ourselves. They also
suggest how changes in our surroundings (because social life is dynamic and unstable)
solicit new ways of seeing/knowing things. It is precisely because these images entice us
to reflect on what vision and visualization are, that they are able to infer the notion that
epistemic questioning entails not just a logo-centric but also a visual set of practices.
fig. 4 Duck-rabbit and Necker cube as pictured by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations
(1953)
In a fairly straightforward manner the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube are about how
difference and similitude, the shifting of names, identities and perspective occur in the
field of vision. The duck-rabbit with one image concealed inside another displays signs
of visual nesting. Either we see a duck (a beak) or a rabbit (ears), but we never see both at
the same time. Similarly by staring at the Necker cube we notice that the cube flips, that a
corner of the cube that was in front now suddenly is behind, and vice versa. We can
therefore say that the cube (whether seen from above or below), like the duck-rabbit
(duck or rabbit), represents two equally valid interpretations. In either case both are
examples of ambiguous multi-stable images in which vision picks an interpretation that
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
61
makes the whole consistent within the frame of one of several possibilities.140
In principle
and because pictures have always been more than lines shapes and colors on flat surfaces,
it can be said that ambiguous images such as the duck-rabbit and the cube allude to the
fact that pictures (like language) are bearers of multiple meanings. Ambiguous multi-
stable images are therefore as much an instrument for understanding pictures, as they are
a means of calling into question the self-understanding of the observer. We can therefore
say that the transformation from one perceptual gestalt to an other solicits a situation in
which a shift within the knower and the known take place.141
Epistemic Questioning and Perceptual Shifts
When it comes to epistemic questioning visual and logo-centric practices are not
mutually exclusive phenomena, but rather configured so that one exists within, and is an
effect of, the other. Meaning that ambiguous images reflect how paradigms change
because they show that “what were ducks in the scientists world before the revolution are
rabbits afterwards.”142
There is of course a certain disjunction between the perceptual
shifts of ambiguous multi-stable images and those we find in science. For while
perception in the former tend to toggle back and forth with relative ease it usually is seen
as a more gradual and irreversible process in the latter. A concrete way of illustrating this
process is to examine the relationship between student and teacher.
Before a student becomes a student of a teacher, the student and teacher can be
said to inhabit different worlds. By repeated exposure to the teachers ways of viewing the
world the student comes to inhabit that world, seeing what the teacher sees and
responding as the teacher does. We can therefore say that once the student has acquired
(and accepted) the knowledge passed on by the teacher he or she lives in a different
world. While the world thus entered may not be fixed once and for all, it is in large
determined by the environment and scientific doxa that is passed down. However since it
is the goal of any ambitious student or scientist to question the scientific paradigm of
140
A parallel observation can be made to the nineteenth century where the onrushing impressions of urban life are said
to have given rise to a perceptual transformation that allowed for multiple and simultaneous realities to be
acknowledged, flipping through the channels on the television gives a similar sense of multiple and simultaneous
realities (esp. with live transmission). 141
When first confronted with the Necker cube people often have difficulty switching from one gestalt to another.
However frustrating this may be, the situation mirrors the struggle that scientists have when new knowledge compels
them to change not only what they do but also how they perceive the world. On a more ordinary note, juxtaposing this
shift within the knower and known with the gaze of the tourist could certainly yield interesting similarities. 142
Kuhn, "Revolutions as Changes of World View." 111.
62
their field we can be certain that it too eventually, or even better, unavoidably is bound to
undergo change. Therefore, when the paradigm of a field changes “the scientist’s
perception of his environment must be re-educated – in some familiar situation he must
learn to see a new gestalt.”143
Once the re-education process has run its course awareness of the conditions and
struggles that led to the transformation fade. The reason for this loss of awareness is
given by the fact that scientists normally do not need to provide authentic information
about the way in which transformations are recognized and embraced in order to fulfill
their function as scientists.144
As Kuhn notes this is because “scientists and laymen take
much of their image of creative scientific activity from an authoritative source that
systematically disguises – partly for important functional reasons – the existence of and
significance of scientific revolutions.”145
The most obvious venue in which a systematic disguise of scientific
transformations can be found is in textbooks. Since the most important function of
textbooks is to perpetuate the scientific doxa of a field they have to be rewritten every
time a scientific revolution or as is the case in sociology, every time a sub-discipline
comes into prominence, that is, after it gains legitimacy and/or mainstream recognition. It
is not that textbooks omit presenting a historical understanding of the field but rather that
their histories are geared toward making professionals and students feel like participants
in a long-standing tradition. While it is safe to assume that new knowledge and subfields
are continually being generated, their entry into the history of the discipline require not
only that textbooks be airbrushed but that they be airbrushed so that scientists of previous
generations are implicitly made out as having worked on the same set of problems.
Textbooks therefore not only tend to impose a cumulative and leveling effect on the
complex issues they seek to convey, they also inadvertently conceal what goes on in
times of crisis and uncertainty, that is, in times when paradigms change and subfields
emerge. To the extent that visual sociology remains a discipline in the making, it is
nowhere to be found in general introductory textbooks. In this sense we can say that we
are witness not only to the struggles and becoming of a field of knowledge, but to the
gradual emergence of a new gestalt.
143
Ibid. 112 144
Ibid. 137 145
Ibid. 136 italics added
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
63
Because knowledge of what happens during scientific transformations is of
utmost relevance to anyone seeking to generate and disseminate new ideas, it is important
to know what these are and why they occur. For example when a small segment of a
scientific community have a growing sense that “the existing paradigm has ceased to
function adequately in the exploration of a set of problems on which that paradigm itself
had previously led the way” we not only have a crisis in the making but also the
prerequisite condition for such a transformation to occur.146
So when visual sociology as
we have seen conjure a group of persons who are sufficiently dissatisfied with that they
do to want to try something new it is safe to assume that at least this condition, the
condition of communal dissent, has been met.
However one thing is to rebel, another is to get ones peer community (those who
do not feel the urge to do things differently) to recognize the legitimacy in doing so.
Hence, when recognition fails to transpire it can be that too little has been done to
communicate why one thinks the prevailing paradigm has proved inadequate and why
what one offers in its place should be recognized as a legitimate path of inquiry.
Similarly failure to find recognition when and where one wants can equally and
realistically be due to the fact that the claims being made (regardless of whether they
have merit) are vehemently rebutted (or ignored) by a mainstream who see their status
(quo) threatened. Complicating matters even further are situations where the yearning for
legitimacy becomes so overpowering that the once so visionary and rebellious willingly
compromise their most valuable asset by adopting imaginary demands that limit their
ability to seek-out and fully explore the potentials of their newfound terrain. Lack of
legitimacy could of course also be due to the fact that the academic environment is able
to harbor self-sustained sub-fields whose communities neither need nor want mainstream
recognition. More often than not the budding off of expert knowledge into new subfields
along with their re-embedding back into mainstream science solicits a combination of the
above. When the process stops short of its goal, that is when calls for change and
legitimacy stand confronted with a blurred gestalt, it can be helpful to study what
scientific transformations entail in order to figure out how to make the contours of ones
discipline appear more readily to others.
Since the gestalt of visual sociology is affected in one way or the other by all of
the above mentioned problems it makes perfect sense to pose the ‘original’ question once
146
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 92.
64
again and ask how vision and visualization can bring original and stimulating knowledge
to the field of sociology. In doing so we are reminded not only of the North American
origins of visual sociology but also of its relative isolation from European cultural theory.
Significantly, then, a great deal of highly relevant sociological knowledge remains to be
incorporated and discovered. Certainly the relevance of European cultural theory to
visual sociology is not confined to a logo-centric inquiry into vision and visuality, for if
many European cultural theorist have drawn inspiration from visual artists, it is certain
that an even greater number of visual artists have drawn inspiration from them. In this
sense there exists a longstanding tradition in which logo-centric and hands-on practices
connect. As argued the guiding theme under which these practices show the strongest
affinity is the concept of visual culture. Within this concept there exists an incredible
amount of literature, lengthy historical testimony and a myriad of artifacts that show how
vision and visuality have played a central if not defining role in how we make sense of
the world.
The sheer diversity of logo-centric and hands-on practices that fill the pallet of
visual culture looms large, indeed at times nonsensically or even magically large. By
these standards visual culture harbors innumerable and insightful ways of
conceptualizing how transformations in vision and visuality have brought new ways of
thinking and being to the fore. Having thus come full circle a parallel emerges whereby
the perceptual transformations of the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube render themselves
relevant not only as metaphors for discovery but also as metaphors for how
transformations in vision and visuality entail new ways of making sense of the world.
That said, ambiguous visual gestalts can only ever be metaphors for how we experience
such transformations, not their substitute. Why I now turn to explore more in depth how
visual culture, with its many and significant transformations, merits a reconfiguration of
visual sociology.
V: Four Ontologies of Sight - Reflections on The Use of History
With the intent of keeping this pervasive subject matter as simple as possible the
historical contextualization of visual culture will here be limited to include an admittedly
shorthanded rendering of insights from four semantically different yet contingent epochs
of Western culture. In very broad terms these are: Antiquity (Greek), Renaissance,
Modernity and Post-modernity. Each has been conceptualized, as significant periods in
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
65
Western ocular culture by scholars such as Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, Michael Levin,
and Hal Foster to name a few. However, since the task here is to provide context rather
than detail I will omit passing judgment on whether one is more important than the other,
just as I bypass the politics of determining the duration and origin of each period. What
will be presented is a selection of historical highlights and discourses that contextualize
vision in Western culture and which are essential to conceptualizing seeing and thinking
as fundamentally interrelated concepts of sociological thought.
My core concern for bringing this discussion to the fore is that a historical
overview provides a sense of transformation by showing us the many and different ways
that vision and visuality have been conceptualized over time. Thereby intimating that
documentary photography is not necessarily the only (or best) way to conduct image
based research. Again, and so not to be misunderstood, my errand is not to abandon
ethnographic and documentary models of inquiry, but rather to ‘soften’ their focus so that
an access to ‘seeing by other means’ can be gained.
In what follows this ‘seeing by other means’ is exemplified by how vision and
visuality is historically linked to epistemic questioning. Therefore much of what I have to
say challenges prominent visual sociologists Gordon Fyfe & John Law who argue that
seeing and abstract thought do not sit very well with one another, hence the limited status
of image based research. Or as they write: “The center of gravity of sociology, lying
close, as it does, to the expression and articulation of general philosophical differences,
neither lends itself well, nor allocates much priority to differences that might be resolved
by recourse to visual depictions of its subject matter.”147
While I hope to resolve (or at
least bring a qualified challenge to) this atrophied point of view I also believe that the
position expressed by Fyfe and Law can be seen as a critique of the fact that the few
sociologists who actually took the time and effort to engage themselves in image based
research at the time of their writing, typically resorted to conceptualizing the visual as
‘evidence’ and ‘data.’148
For the most part these ethnographic ‘portraits’ or studies were
characterized by being at once idiographic and quasi-scientistic. Consequently and
because of this very basic and somewhat naïve one-to-one approach to imagery, hands-on
visual sociologists have, at least historically speaking, been blind to the most important
philosophical inquiries that have been made into vision.
147
Fyfe and Law, Picturing Power : Visual Depiction and Social Relations. (1988), 6. 148
This critique is reverberated in a central argument of Fyfe & Law in which they argue “that there can be no such
thing as a sociology of visualization” but rather a mulitiplicity of sociologies that engage the visual in varying ways.
See also Fyfe & Law (1988:6-7)
66
Nevertheless, much progress has been made in the field since it migrated into a
European sociological context, just as the onslaught of postmodern theory, media and
cultural studies, new art history, psychoanalysis and semiotics, to name a few, stand to
significantly affect the outlook and discourse of its practitioners. Today visual
sociologists like their colleagues in adjoining fields are confronted with the ubiquity of
inexpensive imaging equipment, the explosive dissemination and circulation of imagery
on the world wide web, an increasingly frenzied and mediatized obfuscation of ‘reality’,
as well as the now seemingly omnipresent post-9-11 surveillance of public and private
spheres. While this signals that visual sociologists are increasingly becoming aware of
the many ways of seeing and the plethora of discourse surrounding the visual, the field
still suffers from a general philosophical and theoretical lag just as documentary and
ethnographic modes of visualization remain stubbornly persistent elements of the field.
Since the declared purpose of this thesis is to secure legitimacy through diversity
rather than unity, that is, to follow a logic of ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ I will summon the
notion, as suggested by contemporary visual sociologist Douglas Harper (2003) and
anthropologist Marcus Banks (2001), that knowing through seeing is a old as the history
of recorded thought itself.149
The focus of this brief historical inquiry into visual culture is to show how the
visible exerts a powerful presence in everyday life and how both our actions and
understandings are coerced and structured by this presence. However like many other
things, the history of vision is also one of revision, or as Walter Benjamin once remarked,
each epoch dreams the next, and in doing so revises the one before it. In doing so the
practice of each epoch extends beyond its own historical formation only to be reified in a
present of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.150
The four periods presented here
are thus characterized by their overlapping and embeddedness in a complex and
nonsynchronous historical understanding of the present. This nonsynchronous
understanding has the salient feature that it captures the paradoxical fact that the framing
of historical periods depends on our position in the present and that our position in this
present is defined through their framing. Therefore the purpose of historical
contextualization is not to prove that one moment is modern, the next postmodern, as
149
See also D. Harper, "Reimagining Visual Methods: Galileo to Neuromancer," in Handbook of Qualitative Research,
ed. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,, 2000). and Banks, Visual Methods in Social
Research. 150
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1996). 206-209
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
67
such events do not develop evenly or break cleanly, but rather to capture the deferred
action, the double movement through which they present themselves to us in the
present.151
In simple conceptual terms, the visual correlate of the above assertion, is this
…
André Amtoft (2007)
The heading under which each visual regime resides must therefore not be taken too
literally since they reflect how our knowledge of these regimes are emphasized and
related to the concerns presented in this thesis. These concerns, to reiterate, are: a) to
explore how the visible exerts a powerful presence in everyday life and how our
understanding and actions are coerced by this presence and b) to posit this visual
presence as a means whereby hands-on practitioners can connect to both classical and
contemporary social theory and to visual art.
VI: Sight and Insight – From Plato to Baudrillard
Vision in Antiquity (Greek) The Ambiguous Sense
There is one mode of sensory perception that rises above the rest and that is the sense of
vision. Since vision has preoccupied and puzzled the minds of Western scholars more
than any other sense, it is only natural that it occupy a fundamental place in our
knowledge of the world. Or as Aristotle once said: “Nothing is in the intellect which is
not first in the senses.”152
History has shown that humans have always been compelled
151
Ibid p.209 152
Aristotle footnote 27 “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.” in Jay, Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
68
and drawn to vision in numerous and often opposing ways. In Homeric Greece, for
example, vision was celebrated and championed in geometry, philosophy and worship.153
Moreover, the celebration of vision was also a vivid part of life in the polis where “the
political space of democracy was established by the participatory, collective audience of
citizen spectators.”154
This celebration of participatory collective spectatorship was
nowhere more evident that in the theatron, the theater, or “place for viewing,” as Simon
Godhill writes. The ancient theater functioned as a place for displaying one’s social status
and for viewing the projection and promotion of the power of the polis of Athens.155
Oppositely an unease of vision’s malevolent power is vividly expressed in early mythic
figures such as Odysseus, Medusa, Tiresias156
and Narcissus, just as it often came to
fruition in the use of apotropaic amulets to disarm ‘the evil eye’.
While this unease suggests a wariness towards vision, most commentators agree
that the celebration and power of vision, even in its negative guises, has been
instrumental in elevating the status of the visual to the pinnacle of Western culture.157
Under this dialectic vision assumes a kind of quasi-permanence, for whenever a
celebratory concept of vision is absent it is because its other more unsettling aspects have
taken its place and vice versa. Vision is therefore never neutral, but always subject to the
eye of the beholder and the context, which grants it, it’s meaning.
The Bodily Divide of Sight and Insight
Vision was initially conceptualized as a means of experiencing the outside world within.
Plato, for example, believed the height of intellectual abstraction went through ‘the eye of
the mind’.158
Being much less cautious about the dangers of vision, Aristotle defended
the power of sight to discriminate among more pieces of information than any other
sense, just as it was he who linked vision to language, or as he claimed in his Poetics, to
153
geometry (Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid), philosophy (Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle) and worship (iconic displays of
the Gods) 154
Simon Goldhill, "Refracting Classical Vision," in Vision in Context : Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on
Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (1996)., 19. “Theoria, the word from which “theory” comes, implies, as has
often been noted in contemporary criticism, a form of visual regard; what is less often noted is that theoria is the normal
Greek for official participatory attendance as a spectator in the political and religious rites of the state.”, 17. 155
For a detailed account linking citizenship and the visual see Ibid., 17-28 156
Tiresias is known as the blind prophet of Thebes. There exists several anecdotes about Tiresias blindness, the most
common of which is that he was blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets before being given the gift of foresight
by Zeus. 157
E.g. Jay, Levin, Prosser, Virilio, Emmison & Smith, etc,. 158
For an illuminating account of Plato’s relation to vision see Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought., 25-27.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
69
produce a good metaphor is to see a likeness.159
From this emerges the insight that vision,
first and foremost, is characterized by its relationship to the body. Here the body is
conceived as the analytical divide from which vision is either posited within or without.
The latter, in admittedly coarse and oversimplified terms, can be found in the
modern ideal of natural science and subscribes to an objective understanding of truth in
which vision is conceived as a linear, static and ever present illumination of the world in
which we live. In this understanding vision is best perceived as a passive registering of
ones material surroundings, or put differently, it entails a ‘value neutral’ cataloguing of
the content that appears before us in the field of vision. The former notion of vision is a
bodily notion that finds expression through the formation of mental images. It equates
sight with insight and subscribes to a subjective and discursively oriented understanding
of vision, i.e. here vision is inscribed in a myriad of symbolic and culturally embedded
constructs. Expressed in more contemporary terms we might say this subjective,
fragmented and highly individualized concept of vision has its correlate in an ephemeral
post-modern glance rather than in a fixed analytical gaze.
According to historian Martin Jay these ambiguous features of vision correlate
with the way light came to be conceptualized in Western thought. Or as he writes:
“…light could be understood according to the model of geometric rays that Greek
optics had privileged, those straight lines studied by catoptrics (the science of
reflection) or dioptrics (the science of refraction). Here perfect linear form was
seen as the essence of illumination, and it existed whether perceived by the
human eye or not. Light in this sense came to be known as lumen. An alternative
version of light, known as lux, emphasized instead the actual experience of human
sight. Here color, shadow, and movement was accounted as important as form and
outline, if not more so.”
In short, the correlation between how vision and light were perceived captures a
prominent feature of Western culture’s relation to sight by calling attention to the
159
Aristotle, Poetics trans. Butcher, S.H. 1999 http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/poetc10.txt XXII “… to make
good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” see also Aristotle, Poetics trans. Bywater, Ingram 10th
ed. 1962
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/poeti10.txt XXII “… a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the
similarity in dissimilars.” and in Aristotle: Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Volume 23 trans. Fyfe, W.H. 1932 Harvard
University Press (1459a) “… by far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token
of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-
bin/ptext?lookup=Aristot.+Poet.+1459a
70
alternating traditions of speculation with the eye of the mind and observation with the
two eyes of the body.
Speculation and observation allow for both rational and irrational modes of
seeing, which multiplies the variants of sight and their characteristics. Exemplifying this
multiplicity, “observation can be understood as the unmediated assimilation of stimuli
from without, the collapse of perception into pure sensation. Or it can be constructed as a
more complicated interaction of sensations and the shaping or judging capacity of the
mind, which provided the Gestalt-like structures that make observation more than a
purely passive phenomenon. And within these broad categories, many different variants
could proliferate.”160
The point being as Jay writes is that “in all of them … something
called sight is accorded a fundamental place in our knowledge of the world.”161
According to Jay, Plato also contends that the human eye is able to perceive light
because it shares a like quality with the source of light, the sun. Or as he writes: “If Plato
argued that the eye and the sun are composed of like substances, and the Greeks believed
that the eye transmitted as well as received light rays (the theory of extramission), then
there was a certain participatory dimension in the visual process, a potential intertwining
of the viewer and the viewed.”162
In this sense, the eye is also configured as the carrier of
the gaze, a medium of nonverbal communication, that plays a constitutive role in the
formation of social groups. Astrid Schmidt-Buckhardt gives lucid expression to this
relationship when she notes that George Simmel, “inspired by the psychology of
perception, inserted an ‘Appendix of the Senses,’ in his main work Soziologie in which,
reflecting on the difference in performance of the sensory organs, he emphasized the
unique psychosociability of the eye in socialization.”163
The dialogic glance created by
individuals when looking at one another thus conscribes, according to Simmel, the most
direct and purest form of interaction between two human beings because it establishes a
fundamental (if not initial) point of social contact. From this simple analogy we find that
vision, from Plato to Simmel, and beyond, weaves a tight knit and longstanding
preoccupation with thinking. Hence, it is no wonder that “from the very outset,” as Hanna
Arent writes, “thinking has been thought of in terms of seeing.” (Hannah Arent quoted in
160
Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 30 161
Ibid 162
Ibid. 163
A. Schmidt-Buckhardt, "The All-Seer," in Ctrl Space Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. T.
Levin, U. Frohne, and P. Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), 2002). 18.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
71
Levin 1993:2).164
A relationship that, as we now will see, sets the measure of progress in
the Renaissance.
Vision in Renaissance - The Installment of the Eye (I) in Art and Science
Traditionally the Renaissance (or late medieval period) represents a reconnection of the
West with classical antiquity just as it signals the onslaught of an era that witnessed an
explosive dissemination of knowledge brought on by printing and the creation of new
techniques in the fields of art, science and architecture. The result of this
uncompromising intellectual activity was not only that it revitalized European culture in
new and unforeseen ways it also signaled, the advent of modernity, so much indeed, that
many contemporary historians prefer using the term ‘early modern’ rather than
Renaissance.165
But more than anything else, the Renaissance brought an intensification
of the eye as the locus of intellectual and artistic achievement.
One of the most important Renaissance achievements was the invention of linear
perspective, i.e., the technique for rendering three-dimensional space on the two
dimensions of a flat canvas (fig.2). Filippo Brunelleschi is traditionally given the honor
of being its practical inventor, while Leon Battista Alberti is almost universally
acknowledged as its first theoretical interpreter.166
The basic idea of perspective is to
approximate a representation of reality, as the eye of the viewer perceives it. This is done
by representing the light that passes from a scene, through an imaginary window (canvas
of the painting), to the viewer’s eye.
164
It should be noted that the theoretical importance of vision and the emphasis given to it within sociology is typically
assigned to the work of logo-centric European practitioners. 165
See also Wikipedia.org for a brief explanation of the Renaissance and the problems concerning its use. 166
Perspective is not an invention of the Renaissance but linear perspective, with its uniform guidelines for
representation of space, is. Etymologically: The Latin word perspectiva (from perspicere, to see clearly, to examine, to
ascertain, to see through.) Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 53.
72
fig. 5 http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_perspective
In this scaled down representation of reality the eye of the viewer is aligned in a system
of symmetrical visual pyramids or cones with one of their apexes the receding vanishing
or centric point in the painting. From this we are presented a point of view, that not only
becomes “autonomous, but also a function of a central vanishing point,” a mark in the
image, “to which the viewer’s gaze is attached.”167
As we will now see it is precisely this
attachment that marks the point in which the immediacy of the gaze becomes aligned
with the all-at-once condition of the image and its pure simultaneity as ontological truth.
With the differentiation of the aesthetic from the religious, an outgrowth of the
Reformation, perspective was free to follow its own course and become the naturalized
visual culture of an emerging secular order. Linear perspective thus marks a decisive
moment in history because, as John Berger has remarked, it is the first time “the visible
world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for
God.”168
While this newfound aesthetic autonomy brought a denarrativization of the
image, i.e., a loosening of its ties to the church and the unlettered masses, perspective
remained a predominantly technical feat, for it was the first to allow artists to reproduce
nature ad infinitum. It produced not only a new kind of audience but also a new breed of
artists that culminate in the impeccably urban social type that Charles Baudelaire
famously described as the disinterested observer. The disinterested observer is reflected
in renaissance perspective because perspective was “…in league with a scientific world
view that no longer hermeneutically read the world as divine text, but rather saw it as
situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order filled with natural objects that
167
T. Conley, "The Wit of the Letter," in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. T.
Brennan and M. Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996). 48. 168
Berger, J. in Jay, M Downcast Eyes p.54 re: note the parallel discussion of lux/lumen in Antiquity
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
73
could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral
researcher.”169
The ordering of the gaze by perspective, thus anticipated the scientific
ocular conventions of modernity and its commitment to an ontological truth relieved
from metaphysical speculation.170
It is no coincidence that the progression of the above outlined events was mirrored
by the founding father of modern sociology, August Comte when he wrote: “The greatest
fundamental law … is this: - that each of our leading conceptions – each branch of our
knowledge – passes through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or
fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. … The first is the
necessary point of departure of human understanding, and the third is the fixed and
definitive state. The second is merely a transition.”171
More recently, visual sociologist,
Eric Margolis has made the observation that the social type of the disinterested observer,
e.g., the modern attitude of the Flâneur, is not only a forewarning of street photographers
like Eugène Atget or Helen Levitt, but also of camera lugging visual sociologists.
Modeled on the uniformity and consistency of eye, the disinterested observer underpins,
as Margolis notes, “much of sociology in general and visual sociology in particular, ” to
be sure, visual sociologists “often present photos of subjects as if they occurred sui
generis and the observer was not there.”172
There exists, in other words, an infallible
connection between the documentary/ethnographic approach to imagery by visual
sociologists and the positivism that since has been widely critiqued by a great majority of
theoretical and qualitative oriented sociologists.
However, no epistemology of Renaissance (or Modern) vision would be complete
without recourse to René Descartes (b.1596-1650) who posited vision as the noblest of
the senses. Like the pivotal importance assigned to the eye in social relations in Simmel‘s
Soziologie, Descartes in La Dioptrique (1637), examines the intellect as that which
inspects entities modeled on retinal images. In fact it would not be entirely wrong to
claim, as many commentators have, that Descartes is the founding father of the modern
visualist paradigm; a paradigm that not only provides “philosophical justification for the
169
Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press & Dia Art
Foundation., 1988). 9. 170
Arnold Hauser make a similar point when he notes, that “uniformity and consistency were in fact the highest
criteria for truth during the whole of this period.” in Hauser, The Social History of Art. Vol. 2 Renaissance, Mannerism,
Baroque. Vintage Books, New York, 1985:77 171
Comte, A. in John P. McKay, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler, A History of Western Society, 5th ed. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995), 822. 172
Eric Margolis, "Blind Spots: Thoughts for Visual Sociology Upon Reading Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought," (Arizona State University, 2004), 2-4.
http://courses.ed.asu.edu/margolis/review.html
74
modern epistemological habit of ‘seeing’ ideas” and representations of things “in the
mind,” but also for “the speculative tradition of identitarian reflexivity, in which the
subject is certain only of its mirror image.”173
Descartes employs much of his insight into
vision using the camera obscura as a metaphor and measure of its many intrinsic and
extrinsic qualities. Or as Rosalind Krauss writes: “The eye that surveys the inner space of
experience, analyzing it into its rationally differentiated parts, is a eye born of … the
camera obscura. Beaming light through a pinhole into a darkened room and focusing that
light on the wall opposite, the camera obscura allowed the observer – whether it was
Newton for his Optics or Descartes for his Dioptrique – to view the plane as something
independent of his own powers of synthesis, something that he, as a detached subject,
could therefore observe.”174
fig. 6 Camera Obscura, Athanasius Kircher (1646)
With Descartes, the division between an interiorized subject and the exterior
world is a pre-given condition for acquiring knowledge about the latter. In this sense the
camera obscura, and thereby also vision and visualization, act not only as a metaphor, but
as the quintessential classical subject of knowledge. As Richard Rorty notes, “the
conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and
distinct ideas passed in review before an Inner Eye” is characterized by “the novelty of
the notion of a single space in which the bodily and perceptual sensations” become “the
173
Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, 70. 174
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, October Books (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 128.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
75
object of quasi-observation.”175
This newfound autonomy marks a significant shift in the
knowledge of man, because it signals the emergence of an observer fundamentally
different from anything in Greek and medieval thought. For with a single and orderly
placed opening, the camera obscura flooded the mind of the observer by light of reason
and so brought mankind one-step closer to the era of Enlightenment. Vision thereby
acquiring secular prominence in Western culture plays an indispensable role in giving
voice to the complexities of man; complexities that as we now will see spillover and are
multiplied in modernity.
fig. 7 Cattelan, M. La Nona Ora. Pope John Paul II hit by meteor, mixed media. (1999)
Modernity and The Eclipse of Vision: Sight as Cultural Insight
The Renaissance discovery and proliferation of a new kind of imagery and not least a
new kind of observer in which vision and visualization find prominence through secular
knowledge, is often seen to anticipate modern rationality. It is a solid, permanent and
piercing kind of vision, a vision that penetrates and makes the irrational, mythic and
cultic occlusion of previous eras superfluous by establishing in its place an order of
transparency.176
However, with modernity there are also, as intimated, other elements of
social life that inscribe themselves onto the field of vision, elements that sometimes work
175
Rorty, R. Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979: 49-50) quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the
Observer : On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 43. and in
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 128. 176
It is no coincidence that a similarly cold and observing kind of gaze is said to be cast by literary realists such as
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880).
76
in the opposite direction yet are equally significant and novel in terms of how we
experience and acquire knowledge of the world. Simmel and Benjamin are among the
most acute observers when it comes to bringing these discrete elements of modernity into
focus. Generally speaking their observations capture the fact that with modernity, and
hence also urbanization, comes a whole new set of demands to incorporate into vision a
heretofore unimaginable intensity of visual impressions. In particular, they note how the
physiognomy of the crowd and the hustle and bustle of traffic fascinate nineteenth
century commentators, since it is here, as the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-
1867) remarks, that man emerges as “a kaleidoscope with a consciousness.”177
With the rise of the modern metropolis comes a historically specific mode of
seeing (i.e., the luring displays of commodities, the diversity of characters, the
unexpected onrushing of impressions, and their shock like effects on the human psyche)
that not only necessitates anonymity but also the need to stand out. Or as James Donald
writes, the “metropolitan man, as characterized by Simmel, has two main aspects to his
character. One is defensive: the blasé, intellectualizing self that provides protection
against the shock of exorbitant stimuli. The other aspect is more expressive, but again in
a specifically modern way: it identifies a form of conduct, or an exercise of liberty, that
manifests itself in an aesthetics of self-expression.”178
To be sure, this psychological
piecing together of metropolitan man’s constant oscillation between voyeuristic and
exhibitionistic tendencies, marks the decisive moment in which vision, for the first time
and on a mass scale, is established not on the basis of permanence of an unblinking gaze,
but rather on the fleeting, ephemeral moment of a glance.
Within this turn of events, that is, within this process of urbanization,
industrialization, and secularization the consciousness of modernity is configured as a
visual fragmentation and splintering of the experiential frame. It is this multiplication of
perspectives that make possible an acknowledging of the independence and simultaneous
existence of realities outside ones own. Here the unfamiliar and uncanny becomes part
and parcel of metropolitan man, a visual appendix to everyday life’s encounter with
uncertainty and wonder. What makes vision in modernity substantially different from
previous eras, then, is that the sheer mass and intensity of impressions that lay themselves
to rest on the eyes are of such a magnitude and diversity, that they abstract and warp the
177
Baudelaire, C. in Frisby, Fragments of Modernity : Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and
Benjamin, 252. 178
J. Donald, "The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces," in Visual Culture, ed. C. Jenks (New York: Routledge, 1995),
81.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
77
ideals of transparency into a collective dreamworld, a world of boundless consumption, a
world in which the highest aspiration is to see the memories, associations and desires of
today replaced (and preferably as quickly as possible) by those of tomorrow (i.e.
Nietzsche and the eternal return of the new). The aesthetization and snapshot quality of
life in the modern metropolis is bound to the realm of commodities and masses just as it
is tied to the all to often taken-for-granted environments in which the ebb and flow of
these impressions come into being. Architects and urban planners of this period were
instrumental in changing the lived environment in ways that decisively accommodated
both the influx of masses and the transformation of perception. Like many of their
contemporaries they were, in the most literal sense of the term, enlightened visionaries,
who felt an urgency to render the increasingly complex metropolitan space more
transparent.
Universally acknowledged as the nexus from which these tendencies first emerge
is Paris; birthplace of the modern republic and Enlightenment rationality. In this
metropolitan icon of spectacle and light the most influential figure in the transformation
of its landscape is Baron George-Eugène Hausmann who initiated a massive rebuilding
of the capital in 1865. Hausmann’s unabashed propensity for a rational and transparent
planning set about a destruction of much of the medieval quarters (then a tangle of slums
and thieves dens). As a result of the Baron’s efforts emerged a city with safer streets,
better housing, more sanitary and shopper-friendly communities, a better traffic flow and
not least technological amenities such as gas and kerosene street lamps that allowed
virtually everyone to transcend the natural rhythms of night and day.179
The effect of this
transformation can be summarized in the effect that the latter had on life in the city.
While street lighting made life in the city safer it also brought a rationalization of time
that made possible a regularization of working hours just as it ushered in new
entertainment and leisure opportunities. Nonetheless and despite tremendous efforts to
render metropolitan life transparent with its uniform streets and its endless rows of
buildings and courtyards, the rationalization of the city also had, to a certain degree, the
179
Louis XIV, the Apollonian Sun King who reportedly had 24.000 wax candles lit at the gardens of Versaille every
evening as a spectacle testifying to his power also used the spectacle of light as a means of enforcing his reign by
having thousands of lanterns installed by public decree in the streets of Paris. Here they hung like small suns strung out
by cables in the middle of the street, bringing security to the public while reminding them of the power of their ‘all
seeing’ ruler. He was thus the first to illuminate the city. However, it was not until the 1890s with Thomas Edison’s
invention of electric lighting that the city truly became The Great City of Light.
Also it should be noted that Haumann’s rationalization of Paris has been linked to the militarization of its
environment and particularly population/mob controll (e.g. the 12 grand avenues radiating out from the Arc de
Triomphe were not only purposely built broad so barricades were hard to built, they also linked to the main train
stations so that army troops from the provinces could be made operative in a short amount of time.)
78
opposite effect, for what had indeed been created was an architectural equivalent of a
labyrinth where one could easily loose ones bearing. To traverse this labyrinth, as David
Frisby writes “is to become aware not merely of the dream world of the nineteenth
century but of the changes in perception and experience that were their counterpart.”180
The Dialectical Image of the City as Aesthetic Fragmentation
An important area in which these changes in sense perception spill over and become
materialized is in the field of visual art. Given that the dialectical image of the modern
metropolis is infused with instances of both transparency and opacity and given that the
oscillation of eye between these instances (re)produce the phantasmagoria of the city as
an interior landscape – a bewildering and shock-like panorama of visual impressions in
which life is played out – metropolitan artists conjure up works of art that look entirely
unlike those of previous eras.181
Here the change in visual perception is manifest in an
aesthetically fragmented and highly idiosyncratic artistic sensibility that rather than being
severed from the praxis of everyday life (as was the case of ritual images) became its
product.
Faced with the task of rendering the discontinuity of the metropolitan glance in a
single image meant that that the image of the artist had to be multiperspectival. Cubists,
such as Picasso, Braque and Delaunay, exploded the illusions of spatial homogeneity and
depth by incorporating different views of a building at the same time and by rendering
buildings from different districts simultaneously within the same frame. A central means
of capturing the onrushing impressions of the metropolis was thus to bring elements of
temporality into the image, as these animated not only the sense of newness and
accelerated rhythm of life in the city, but also the experiencing of a condensation and
intensification of time and space. Whatever remnants of Renaissance perspective remain
are thus thoroughly abstracted and fragmented by the widespread use of the techniques of
montage and collage; techniques that allow the spectator to revisit the inherently modern
experience of being simultaneously, here and there, an experience that, as we now will
see, is part and parcel of the sensibilities attributed to photography and film.
180
Frisby, D. on “Walter Benjamin – The Prehistory of Modernity” in Frisby, Fragments of Modernity : Theories of
Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, 237. 181
Donald, "The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces," 83.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
79
fig. 8 Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower (1910-1911)
The Visual Culture of Modern Technology – Managing Sense Perception
Photography and film coincide with the emergence of the modern state and define the
visual culture of this era as a unique and historically new means of making sense of the
world.182
Both were quick to capture the imaginations of the masses and both were quick
to bring substantively new modes of seeing to the fore. Indeed so great was their impact
that they changed not only the means and ways in which imagery came to be engaged,
produced and disseminated, but also the conception of everyday life itself. Although
rarely mentioned by hands-on practitioners, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is the first,
and in retrospect most influential sociologist to have identified and theoretically explored
the modern qualities of photography and film.
In his widely celebrated essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1936) Benjamin identifies photography and film as that which
transformed the visual culture of modernity into something substantively different from
182
The most revolutionizing feature of modernity arrived with Nicéphore Niépce’s (1826) invention of photography
and Louis Daguerre’s (1839) improvement of the same – for it signaled the first time in history that a mirror image of
‘reality’ could be fixed and reproduced mechanically on end without intervention of the hand. The French government,
with the foresight and supervision of scientist Arago, immediately bought the patent from Daguerre in 1839 and made
it public domain. Its inventor Niépce who had died of a stroke in 1833 and in povery thus never lived to see the fruit of
his own invention.
80
previous eras. To illustrate this transformation he juxtaposed the status and intrinsic
qualities of film and photographic images to the traditional art object. Benjamin thereby
produced a vast set of binary oppositions in which the exhibition value of the former was
seen to replace the cultic value of the latter, a process he famously described as the
decline of the aura of the authentic work of art and which is said to capture the essence of
the modern spirit.183
While it is safe to say that Benjamin was not so much interested in the fetishized
art object as he was in the emergence of a visual culture that significantly altered our
perceptual schemes and how we make sense of the world, he remains heavily indebted to
the Surrealist movement.184
In fact what most people do not know is that much if not all
of Benjamin’s writing on the redemptive and revolutionary value of the image, its
reproducibility and subsequent loss of aura, can be assigned to his 1930 encounter with
Parisian bookseller and publisher of avant-garde literature, Adrienne Monier.185
As it happens, Monier, “who was in close contact with important French avant-
garde writers (e.g. Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean
Paul Satre, and Paul Valery, ed.)186
, had contradicted Benjamin’s vehement old prejudice
against photographs of paintings.”187
Also illustrated in the following excerpt from
Benjamin’s ‘Paris Diary.’188
“When I went on to call such a way of dealing with art miserable and
irritating, she became obstinate. ‘The great creations’ she said, ‘cannot be
seen as the works of individuals. They are collective objects, so powerful
that appreciating them is almost necessarily connected with reducing their
size. Mechanical methods of reproduction are basically techniques for
reducing things in size. They help people to achieve that degree of
183
Def. loss of aura signals the decline of the image as an object that is embedded in tradition and has a unique
existence 184
See S. Buck-Morss, "Dream World of Mass Culture – Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of
Seeing," in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. D. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 309-
38. and Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 185
Gisèle Freund (founding member of Magnum Photo Agency) who studied under Norbert Elias and Karl Manheim
had written her doctoral thesis Photography and Society in 1936 at Sorbonne was preoccupied with photography at the
same time as Benjamin (whom encouraged her). Significantly speaking it was Freund who introduced Benjamin to the
famous bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monier, an introduction that radically changed Benjamin’s attitude towards
photography. 186
For a comprehensive insight into the then cultural and literary Parisian elite to be, see Gisèle Freund, Gisèle Freund,
Photographer Foreword by Christian Caujolle Translated from the French by John Shepley (New York: Abrams,
1985). 187
See Benjamin in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, Studies
in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 203-10. 188
Note Monier’s surrealist displacement of convention, i.e. size matters!
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
81
command of the work without which they cannot appreciate it.’ And so I
exchanged a photo of the Wise Virgin of Strasburg, which she had promised
me at the beginning of our meeting, for a theory of reproduction which is
perhaps of greater value to me.”189
Benjamin, as we know, went on to incorporate Monier’s Surrealist insights into his
essays ‘Small History of Photography’ and ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’.190
The point being, that if Benjamin’s thinking could be so profoundly
influenced by an artistic conception of images why then should visual sociologists, of all
persons, refrain from gaining similar insights from the arts!191
According to Benjamin, art elicits its aura from its location in tradition, its
material singularity, and its spatial and temporal specificity, meaning that it can only be
appreciated in situ and through its proximity to ritual and cultic tradition (e.g. in Fresco’s
and the ornamentation of cathedrals). In contrast, photography and film drain the work or
art of its aura, its location in tradition and its cultic value, because the images of these
media, like the products of an assembly line, are easily reproducible, highly mobile and
bereft of ritual significance. However, the loss of aura and the reorganization of sense
perception through photography and film, i.e. through mechanical reproduction, was not
achieved in isolation nor was it achieved through these means alone. Photography,
interesting enough, only truly came into circulation via other graphic and technical
processes and predominantly alongside the meanings of the printed word.192
Or as John
Tagg writes: “With the introduction of the half-tone plate in 1880’s, the entire economy
of image production was recast … half-tone plates at last enabled the economical and
limitless reproduction of photographs in books, magazines and advertisements, and
especially newspapers. The problem of printing images immediately alongside words and
in response to daily changing events was solved … the era of throwaway images had
189
Ibid. 190
Here exemplified in an exert from Small History of Photography. “Everyone will have noticed how much easier it is
to get hold of painting, more particularly a sculpture, and especially architecture, in a photograph than in reality. It is all
to tempting to blame this squarely on the decline in artistic appreciation, on a failure of the contemporary sensibility.
But one is brought up short by the way of understanding that of great works was transformed at about the same time the
techniques of reproduction were being developed. Such works can no longer be regarded as the products of individuals;
they have become a collective creation, a corpus so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturization. In the final
analysis, mechanical reproduction is a technique of diminution that helps people achieve control over works of art – a
control without whose aid they could no longer be used.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1927-1934, ed. M. W.
Jennings, 4 vols., vol. 2 part 2, Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 523. 191
It has also frequently been remarked that Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project with its principle of montage
mimics the classical Surrealists convention of discarding clarity for the sake of an abrupt unconscious awakening. 192
To this should be added that photography as an activity of the masses coincides with the emergence of the nuclear
family, the structure of work and the ideology of leisure.
82
begun.” (Tagg 1988:56) Thus, the modern saturation of experience by images depended
upon a convergence of photographic image with print, graphic, electronic and telegraphic
technologies (the latter being indispensable components of film, television and video).
Only when this piecing together of technologies had come into place and made images
easy available, was art freed from the aura of its singularity and its embeddedness in
tradition. In other words, the collapse of traditional models of vision and their stable
spaces of representation meant that images were freed to become an integral part of the
abundance of disparate impressions of metropolitan life. Caught in the flux of these
disparate impressions emerged an observer unable to distinguish between internal
sensation and external signs. Meaning that the technologies of industrial culture had
established on a massive scale a correspondence between imagery and everyday life, a
mythical and thoroughly enchanted dreamworld of spectacle and distraction. As we now
will see, Benjamin thought this correspondence in terms of a dialectical image that was
crucial for understanding how modernity was configured not just as a shift in rationality,
but also as a shift in perception.
Modernity and Awakening
Benjamin’s analysis of modernity is unique in comparison to others (such as Adorno,
Weber or Durkheim for example) in that he did not see the rationality of the era as one
that exclusively fostered a demythification and disenchantment of the social world. This
does not mean that Benjamin failed to acknowledge that the fundamental contradiction of
capitalist-industrial culture was that it produced a peculiar kind of collectivity in which
the individual became isolated and alienated. Contrarily he understood this anemic
condition not just to be a product of a mode of production that privileged individualism
but also of new forms of social existence – urban spaces, architectural forms, mass-
produced commodities – that engendered new identities and conformities in peoples
lives.
Within this space Benjamin cast the dialectical image as a means of soliciting the
truth about modernity. This involved a double interpretation in which the dialectical
image could be seen redemptively, as the expression of utopian longing, and critically, as
the failure to fulfill that longing. Assembling disparate elements into his analytical
apparatus, the most notable of which include Surrealism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and
Jewish Mysticism, modernity was configured as a dreamworld in which the collective
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
83
conscious had been lulled to sleep by the abundance of consumer fantasies. Dazed by the
spectacle of its own narcissism and unaware of its own potential (Freudian
misrecognition) it had become stuck in the dream. Benjamin’s hope was that the
dialectical image, with its special affinity to truth, could shock the collective into a
revolutionary ‘awakening’ of its conscious from this dream. Or as the Ancient
philosopher Heraclitus (535-475 BC) once said “sleepers are in separate worlds, the
awake in the same.”193
Benjamin, no doubt, wished humanity to live in the same.
Modernity and Walter Benjamin
In conjuring the mythical and labyrinth character of the metropolitan city Benjamin
draws upon the insights of 19th
century poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, who sees the
modern era and its mythical impulse realized in the adaptation of the eye to new
experiences as well as in new forms of art that give expression to these experiences. Or as
Benjamin writes: “… the daily sight of a lively crowd may once have constituted a
spectacle to which one’s eyes had to adapt first. … once the eyes had mastered this task
they welcomed opportunities to test their newly acquired faculties. This would mean that
the technique of Impressionist painting, whereby the picture is garnered in a riot of dabs
of color, would be a reflection of experiences with which the eye of a big-city dweller
have become familiar.”194
Benjamin’s concern, however, was not to mimic the
reactionary anti-Enlightenment agenda of the early nineteenth century German
Romantics who sought, via art, to establish a utopian mythology based in pre-industrial,
traditionalist culture.195
In fact Benjamin vehemently rejected such social conservatism
and so rather than look for what had never been, he went in search, with help from the
Surrealists, of a new mythology of industrial culture. And so it was in anonymous
industrial creativity, with its technical brilliance and mass potential, that Benjamin sought
hope and not in the bourgeois (re: socially exclusive) trappings of genius and authenticity
that embodied the realm of fine art. Meaning that Impressionist painting may be seen as a
riot of dabs of color, a singular and symbolic reflection of fragmented experience, but
when stretched out and contorted to the point where every dab can be reassembled into a
193
Heraclitus in Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 1st English ed. (New York, N.Y.: Semiotext(e), 1991),
29. 194
Benjmin, W. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 197 n.8. and in Buck-Morss, "Dream
World of Mass Culture – Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing," 323. 195
A. Amtoft, "The Silent Intellectuals - a Critique of Contemporary Visual Art" (University of Copenhagen, 2000).
84
whole, we arrive at the medium of film; a medium that Benjamin thought far more
accurately able to capture both the spirit and longings of modern life.
In modernity, both film and Impressionist painting point to life beyond the frame.
Always referring back to the reality from which they are produced. Based on a true story
as it were, they conjure the notion of simultaneously being here and there. Yet
significantly speaking there is a world of difference in the kind of impact they make and
the audiences they have. This difference is given by the fact that the exhibition value of
film (and hence also its revolutionary potential) is much greater than that of painting
(which retains its aura of singularity and therefore limited (read: exclusive) audience
potential). This suggests film has a special affinity to the modern era that painting can
only hope to aspire. The difference becomes even clearer if we look at how the two are
produced and received. To begin, and from a Marxian perspective, the ability to
mechanically reproduce an image signals the first time in pictorial reproduction, that the
hand is freed of the most important artistic functions. Or as the saying goes, painting are
made, photographs are taken.196
Secondly and because, as Benjamin writes “the eye
perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was
accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.”197
Which basically
means that the kinds of arguments that can be made with film are more easily accessible
because film like speech unfolds in time. Films are narratives and as narratives they have
a ‘fixed’ duration and trajectory to which they adhere. Oppositely paintings differ from
film in that they have no fixed duration or preset narrative. In paintings all elements can
be seen simultaneously and so whenever a spectator reaches a conclusion, the
simultaneity of the whole is there to reverse or destabilize his conclusion. Paintings more
than film depend on their audience to make them meaningful. Like photographs the
meanings of paintings change with the contexts in which they appear.198
In contrast the
meaning of a film does not change because the context in which it is presented (the
movie theater) is a stable environment, uninterrupted by other signifying practices.199
196
J. Szarkowski, "Introduction to the Photographer's Eye," in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London:
Routledge, 2004), 97. 197
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New
York: Schocken Books, 1986), 219. 198
To secure the value, stability and meaning of painting the context in which it is presented has been institutionalized
(i.e. the white cube) and thereby also homogenized over time, making them timeless objects. Posh fashion retailers use
the same aesthetic as a means to give authority to mundane products such as shoes. Oppositely photographs are the
vagabonds of the image world they travel in all settings. Because photographs are easily cloned [CTRL C] they are
quick to acquire multiple meanings hence value is less if anything at all. 199
Except of course when seen at home on television and interrupted by commercial breaks (as we know Benjamin did
not speak about television which was still in its infancy then and which would have complicated his theories
immensely.)
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
85
Paintings are singular and original creations that can only have one audience at a time,
photographs and films are also original creations but they are not singular and can
therefore have multiple audiences at a time. In short, because photography and film are
easily accessible to a greater and diverse number of peoples their impact and potential are
greater than painting.200
For Benjamin then, it is precisely the ability of technological reproduction to
reassert back into humanity the capacity for experience that technological production
threatens to take away that gives it its hope. Meaning that “if industrialization has caused
a crisis in perception due to the speeding-up of time and the fragmentation of space, film
shows a healing potential by slowing down time and, through montage, constructing
‘synthetic realities’ as new spatio-temporal orders, wherein ‘fragmented images’ are
brought together ‘according to a new law.’”201
In this new law the camera is the center
around which Benjamin’s logic revolves. Being an augmentation of vision, a prosthetic
device, that is capable of capturing and portraying things unseen to the naked eye or
unready psyche (e.g. through use of slow motion, close-ups, pan and zoom, wide angle
shots, multiple exposure, etc.,) the camera holds an affinity to the psychoanalytical
discovery of the unconscious. Hence, Benjamin reasons that if psychoanalysis provides
access to the unconscious then the camera surely provides access to the optical
unconscious.202
The potentially redemptive character of film is therefore situated not only
in its capacity to keep pace with and organize the otherwise insurmountable experiences
of modern reality, but also in its ability to provide the audience with a means whereby
they can study the conditions of their existence reflexively, that is, from the position of
the expert/analyst. Consequently, if the abstracted reality of modernist painting is
confined to the world of dreamers, then film, with its capability for reassembling the
fragments of experience into a coherent whole, holds the potential to awaken the masses
from their dream and thereby also that which keeps them from realizing the
disenchantment, dispossession and un-harnessed potential of their position in society.
200
COMMENT: IN EITHER CASE THERE CAN NO DOUBT THAT THE IMAGE IS THE OBJECT THAT
BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN SCIENCE FICTION AND SCINECE FACT 201
See Buck-Morss, "Dream World of Mass Culture – Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of
Seeing," 322-23. 202
Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," in Selected Writings 1921-1934, ed. M. W. Jennings (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
86
fig. 9 Bettina Camilla Vestergaard. Anderson Cooper, CNN Los Angeles. May 1 (2006)
Mass Media
As we know, this awakening remained unrealized because the modern consumer of
moving images was in large, and for practical reasons, just that – a consumer. Meaning
that the production and mass dissemination of images was limited, due to the relatively
high costs involved, to the highly professionalized tasks that revolved around film,
television, and media industries.203
This mass dissemination of information through still
and moving images thus points to a visual culture whose power to envelop, transmit and
enchant the public is centered on the hands of the few. What is then realized is not the
liberation of the masses, but their mobilization by political propaganda and conspicuous
consumption.204
The media landscape of modern visual culture is therefore and above all
characterized by an elite who control the flow of information and who exhibit scarce
interest in mobilizing the masses other than for purposes entirely their own.205
203
Still photography is truly an exception insofar as the average person was able to afford it from the very beginning.
Because of this, photography was seen as a lowbrow art form, a label it only recently has begun to shed. 204
Although Benjamin recognized this danger, it was his hope that the man in the crowd recapture his capacity for
experience that characterizes his writings. 205
See alsoTheodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, trans.
J. Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso Editions, 1997), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,
"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum,
1990)., C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York,: Oxford University Press, 1956), 298-324. and Noam Chomsky
and David Barsamian, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage
Press, 1992).
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
87
From the panopticism of modern architecture and urban planning (i.e. to the few
watching over the many), to the sousveillance regime of mass media (i.e. to the many
watching the few) the power elite have found in visual culture an effective means of
exercising control by other means than force.206
If we are to speak of violence here it is a
symbolic violence, to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu, a violence that is hidden,
passed down and internalized through what is made visible or willingly disclosed. Or as
former president of Ford Motor Company and US Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara in an astonishingly candid interview put it: “What we believe and what we
see are often both wrong, we see what we want to believe.”207
Hence the visual culture of
modernity is characterized by an elite who see in mass media an effective means to
extend their power by casting ‘mirror images’ in which the masses not only make sense
of the world but also themselves. In the characteristically hard hitting prose of C.W. Mills
the ‘mirror images’ of mass media are characterized as the follows:
“(1) the media tell the man in the mass who he is – they give him identity;
(2) they tell him what he wants to be – they give him aspirations; (3) they
tell him how to get that way – they give him technique; and (4) the tell him
how to feel that way even when he is not – they give him escape [i.e.
McNamara’s above comment, ed.]. The gaps between the identity and
aspiration lead to technique and/or to escape. That is probably the basic
psychological formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human
being. It is the formula of a pseudoworld which the media invent and
sustain.”208
What is advocated, then, is that the link between the social structure as laid out by the
mass media and the character structure of the individual psyche follows a pattern of
uniformity or purification. The implication of this purification mechanism is
characteristically illustrated by Adorno & Horkheimer’s scathing critique of the culture
industry, in which they posit the eternal return of the cliché ridden mantras and
206
The term sousveillance was originally coined by Steve Mann to reflect the inversion of surveillance practices, that
is, where the monitored monitor the monitors. For example video activists such as Paper Tiger Television deliberately
point their cameras towards mass media, politicians and law enforcement as a means of holding those in power
accountable for the (mis)information they convey to the public. 207
McNamara, R. in E. Morris and M. Williams, The Fog of War Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. Mcnamara
(Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2004). 208
Mills, The Power Elite, 314. my brackets.
88
uniformity of mass culture as a kind of luxurious stupidity whose dual purpose in life is
to entrap man in a thoroughly artificial dreamworld and bring soaring profits and power
to its owners.209
Similar verdicts are reflected in contemporary criticisms of modern visual culture.
Especially media analysts, such as Chomsky & Herman (2002), Klaehn (2003), and
Nichols & McChesney (2005), have been quick to point out how media not only shape
public opinion but also how they keep people in the dark about what actually goes on at
the top echelons of power.210
Mapping the ownership and overlap of financial interests of
mass media with large corporations and the political establishment, Chomsky & Herman
(2002), Klaehn (2003), and Nichols & McChesney (2005) argue that there is a wide
discrepancy in what mass media say they do and what they do without saying.211
All of
these authors “highlight the multilevel ways in which money and power can be seen to
influence media performance.”212
As such, they provide a structural analysis whose main
argument rests with the notion that mass media, like any other profit-seeking enterprise,
sets its financial self-interests before public concern.213
In this regard they point out that
the primary source of revenue for mass media is advertisement and not subscribers to
whom they are in the business of selling access. Therefore, and since advertisers want
their ads to appear in supportive selling environments, there is a tacit incentive to run
stories and programming that do not conflict with these business interests.214
For
example, when multinational corporations such as General Electric own a large portion of
mass media it is highly unlikely that its employees (editors and journalist) will address
the fact that they, the company that bring good things to life, also is a major supplier of
components for landmines.215
209
Or as illustrated by the following quote: “Capitalist production so confines them [consumers], body and soul, that
they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed on them
more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even
more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.” Adorno and
Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, 133. 210
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New
York: Pantheon Books, 2002). J. Klaehn, "Behind the Invisible Curtain of Scholarly Criticism: Revisiting the
Propaganda Model," Journalism Studies 4, no. 3 (2003). John Nichols and Robert Waterman McChesney, Tragedy and
Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New York: New Press, 2005), v-
11, 171-203. 211
For mass media ownership see also Columbia Journalism Review http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/ 212
Klaehn, "Behind the Invisible Curtain of Scholarly Criticism: Revisiting the Propaganda Model." 213
Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Klaehn, "Behind the
Invisible Curtain of Scholarly Criticism: Revisiting the Propaganda Model." Nichols and McChesney, Tragedy and
Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy, v-11, 171-203. 214
E. S. Herman, "The Propaganda Model Revisited," Monthly Review 48, no. 3 (1996). 215
See also Human Rights Watch landmine campaign http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/mines/IV.3.ge.html
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
89
According to Chomsky & Herman (2002), Klaehn (2003), and Nichols &
McCheasney (2005) these common “structural” deficiencies apply to the overlapping
interest of businesses and media sectors and the political establishment. In arguing this
case they present an impressive barrage of evidence and data, which corroborate their
analysis and which posit mass media as a toothless watchdog that overwhelmingly feeds
on spectacle and distraction rather than protect the interests of the public.216
In this regard
their criticisms are aligned not only with the Marxian perspectives of C.W. Mills, Max
Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno but also with the infamous author George Orwell, who in
the 1940s described the concentration of media and resulting literary self-censorship
within Great Britain as follows: ”The British press is extremely centralized, and most of
it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important
topics. … Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts can be kept in the
dark, without the need of any official ban.”217
That Orwell’s words ring true even today is
given by the fact that media, rather than generating and securing a plurality of
perspectives, select and disseminate a very narrowly scripted slice of reality (preferably
one that caters to keeping the wheels of consumption turning). To this should be added
that even ardent critics of Marxian perspectives such as Chomsky’s and McCheasney’s
have begun to assert that the “emasculation of restrictions of broadcasts ownership, have
increased the salience of” this “critique.”218
As they argue, this is especially true when
legislative oversight fails to act on behalf of the public, that is, when greed and power are
given free reign to purge a diversity of opinion from the collective consciousness.
As much as the contemporary critique of mass media relies on structural analysis,
there are others who approach the field on a more intimate psychological level. Richard
Sennett, for example, remarks that a characteristic feature of television is that it does not
permit interruption by its audience.219
Audiences must for all purposes remain silent if
they are to follow what is being said. As we know, escape from this wholly artificial state
is provided by substituting any possible means of response with the successful and
famous TV commentator or ‘star’, who ‘acts’ as it were as a double for the audience and
216
Similar arguments and evidence have been presented by Mark Crispin Miller (Professor of Media Studies, NYU),
Jeff Cohen (founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, FAIR), Mark Lloyd (Visiting Professor, Urban Studies and
Planning, MIT), Charles Lewis (founder of The Center for Public Integrety), Robert W. McChesney (Professor of
Communications, University of Illinois) in Robert Kane Pappas, "Orwell Rolls in His Grave," (US: Sag Harbor-
Basement Pictures, 2004). 217
Orwell, G. quoted in Klaehn, "Behind the Invisible Curtain of Scholarly Criticism: Revisiting the Propaganda
Model." 218
For a thorough criticism of Chomsky and Herman see K. Lang and G. E. Lang, "Noam Chomsky and the
Manufacture of Consent for American Foreign Policy," Political Communication 21, no. 1 (2004). 93-101 219
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 282-93.
90
who simultaneously projects a voice, a look and measure of success to which the average
man, woman and child can do nothing but aspire.220
As a result, the telescoping of vision
into television leaves no alternative for the many but to watch and listen to the few. Here
their silence and isolation from participating in any ‘genuine’ form of collective (or
individual) experience is given one outlet only and that is mass consumption. Oscillating
evermore rapidly between these two complimentary modes of passive and active
consumption, an inner vulnerability emerges in which those who do not fit in, or find
themselves overwhelmed by prevailing ideals (or take too seriously what is promised) are
at risk of being struck by intense bouts of anxiety. In extreme cases, the anxiety overload
and personal breakdown that follow in its wake become manifest in obsessive acts of
self-conformity. These are highly specific to a Western consumer culture and are duly
exemplified in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.221
The
underlying conditions from which these disorders arise thus point to a psychological
illiteracy advanced by Western consumer society, promulgated by the mass media and
swallowed by an image to which all ‘good’ things must aspire. The point being, that in
the mimetic relationship between the images of the media industry and the individual’s
self-image, the former is embedded, with seismographic precision, into the structure of
everyday intimate human interactions and the formation of the subject. At the level of
social inscription this slippage is not only manifest in eating disorders but also, and more
generally speaking, in the decline of the distinction between what we deem private and
public.222
In other words, the transformation of our lives’ contexts into staged settings
(we often see things before we experience them)223
raises the question of the extent to
which mediatized roles of self-presentation increasingly transform ‘subjects’ into
‘figures’ that primarily conform to the perceptual demands of the media’s attention.
However, and despite such criticism, it would be disingenuous not to recognize
that mass media has also prompted truly mesmerizing moments in which its potential as a
vehicle for collective memory and future hopes has found expression. For example, the
220
What began with the ‘semi-secular’ self-aggrandizement among artists and scientists in the Renaissance finds full
expression in mass culture’s celebration of ‘stars’ and fame and fortune. 221
For the psycho-social and cultural origins of these disorders see also:
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/uvahealth/adult_mentalhealth/edbulim.cfm
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/UVAHealth/adult_mentalhealth/edanorex.cfm 222
E.g. reality shows and shows where people from ‘real’ life gradually become actors in the social imaginary, have
moved the unfiltered personal and private realms, the last realms of authenticity, into the public field of vision. This
impoverishment of authentic possibilities for experience subscribes to a narcissism in which the subject can do nothing
but obey his or her desire to see the void filled. The hyper-reality of media worlds expertly compensate this desire by
providing evermore outlets (channels) for escape. 223
for example, kissing, falling in love, death, birth, divorce, racial tension, sexual orientation, drug use, etc.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
91
gripping footage of Earth from the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, estimated to have been seen
by a quarter of the world’s population, brought in a significant way a new kind of
awareness that helped among other things spawn the environmental movement with the
first Earth Day in 1970.224
Similarly, there are also examples (from the early era of
television) that show how mass media in its raw and unabbreviated form have solicited
the rationality of the public against the policies of the political and financial elite.
Critically speaking, this was the case when the US administration naively let journalists
unrestrictedly bring the horrors of the Vietnam War (the first televised war) into people’s
living rooms. The subsequent effect of these frontline reports culminated in the loss of
public support for a war that was as senseless and brutal as it was unwinnable. In
hindsight the argument has often been made (and followed) that any war reported in an
unrestricted way by mass media will eventually loose public support: a truism
memorably captured by the title of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem & song “The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised.”
fig. 10 Image Apollo 8 (1968) fig. 11 Earth day flag (1969)
fig. 12 & 13 Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home (1967-72)
224
http://ipp.nasa.gov/innovation/Innovation_84/wnewview.html
92
Needless to say the consolidation of media ownership along with the valuable
lessons of the Vietnam war have only exacerbated the power and ability of its owners to
maneuver audiences into evermore narrow profit-seeking agendas (i.e. the dramatic rise
of advertising and infotainment markets vs. the cutbacks in newsrooms and investigative
journalism). Having matured and become aware of its own powers and ability to
monopolize and direct the flow of information into the public sphere, mass media have
discovered that they can be virtually oblivious of their complicity in making truth the first
casualty of war (something the highly choreographed coverage of the two Gulf Wars and
the near total lack of coverage of the atrocities committed in East Timor and many other
places have made all too obvious).225
In short, executives and owners of mass media
know and operate by the fact that it is much cheaper, more profitable and exceedingly
less risky to report news, than it is, to make it.226
The cynical truth, or so it seems, is that
it no longer matters that mass media accommodates and profits from misinformation as
long as it is capable of soliciting the desired effect at the desired moment, a fact that in
itself points to a very powerful if not ruthlessly valuable kind of bargaining chip.227
That
newsroom editors and journalists are taking the brunt of the heat from these ‘profit first’
policies is reflected in the current crisis of mass media to legitimize its role as protector
of public interests. Moreover, and when we add that this mediated reality produces in
very tangible ways “a shortening of temporal horizons, diminishing attention spans, and a
saturation of time and place” (usually peppered with non-essential information and
captivating imagery), we begin to realize why mass media, a multi-billion dollar industry
with an army of coin operated lobbyists, is virtually immune to reproach.228
225
On the lack of coverage in US media of atrocities committed in East Timor (1974-1999) see also Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent. It is estimated that a third of the East Timorese population (200,000) were killed by
Indonesian troops (see also amnesty international website). At the time, the Indonesian government had large arms
deals with American companies. The attacks commenced within 24 hrs after US President Ford and Secretary
Kissinger left Jarkarta on official visit. Recently declassified documents (2001) have shown that the Ford
administration not only was complicit and well aware of the planned attack they also supported it. See also
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/index.html 226
See also Joe Strupp’s column Get Me Rewrite in trade journal Editor and Publisher on the effects of news media
consolidation in which Strupp remarks that “no editor who makes news first and profits second is safe.” Nov. 09. 2006.
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of media by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. See also R.
Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. M. G.
Durham and D. Kellner (London: Blackwell Pub, 2001). and S. Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Media and Cultural
Studies: Keyworks, ed. M. G. Durham and D. Kellner (London: Blackwell Pub, 2001). 152-176. 227
It is no secret that story of ‘Saving Private Jessica Lynch’ was released at a time when support for the second Gulf
War had declined significantly. Although it has been revealed that the story was a fictional propaganda job concocted
by the pentagon and abetted by mass media there has been no public outcry nor have any of the parties involved been
held accountable for misleading the public. As the many examples provided by media analysts such as Chomsky,
Herman, McCheasney and Nichols (to name a few) the Jessica Lynch story is but one of many smokescreens. 228
A. Hoskins, "Television and the Collapse of Memory," Time & Society 13, no. 1 (2004).
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
93
The social space created by mass media is thus not unlike the kitsch bonanza of
mass products that found their way to department stores during nineteenth century
industrialization, in that its primary function is to reinscribe into society an image of
itself. Only here, the image of mass media is an immaterial vehicle that delivers the
productworld of capitalism into the consciousness of man. The accelerated pace with
which the attributes and effects of this image world inscribes itself, conjures a notion of
progress that relies not only on the reorganization of temporal-spatial experience but also
on a transformation in our relationship to the past.229
Or put differently, if mass media is
a figuration of our collective historical conscious, then the latter is surely in deep trouble
seeing that the success of the former is measured by its ability to relegate present events
as rapidly as possible into the past.
To reiterate the point of Herman (1996), the loyalty of mass media lies not with
protecting public interests but with its ability to self-reproduce by creating and
maintaining supportive selling environments. As reported by the International Herald
Tribune (Nov. 17, 2006) current market trends indicate this plot has been given an extra
profit-seeking twist as an increasing number of mass media companies find themselves
being bought out and ‘trimmed’ by private equity firms who have no commitment
whatsoever (or intent) to provide costly public service functions such as investigative
journalism.230
Accordingly, the visual culture of modernity being intertwined with both
written and verbal communication signals the advent of a particular kind of space whose
(at least in this context) dominant feature includes the denaturalization of knowledge and
its ultimate displacement by commodification. This points to a broader trend in which the
expropriation of intellectual authority and the installment of an economy of transient
signs and surfaces are said to emerge. 231
229
The essence of which is also famously captured in the following passage by Walter Benjamin: “A Klee painting
named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of
history. His face turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is
turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Walter Benjamin,
"Thesis on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 257-58. 230
See also Sorkin & Edmonston, "Private Equity Firms Attracted to Traditional Media Companies," International
Herald Tribune, Nov. 17 2006. Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Company recently acquired Clear Channel for 18.7
billion USD (the largest buyout in media and entertainment industry to date) 231
This is not to say that capitalism itself is a bad or unwarranted principle for social organizational but rather the
unintended consequence of an unregulated capitalism is that it threatens to take away what has made it such a
compelling alternative to begin. In this context, intellectual responsibility to address these concerns plays an important
role.
94
What is created then, to paraphrase Baudrillard, is a simulacra that not only layers
itself on top and empties out reality of its contents but replaces it with a substantively
new and thoroughly artificial kind of reality.232
Significantly, then, the passage of
Aristotle’s claim that ‘nothing is in the intellect which is not first in the senses’ to its
current inversion, that is, to the claim that nothing is in the senses that is not first in the
intellect marks the decline of the aura of the object and the rise of simulacra in its
place.233
The discerning question, as brought forth by the challenge of postmodern
theory, is how intellectual communities respond to, or engage, this new layer of reality.
Postmodernity & The New Self-Awareness of Intellectuals
Postmodern theory provides a straight line of inquiry which enable us to understand the
self-image of visual sociologists, the terrain in which its practitioners operate and the
future potentials of the field. More particularly, the line of inquiry I have in mind and
which will open this debate is given by Bauman (1988) for whom the concept of
‘postmodernity’ connotes the advent of a new-self-awareness among intellectuals.234
In
many ways this new self-awareness has a strong correlate to the reevaluation by hands-on
practitioners of their purified identity, the acknowledgement of its failures and the
anxiety (or heroic undertakings) generated by a pending emancipation from past
procedures and limitations.235
Or as Bauman writes: “This implosion of intellectual
vision, this ‘falling upon oneself’, may be seen as either a symptom of retreat or
surrender, or a sign of maturation. Whatever the evaluation of the fact, it may be
interpreted as a response to the growing sense of failure, inadequacy or irrationalism of
the traditional functions and ambitions, as sedimented in historical memory and
institutionalized in the intellectual mode of existence.”236
The sense of failure and the
anxiety (or hopes) that postmodernity brings with it is thus grounded in the
acknowledgement that the kind of services from which intellectuals historically have
232
Because simulacra is viral (i.e., parasitic) it assumes a reality of its own. 233
Note, the inversion of Aristotle’s claim belongs to the author of this text. For original quote ‘Nihil est in intellectu
quod non prius fuerit in sensu,’ see Aristotle in Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought. footnote 27 234
Bauman develops his theory on postmodernity from the circumstances that lead to a dismissal of the role of
organic intellectuals as formulated by Antonio Gramsci. see also Bauman, Z. Intimations of Postmodernity. Routledge,
New York & London. 1992 235
While the realization that this sense of failure renders the ambitions and functions of what one ought to do visible, it
is also a premier source of anxiety because it increases both the risks and the accountability of individuals. 236
Bauman, Zygmunt. Is There a Postmodern Sociology? In Theory, Culture & Society, Volume 5 Numbers 2-3 June
1988.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
95
derived their sense of social importance (read: legitimacy) are no longer in high demand
because the basis of the provisions that traditionally have dispensed “an authoritative
solution to questions of cognitive truth, moral judgments and aesthetic taste” are annulled
by the advent of a social horizon where distinctions between high and low, appearance
and reality, truth and untruth are seen to implode.237
It follows then that those who
traditionally view the social, moral, political and aesthetic fragmentation as a threat to
social cohesion have a hard time making sense of a world that most of all derives its
sense of self through a voracious and ‘free-spirited’ appetite for difference and plurality.
In other words the existentially and occupationally disorienting (or liberating) quality of
the postmodern sensibility is, to paraphrase Adorno’s take on art that it is “delivered from
the lie of being truth.”238
While the increased differentiation and complexity of the postmodern condition
work to undermine the authority of orthodox intellectuals by challenging the social
reality from which they normally proceed, they are also threatened by a different kind of
change. More specifically, and according to Bauman, this change is given by the overall
decline in demand for their services by the state apparatus.239
The need for the
authoritative legitimation of intellectuals and hence also the need of the state to impose
universalizing and hierarchical standards for a reason led improvement of the human
condition have thus sharply diminished with the advent of an era that defines its self-
content (its need for self-expression and individual freedom) by its ability to market and
consume a world of difference. As Bauman (1988, 1992), Chin-tao Wu (2002), Bourdieu
& Haake (1995) and several others have noted, even that last intellectual bastion of ‘high’
culture has been abandoned, so that it no longer is seen by the educated elite as an
exclusive terrain of their own making, but rather as one that increasingly belongs, head
over heels, to corporate sponsorship and private interests.240
While culture is only one of
many areas in which the authority of the state has changed hands it signals, according to
237
Ibid. p.219 … a cautionary warning must be issued for just like discussions of change from premodernity to
modernity are not singular and definite, but diverse and plural, so are discussions of what constitute postmodernity.
What I present is therefore only a small, but for my purpose contextually important, fragment of what has been said on
this topic. 238
Adorno, T. Minima Moralia – Reflexions from Damaged Life. Verso, New York. 1999: 222-224. Baumans´
characterization of postmodernity shares an affinity with Jean-Francois Lyotard´s in so far as they both see the waning
significance of Enlightenment rationality. 239
In retrospect this observation may seem a bit ill-founded for according to data from the ASA there has in fact been
an increase in federal and state funding of sociological research from the early 1980’s onward. However, it should also
be noted that while funding has increased there is no immediate linking to data that show what kind of research has
been funded or whether this resurge in funding is qualitatively different from past areas of research. source:
www.asa.org 240
Wu, Chin-tao. Privatizing Culture – Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980’s. Verso, London & New York.
2002: Bourdieu, P. & Haake, H. Free Exchange. Stanford University Press, Stanford. 1995.
96
Bauman, an overall change of strategy (by the state) that increasingly relies on the
successful adaptation of a mode of political domination that can reproduce itself using
means more efficient and less costly than intellectual ‘legitimation’.241
The efficaciousness of this new mode of political domination depends to a large
extent on the state rendering its authority irrelevant by replacing its costly and traditional
weapons of intellectual legitimation, (i.e., the authorization of truth, moral, and aesthetic
value) with the mutually complementary weapons of seduction and repression. (Ibid) Its
origin, as examined by Bauman, lies with the successful acquisition and deployment of
panoptic techniques; techniques that when coupled to a highly dedifferentiated form of
conspicuous consumption are able to facilitate a gradual displacement and elimination of
ideological legitimation as a means of reproducing systemic integration. (1987:157-159)
Or put differently, when authority and the creation of the individual (as individual) is
relegated to the heaves of consumption, the social order entrusted to the power of the
state becomes much easier to re-inscribe because recourse to prior forms of
ideological/intellectual legitimation is no longer needed. Thereby intimating that the
mindset of consumer society is a matter of self-creation because it restores to the
individual the concept of choice rather than the verdict of those who crown themselves
‘in the know’. Consequently, the values held by the educated elite loose their practical
political relevance and with it the obviousness of their superiority and collective
importance to the greater whole, is reduced to an afterimage of a bygone era.242
The point
here being, as Bauman writes, “that the state is not necessarily weaker from this demise
of authority; it simply has found better, more efficient ways of reproducing and
reinforcing its power.”243
While this does not mean intellectuals have become superfluous, it does mean,
that much of what they do (or are expected to do) has drifted from the top-down realm of
legislative authority to the pluralistic realm of interpretative authority. Among other
things, it is this reallocation of the intellectual endeavor from the certitude of the first to
241
See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals (Cambridge,
Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 122. Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom, Concepts in Social Thought (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), 221. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992). Zygmunt
Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 242
This, as Bauman suggests, can also be seen in “the deprived political support … to launch further cultural crusades”
which (at least after the end of the Cold War) had begun to look “increasingly fanciful as ideas and farcical as
practices” (1987:160). This said, it would not be entirely wrong to claim that the events of 9/11 have resuscitated, on an
heretofore unimaginable scale, the need and want of politicians to recruit intellectuals (and the media/entertainment
complex) for cultural/ideological warfare, i.e. the massive allocation of research funds to anti-terrorism, Islamic and
muslim-diaspora studies. 243
Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals, 122.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
97
the uncertainty of the second that we see realized in the realm of visual sociology. Its
unequivocal expression is found in the ambivalence facing its practitioners. Yet another
way this change can be said to be expressed, is in the mushrooming of private think
tanks, spin doctors and expert consultants (‘interpreter-seducer’ types used by politicians
and special interest groups to lobby particular issues as legitimate) often represented in
‘news’ media (utilization of seduction/repression technology) which they actively target
as opposed to university professors who have less need or want for such public profiling
because they represent a more traditional and subtle kind of proselytizing authority.244
While a considerable amount of concern has been voiced (especially by mass-
culture theorists) as to whether the subsumption of intellectual legitimation by market
forces prompt cultural uniformity, there is plenty of evidence, as Bauman argues, that the
opposite is the case. (1992:18ff)245
A telling indication of this diversification is given by
the fact that mainstream, local, and specialized media vendors (radio, television, film, and
newspapers) are cramming their activities into the online market because this is where
infotainment consumers increasingly have migrated.246
In fact if the online market in its
present form is indicative of anything it is the cultural diversity of opinions, products,
identities, and beliefs that are available and continually produced by and for consumers
who see choice and experimentation not as a burden but as a freedom to be or voice
whatever they want. In other words “in the new domination of market forces culture has
recovered a mechanism of the reproduction of diversity once located in autonomous
communities and later ostensibly lost for a time in the era of politically sponsored
cultural crusades.”247
Confronted with a world view almost diametrically opposite to the
setting in which intellectuals first deployed their visions suggests that a reevaluation of
priorities is needed.
Intellectuals, therefore, need to understand how new modes of political
domination and the market forces that fuel them exert a considerable influence in
244
The challenge of postmodern thought is that it ties the aesthetization of everyday life to the retreat of the state and
the onslaught of the market. According to reports by resereach body Forrester, European internet users now spend 14.3
hours a week online compared with 11.3 hours watching television, and 4.4 hours reading newspapers or magazines.
(Source: BBC online “Online advertising ‘growing fast’, July 12, 2007) 245
Market liberalization of media and the relinquishing of state control was the first instance of this turn, but as the
power of market media began to assemble on the hands of the few like Ruppert Murdock and Silvio Berlusconi and as
the overt political agenda of their businesses spawned a radicalization and disenchantment of the public, an ever
increasing stream are turning to other media such as the internet where they find their own information and form their
own opinions instead of relying on mainstream media outlets. For alternative sites see www.buzzflash.com,
www.commondreams.org, www.fair.org, www.mrzine.org. 246
See also study by UK telecom regulator Ofcom, and Institute for Public Policy and Research (IPPR), source
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4779329.stm (Aug. 2006) 247
Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity. 18.
98
creating, controlling and disseminating the needs and demands of our on- and offline
worlds; which by all means are neither as private or free of corporate and government
interests as most people would like or think them to be.248
Moreover and besides the
obvious and widely increased capacity for surveillance that digitization brings in the form
of ubiquitous computing (e.g. the gathering of personal information under the Patriot Act
as a matter-of-fact example of how panoptic technologies, such as commercial data-
mining, are used by the state to extend its power and control - a process due to be
extended even further with the increasing mobility of communication and information
technologies and the embedding of computation devices (e.g. CCTV, RFID & GPS) into
our everyday environments) there is an equally distressing indication that the postmodern
moment of late consumer or multinational capitalism is unable to retain, let alone
generate, a historical sense of self. It is precisely this historical amnesia which marks a
singularly profound challenge to intellectual craftsmanship and which we therefore now
turn to explore more in-depth.
Visual Culture and the Case of Historical Amnesia
While the postmodern problem of historical amnesia is often couched in excessively
complex theoretical arguments there are numerous real world examples that can be made
and which point in one way or the other to the same phenomenon – namely that if history
is to make sense of the contemporary condition it must be re-conceptualized to capture
the present as a spatial phenomenon. More precisely and to conjure this shift in historical
understanding one could begin, as Fredric Jameson does, with the countercultural
upheaval of the 1960s which popularized on a mass scale all things subversive and
morally dubious and whose immanent failure too bring about revolution can be seen in
248
In terms of the merging of corporate and government interests we need but recall the recent decision by the US
congress to pass the heavily lobbied Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006
which effectively ends the concept that everyone, everywhere should have free, universal and non-discriminatory
access to all of the Internet. The COPE Act permits internet service providers such as AOL to charge fees for almost
every online transaction and to prioritize emails based on the senders willingness to pay. Or as the NGO organization
Common Cause write “Right now, no law or rule protects citizens facing obstacles to getting access to the information
on the Internet. The COPE bill would make it impossible for those protections to be written into law or rule, making all
of us vulnerable to big companies who would like to "own" the Internet and mine it for profit. Some companies like
Verizon and Comcast have already announced plans to create a two-tiered Internet, where some websites and services
would travel in the "fast lane" - for a fee, of course - and the rest would be relegated to a "slow lane."” (see also
http://www.commoncause.org) If the COPE Act passes in the Senate we can certainly expect to see major corporations
such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon blocking access to critical or otherwise inconvenient voices (as has already been
done by AOL) or as ALL of these companies already have done under the Patriot Act, pass ‘personal’ information on
to government agencies. For more information see http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/09/1427218,
www.freepress.org, www.saveaccess.org, www.aclu.org, www.eff.org, www.nyt.com.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
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the subsequent incorporation of this transgressive moment in history into the official
realm of high culture i.e., to a realm whose autonomy has been supplanted by the logic of
the market. It is precisely this new market driven institutional setting and legitimate
stamping of all things profane that has revamped the underlying condition of cultural
production. So much indeed, that anybody aspiring to originality or transgression of
norms is confronted with the fact that such a task is indeed an impossible act that can
accomplish nothing that has not already been said and done (better?) by others; duly
illustrated by agent provocateur and Sexpistols manager Malcom McLaren´s poignant
comment: “Its very, very difficult to decide now what is bad.”249
fig.5 Dan Perjovschi , Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. (2006)
In short what characterizes the postmodern condition and what ‘weighs like a
nightmare on the mind’ of so many progressive (or should we say retrogressive?)
intellectuals is that it captures the implosion of utopian ideas as a means of historical
transgression (i.e. the crisis of the political left, and of artists and writers) and thereby
also the futility of longing for something better. However, and as Jameson (1991:48),
Olalquiaga (2001:588-597) and Bauman (1988, 1992) argue, the dissolution of the
concept of culture and cultural production as an autonomous sphere by market capitalism
does not necessarily imply the disappearance of culture nor does it mean the extinction or
futility of engaging in cultural production. On the contrary as Jameson argues “culture is
rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture
249
McLaren, M. in R. Ferguson, "Taking Control: Popular Culture," in Discourses: Conversations on Postmodern Art
and Culture, ed. William Olander Russell Ferguson, Marcia Tucker, Karen Fiss (MIT Press, 1992).
100
throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life, … can be
said to have become ‘culture’ in some original and yet untheorized sense.”250
In this culturally saturated space we find an assemblage of signs and surfaces that
posit the history and historicity of the present as a retro phenomenon, a historical pastiche
in which past meanings are continually brought together and reconfigured to express the
sensibilities of the present. While these sensibilities often amount to a longing for the
innocence of yesteryear, as expressed in the retrospective narrative and/or material
styling (e.g. nostalgia films, fashion) they also signal the impossibility of transgressing all
‘norms’.251
Whatever the case, a brief glace through contemporary culture is sure to
reveal that these developments are omnipresent figurations readily found in visual art,
music, architecture, popular culture, literature, etc. However, neither retro or
transgression represents anything substantively new and so what is lost in meaning (in the
traditional modernist sense) is recuperated in a playful celebration that mixes together the
forms and styles of previous eras (often summoned through ironic, campy or otherwise
‘distancing’ narrative gestures). As such the contemporary concept of history not only
amounts to a visual re-inscription of our cultural past, it also signals the atrophy of the
modern author-artist and the installment of the postmodern reader-interpreter in its place.
History is thereby defused and recuperated as a form of praxis in which the glance of an
eye plays a central role in its reading and decoding. Hence, Bauman’s observation that
intellectuals in postmodernity increasingly find themselves demoted from author-
legislator types to reader-interpreters hits the nail of contemporary reason square on its
250
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary Interventions
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 48. and Olalquiga, C. Prologue to Metropolis in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and
Douglas Kellner, Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, Rev. ed., Keyworks in Cultural Studies (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001), 588-97. 251
One way of unpacking this trajectory is to examine Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) where the
main characters travel backward in cultural time, back to a ‘real’ and rural America filled with intolerance and
xenophobic rednecks. Here it is the lack of freedom and the low down cynical ways of American life that are targeted
for inspection. Or as Peter Fonda, who directed and starred in the movie, said to the reporter of Rolling Stone
magazine: “My movie is about the lack of freedom, not about freedom. My heroes are not right, they’re wrong. The
only thing I can end up doing is killing my character. I end up committing suicide; that’s what I’m saying America is
doing.” Eyerman & Löfgren, "Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility," Theory, Culture and
Society, SAGE 12, no. 1 (feb 1, 1995): 62. Fonda’s vision is thus a vision that beckons of the same kind of generational
despair later to be found in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Both are truly journeys into the heart of
darkness. However, as the fast paced yuppies of the nineteen-eighties charged head over heels to slam the door shut in
the face of the 1960’s countercultural criticism, the ideological drapery of life changed once again. Or as Eyerman and
Löfgren put it, with yuppies at the wheel, “the social criticism which unified the previous generation is much less
obvious, if not entirely absent”(Ibid:63). It would, however, be wrong to posit all blame on the yuppies for the
abandonment of a critical inspection of societal norms, as explored by the counterculture of the nineteen sixties. For
example in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) passionate social criticism is transformed by a head-on confrontation
and repositioning of the transgressive moment as entirely toothless (i.e. Jeffery Beaumont’s fearless exposure of Frank
Booth as nothing but a curiosity). Other contemporary examples that ‘mock’ the transgressive are (reality shows)
Jackass, The Swan, Survivor, Big Brother, etc., (Film) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan, Fight Club (1999), Wondershowzen (MTV2), (visual art) Bansky, and Thomas Hirschhorn to
name a few.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
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head. In this sense the visual dimension offers an integral pathway to our understanding
of the historical moment of the present as significantly different from that of the past. If
there is a common spatial reference under which the experiencing of this postmodern
sensibility can be said to roam, it is in a hall of mirrors where vision looks in vein for its
reflection.
Out of this blind spot emerges a hyphenated identity (the multicultural and
globalized) that tirelessly seeks to capture and convey its own reflection (even though it
is an inherently unstable construct) rather than look to a singular purified gestalt. Because
there is no pre-given societal template from which the hyphenated identity can model
itself on, that is, because each and every person is increasingly compelled to explore his
or her sense of otherness through their own thrust and against the grain of previous eras,
against the calcified historical and cultural constructs from which identification is
mirrored but not reflected, they see themselves both negatively (as neither-or) and
positively (as both-and) in terms of belonging. Having to carve their identity from this
uneasy space in which previous solidified modes of being coexists alongside newer more
fluid types of becoming (the constantly negotiable self) there emerges a collective sense
of vulnerability, a caring and consciousness towards that which seeks identification
though difference. In doing so the quintessential discovery is that the wardrobe of history
provides not so much role models but concepts of space, which can be refashioned to
harbor the voices of a diverse and shifting mass of identities. It is precisely in this
capacity that the advent and exponential increase in personal computers and computing
power as well as their interface with new communication technologies have played an
integral role in facilitating. To be sure the cybernetic terrain of the digital age has created
spaces “where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed,
circulated, and exchanged globally.”252
With these spaces come both an intensification
and democratization of the communicative process, an information superhighway in
which the arbiters of taste and opinion are brought down to the level of an audience that
increasingly have become producers and distributors of content themselves (e.g.
YouTube, MySpace, Blogs, Vlogs, Wikipedia, etc.,). In this sense there can be no doubt
that the vast cybernetic terrain is a premier site in which contemporary identities are
negotiated on the model of becoming rather than on the model of being. What is solicited
then is a diverse and thoroughly mutable view of the world, a view whose ethics and
252
Crary, J. Techniques of the Observer – On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. October Books, MIT
Press, Boston. 1991:2
102
aesthetization of everyday life bring both anxiety and liberating potentials to the fore.253
Hence, the revolutionary promise of Benjamin’s recourse to technological reproduction
lies not in the mass proliferation of the message but in the creation of virtual spaces (i.e.
user-producer oriented spaces) that ideally speaking make communication possible and
equal for all.254
Digitization is furthermore synonymous with new modes of aesthetization that
effectively challenge culturally established hierarchies of representation and production.
It conjures not so much a shift in terms of what can and cannot be said as it conjures a
shift in how to say things. Or put simply, because user distributed content compel people
into making aesthetic choices (through use of software such as Photoshop, Final Cut, 3D
Studio Max, Dreamweaver, digital cameras, camcorders and scanners, etc.) they are
increasingly acquainting themselves with how the visual and verbal intertwine to produce
and solicit meaning. What is at stake then, is not just an indexical tracing of real world
events onto the digital terrain, but also the creation of fabricated visual spaces that are at
once highly mobile and accessible to a global audience.255
By no small account this
points to the insight that experimentation with image construction (however banal) is
happening on a mass scale.
The fact that this is happening is good because attaining firsthand knowledge of
how visual arguments are produced make it harder to mislead or use images in a
totalizing manner. In other words the more people experiment with images and image
construction the faster the arrival of a sound and critical basis for their consumption.
Hence, the matter of fact observation that not less but more manipulation of imagery
signals a visual maturity in the making or to be more precise an emerging understanding
of the polysemic nature of images. If visual sociologists with these developments do not
see an impetus to diversify their visual practices, they will not only be outpaced by those
they seek to study, they will also inevitably make themselves and what they do obsolete.
253
In this regard is no surprise to find that some of the most repressive regimes in the world restrict public access to
this domain. China, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Tunesia, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Belarus, North Korea to name the most
explicitly restrictive. Sources: Reporters Sans Frontieres - http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19603 & human
rights watch - http://hrw.org/doc/?t=internet 254
Note: there are numerous examples where owners and administrators of social networking sites have either censored
or monitored online communities for legal as well as illegal activities. The big question is how to regulate and monitor
what businesses (and governments) allow or do not allow users to say in online worlds. What is said and done is
therefore not entirely unproblematic as ubiquitous computing allows for extensive surveillance to take place. See also
www.eff.org 255
Accessibility is measured not so much in terms of whether a site is a top hit on a search engine as it is measured by
it being situated in the network and/or peer community in which it speaks.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
103
But besides this clarion call for (self)adaptation, what else does digitization hold
in store for the concept of history and historical self-awareness? As we have already seen,
news media measure their success by their ability to relegate recent historical events as
rapidly as possible into the past. While there is nothing new about the rapid overturning
of events the change of pace with which they are occurring certainly is. To be sure, the
massive influx of consumers who produce and distribute information on the web has
dramatically accelerated the pace with which this process occurs. What is generated,
then, is a logic in which the modernist credo of the eternal return of the new is
accelerated beyond its historical threshold and into a state of perpetual presents.
Barbara Probst
Exposure #33: N.Y.C.,249 W 34th Street, 04.25.05, 7:36 p.m., 2005
Barbara Probst
Exposure #47: N.Y.C., 555 8th Avenue, 10.11.06, 7:58 p.m., 2006. 256
256
The images in Probst’s series are shot simultaneously and depict a multiplicity of realities just as they convey the
constructedness of contemporary experience.
104
A similar observation holds true for digital photography. With the advent of
inexpensive digital cameras and camera phones the amount of pictures being taken has
soared to new heights. As a result, people are less likely to go back and look at any of the
pictures they have taken because they now have a hundred where they used to have one.
On a significant level, and as recent studies suggests, it is therefore not so much the
photographic image as an instance of biographical memory but the hollowness and
instant gratification of the activity behind it that prompt people into taking pictures.257
258What is happening today, then, is comparable to the making of a map of the world that
grows in detail until every point in reality has a counterpoint on paper, the twist being
that such a map is at once ideally accurate and entirely useless, since it aspires to the
same size as the thing it is meant to represent! By no small means this suggests that
behind our contemporary historical amnesia, that is, behind our obsession with being in
the present (with being live!) lies a an immensely powerful societal force, a post-
industrial multinational and highly accelerated instance of capitalism, whose lease on life
is tied to its ability to obliterate traditions of the kind in which all earlier social
formations have had, in one way or another, an impetus to preserve.259
In less than two decades our historical self-conscious has been worked over,
canceled, volatized, sublimated and radically transformed by an exponential increase in
data storage and computing power. As recent estimates suggest, if technological
innovation continues down its current path we are only a few years away from the costs
of data storage dropping so far that we can record everything that happens to us. What is
remarkable about this largely taken-for-granted shift is that it promises not only to free-
up memory so that we longer are burdened by all the things we might forget, it
simultaneously assures us that future generations will know more about us than we will
ever know about our ancestors!260
However, it is not particularly interesting to note that
future generations will be able to reanimate every step of our lives (most likely they’ll
have better things to do than to sit around and watch us perform mundane tasks), rather it
257
Amy Harmon, "We Simply Can’t Stop Shooting – Photography Now Film Free Has Become an Addiction,"
International Herald Tribune, May 7-8 2005. 258
E.g., the outmoded use of photography as a means of eliciting biographical memory, is rapidly being supplanted by
a whole new set of practices that are much more complicit with making symbolic gestures. Hence, it is not uncommon
to see camera phone yielding teenagers taking pictures of one another to pass time. 259
See also Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (New York: Verso,
1998), 120. 260
E.g., the storage requirement for a video stream and two audiostreams, plus GPS location, is ‘only’ about 10,000 Gb
per year – which will cost about 20 USD by 2017 if we follow Moores Law. Note: “Moores Law is the empirical
observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles
every 24 months. On this basis, the power of computers per unit cost - or more colloquially, "bangs per buck" -
doubles every 24 months (or, equivalently, increases 32-fold in 10 years).” Source www.wikipedia.org.
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
105
is much more intriguing to find out how contemporary social practices are being
negotiated on the basis of how we collect, use, create, distribute, and share information in
everyday life. That these practices depend on and are partitioned by screen based
environments, display not only an empovishment of the experiential frame, it situates the
visual as an integral component in understanding how these narratives subscribe to a
theatricalization of all spheres of public and private life. The collective attention deficit
disorder that this theatricallization inserts into the social order, points to a fundamentally
disrupted sense of symbolic social interaction where the logic of the spectacle has
become the primary prerequisite for private, economic, and political self-assertion. Out of
this transient economy of signs and surfaces emerges a social sphere in which one only
exist in as much as one is constantly looked at.261
One thing is certain, in a world of simulacra the conflation between the image and
the Self is tirelessly manufactured to ensure that a renewal of perception has no place to
go, but the market place.262
In short, and because today’s social practices (however
irrational they may be) are largely grafted from an insatiable desire for making symbolic
affirmations of ones own ‘existence’, the Utopian and ultimately also outmoded elitist
idea that a self-reflexive and introspective subject can challenge the security of this
‘successful’ way of life is a fairy tale at most. As argued in this thesis, gaining access to
the shared meanings, which are the conditions of our existence rest not with our ability to
objectivate the social, but with our ability to meaningfully and visually interpret what it
means to live in an age where “image is everything.”263
261
The atrophied and narcisistic identities fabricated by these self-assertive practices are anticipated in the work of
Andy Warhol and embodied in the profound critiques of visual artists such as Tony Oursler, Cindy Sherman, Dan
Graham, and Maureen Connor, to name a few. 262
E.g. the 280 billion dollar semi-conductor industry is driven by the needs of operators such as Verizon, AT&T, and
Sprint, which are in turn driven by the needs of application providers such as YouTube, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and
eBay, which in turn are driven by the needs of content providers such as TimeWarner, Sony, NBC, and the BBC. Each
step in this chain represents an astronomical economic leap in profits and power. 263
“Image is everything” is a slogan introduced by the Canon Coporation in 1990 to promote its line of Rebel EOS
cameras. Or as Norman Denzin writes: “The search for meaning of the postmodern moment is a study in looking. It can
be no other way.” Norman K. Denzin, Images of Postmodern Society : Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema
(London ; Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991), viii-ix.
106
VII: Concluding Remarks
Visual sociology harbors enormous potential to generate new knowledge. Release of this
potential, however, is conditional in that it asks of its practitioners to find within
themselves the courage to confront the impasse at which they stand. As intimated, this
impasse is no small hurdle for it is foundational to the core and thus an integral
component of the identity of the field. One of the primary goals of this thesis has been to
pinpoint the constituents of this identity so that a better understanding of the difficulties
facing the field could emerge. That these difficulties remain elusive is given by the fact
that many of the limitations that are internal to the field are self-imposed limitations
directed at relieving external pressures. Attempts to relieve these pressures have by and
large been aimed at appeasing scientific standards that are at once outmoded and
nonconductive (re: highly limiting) to the advancement of visual based research. As a
result visual sociology stands without any clear concept of how current sociological
concerns can be visually conceptualized. To adhere to this status quo is therefore to
succumb to the eminent failure to address that on which the field wagers its existence.
Visual sociology, in other words, can only legitimate its existence if it generates a social
science discourse which theorizes different aspects of contemporary experience and
concomitantly explores new ways to articulate how the ‘non-verbal’ contributes to the
discovery and conceptualization of such experience.
In this thesis I have introduced a concept of visual culture that extends an
invitation to explore how others have conceptualized vision and visuality both practically
and theoretically. I have done so in the belief that if visual sociologists recognize and
incorporate this abundant intellectual and artistic heritage they can gain an exceptionally
strong hand in legitimating what they do. Throughout this process, prescriptive cure-all
announcements of how go about have been deliberately avoided as I neither believe nor
think it particularly wise to advocate visual normativity in sociology. While this initially
leaves open the range of possibilities that can be pursued it does not mean that we are
clueless as to how and from where a reconfiguration of priorities can be initiated. Areas
that demand immediate attention and which can easily be worked on include:
• Contemporary themes: Explore how new media and technology
impact identity formation? New and emerging social practices? Visual
literacy criteria? Gender and generational relations? Compression of
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
107
time and space? Media policies and the politization/capitalization of
information? History and historical self-awareness? Reconfiguration of
public and private spheres? Archival practices? etc.
• Foundational: Find ways to synthesize hands-on approach with
traditions that conceptualize vision and visualization from sociological
perspectives (e.g. critical theory, cultural studies, new art history,
psychoanalysis, cultural geography, postmodern theory, visual art, etc.),
rather than ethnographic perspectives.
• Explorative: Initiate new modes of working visually (with emphasis on
methodologically reflexive and interpretative sensibilities rather than
objectivating demands). Innovative use of new technology and media.
• Dissemination & documentation: Develop and create outlets for
presenting new bodies of work (particularly for work, such as large
scale installations and new media, that do not fit the bill of traditional
publication formats). Heightened emphasis on documentation of
projects for future presentations and research (archival strategy is
needed).
• Public outreach: Make it known that sociologists can communicate
complex ideas about society and social phenomena visually (engage
general public as well as people working within other disciplines).
• Funding: Secure ongoing financial support for projects and research as
such endorsements show the relevance of the field (negative long-term
consequences if this is not done on a continual basis).
In other words, the necessity of facilitating this reconfiguration of priorities
comes both as a response to the inability of present procedures to capture the visual
dimensions of social life, and as a response to the ‘status crisis’ and the self-limitating
internal dynamics of the field. While it is clear that something must be done at this
junction, the prospects of abandoning the identity affirming security of a deviant sub-
discipline has brought a general uncertainty about how to proceed. The dialectic tension
of this relationship is conjured by the fact that “while the discontents of latter arise from a
kind of security which tolerates too little freedom in the pursuit of individual happiness,
the discontents of former arise from a kind of freedom which tolerates too little
individual security.”264
However, and as Bauman reminds us, there are greater things at
stake than the illusion of individual happiness for “to be free does not mean to believe in
nothing; what it does mean is believing in too many things – too many for the spiritual
264
Bauman, Z. Postmodernity and its Discontents. Polity Press, 1997: 201-2
108
comfort of blind obedience; it means being aware that there are too many equally
important or convincing beliefs for the assumption of a careless or nihilistic attitude to
the task of responsible choice between them; and to know that no choice would save the
chooser from the responsibility for its consequences – and that therefore having chosen
does not mean having settled the matter of choice once and for all, nor the right to put
one’s conscience to rest.”265
Consequently, if visual sociologists decide to step up to the
plate and produce what they are capable of, rather than continue to produce what they
misleadingly believe is asked of them, they need to learn to live with the burden of
choice.
Since paralyzation or hibernation (i.e. the end strategy of Adorno) are the only
other options, there is but one certainty only and that is to look insecurity and possible
failure straight in the eye and move on. Whatever visual sociologists choose, they can
only be certain that the overall demands and responsibility of intellectual work, now
more than ever, rests on the shoulders of the individual. Hence, and so as not to fall prey
to a stalemate of scientific nothingism we can draw, as C.W. Mills once did, on the
insights of Max Horkheimer who wrote: “The constant warning against premature
conclusions and foggy generalities implies, unless properly qualified, a possible taboo
against all thinking. If every thought has to be held in abeyance until it has been
completely corroborated, no basic approach seems possible and we would limit ourselves
to the level of mere symptoms.”266
As I have argued, the concept of visual culture provides ample opportunity for
visual sociologists, to rise above the level of symptoms because it exemplifies the insight
that history (and knowledge) constantly shifts as new events in the present transform the
meaning of past events leading up to them. More particularly, such insights are fiercely
defiant of the notion that the future can only be trusted if the past is endowed with
authority which the present is obliged to obey. Again, since attempts at obliging past
authority have not exactly worked to the advantage of visual sociologists, they are left
with one option only and that is experimentation. In this sense experimentation becomes
a hallmark of maturity because it effectively extends the practice of a field beyond its
own historical formation, that is, it reifies its work in a present of anticipated futures and
reconstructed pasts. Hence, the premier task of the contemporary visual sociologist is to
find new ways of working visually, or as Steven Gould writes: “If our field is committed
265
Ibid. 266
Horkheimer, M. in Mills, The Sociological Imagination.p.122-23
SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
109
to understanding the contemporary world, we must invent more sophisticated ways of
thinking about the visual elements of social life.”267
Coupled to our long list of findings,
contemporary voices like Gould’s (not to forget Emmison and Smith, Eric Margolis,
Marcus Banks, and Francesco Lapenta) are not only symptomatic but proof of purchase
that the field of visual sociology needs to confront its ethos of self-limitation and move
on. As I have argued throughout the concept of visual culture provides, at least for the
time being, an opportunity to do just that.
267
Steven J. Gould, Introduction, 1 vols., vol. 20, Qualitative Sociology (Springer Verlag
Springer, 1997).
110
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Appendix: e-mail correspondance with Becker, Grady, Harper and Wagner.
Howard S. Becker:
118
John Grady:
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Douglas Harper:
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SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
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SOCIOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
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Jon Wagner:
A B S T R A C T
Mainstreaming Visuals in Educational Research
Paper Presented at the Annual Meetings of the International Visual Sociology Association,
University of Minnesota, July 10-15, 2001.
Jon Wagner
University of California, Davis
email: [email protected]
Within the professions of sociology and anthropology, image-based research often has been regarded as a specialized, peripheral and somewhat problematic strand of field work -- a kind of "soft" and interpretive approach that is less rigorous and credible than studies for which text and numbers appear as primary data sources. However, in sociological and anthropological studies of schooling, image-based research has been more broadly defined and regarded more highly. In several instances, image-based research studies have appeared, in fact, as more rigorous, credible, and theoretically strategic than studies based on numbers and texts alone. As one step towards understanding how and why image-based studies appear more and more in the mainstream of educational research, I'll try to answer the following three questions: First, what kinds of educational research studies have been making increased use of visual data and analysis? Second, how
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have these studies addressed key legitimation issues of typicality, objectivity and visual representation? And third, to what extent are these legitimation issues defined somewhat differently in education than in sociology or anthropology?
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Historical antecedents of image-assisted educational research
1900's-20's
Lewis Hine did his first camera work as a geography and nature study teacher at the Ethical-Cultural School in New York City (while completing a master's degree in education at NYU). In his role as a "school photographer," Hine also made photographic documents of Ellis Island as images that could be used to teach students about immigration and cultural diversity (Freedman 1994; Westerbeck and Meyerowitz 1994).
1920's- 30's
In the mid-1920's, Charles Hamilton Houston began his service as an early "education director" of the NAACP by making a visual survey (on film) of "separate but unequal" conditions of housing and education in the south (Houston was the primary intellectual architect behind a long series of challenges to segregation that culminated in Brown vs. Board of Education).
1930's - 40's:
The 1930's & 40's were the decades when Bateson and Mead (1942) conducted and published their image-rich studies of Balinese culture, including the separate analysis of child development prepared by Mead and Macgregor (1951). The latter was framed as a complement and extension of the pioneering work of Arnold Gesell (1943) in documenting visual indications of child development through still and motion pictures. These are also the years that the Farm Security Administration photo-documentation project was conceived and implemented..
1960's - 70's
John Collier Jr. published his classic review and analysis of photography as a research method (1967). He also made film recordings of classrooms that he described in Alaskan Eskimo education: A film analysis of cultural confrontation in the schools (Collier 1973).
Paulo Freire (1981[1973]) created a set of exemplary projects and networks for using image-based field work to design and conduct literacy and political development programs in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.
1970's - 80's
In the 1970's a host of educational anthropologists and sociologists made good use of film and video tape recording to study classroom interaction as a vehicle for understanding schools "as they are" (Erickson and Schultz 1981; Mehan 1978; Mehan 1979) and what people thought schools should be (Spindler 1987; Spindler and Spindler 1987).
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(1) SIX STUDIES (See attached typology)
(2) How have these studies addressed issues of typicality (i.e. significance and validity),
objectivity (reliability), and advocacy?
These six studies vary tremendously in how systematically and comprehensively they sampled different kinds of data. Judged entirely on their limitations, they all fall short. However, in each of these cases, researchers made deliberate efforts to address issues of typicality and objectivity and to work as systematically as pragmatically possible in at least one key research dimension, and they have described such efforts in detail. These descriptions are thoughtful and useful, but they also remind me Erving Goffman's analysis of embarrassment as a tool for repairing the social order in the face of social miscues, protocol violations and faux pas. In the same way that embarrassment re-affirms rules of social conduct that have been broken or neglected, methodological cautions and confessions communicate to other researchers a commitment to ideals of objectivity and typicality, even when studies themselves fall short on one dimension or another. The cautions expressed by these researchers in reporting on their work also reminds me of what H.. L. Mencken said about American morality -- that it doesn't keep anyone from doing anything, it just keeps them from enjoying what they do. Ritual methodological apologies may not
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keep anyone from experimenting with new modes of social research, but they affirm the virtue of "not enjoying" any one mode much. In contrast, a love of photography or video tape or movies – or text or numbers, for that matter – can be a liability for people who want their use of these elements to be taken seriously by other researchers. Indeed, none of the researchers I've described here write lovingly about the kinds of images they used as research data. This is not to say that these researchers are blind to the aesthetic appeal or emotional content of particular images. However, whatever special feeling they might have for images per se has been set aside in preparing research reports about the focal phenomena they set out to study.
(3) To what extent have these legitimation issues been defined somewhat differently in
education than in sociology or anthropology?
Image-supported educational research such as those I've just described have stimulated new and renewed interests in substantive areas themselves and they also have stimulated the application of visual methods to new substantive areas. As a complement to positive regard of this sort, I have found a relative absence in research publications, conferences and email discourse of categorical prejudice against visual materials. Not only that, but prestigious associations and agencies also have expressed high regard and support for image-based educational research. Some of the studies I've described have been awarded special distinctions by different professional associations. The TIMSS video study has received active support from the National Center for Educational Statistics, and the National Academy of Sciences recently released a report that called explicitly for expanding the use of video tape in cross-national studies of schooling. All this suggests that the mainstreaming of image-based studies may be farther along in education than in either sociology or anthropology. By "mainstreaming" I mean that visual data, analysis tools and evidence are normalized within the conduct of educational research -- not as a separate domain of inquiry, but as a dimension of routine inquiry in a growing number of areas. Dyson; Tobin, Wu and Davidson, the TIMSS research team, Nespor and Raynor all consider visual data as essential to their investigations, and they all use images of various kinds in conjunction with other data sources, including text, audio recordings, documents, and numbers. But they neither wax romantic about the aesthetic value of images, nor do they apologize for including images as essential data elements within their own research domains. Similar pragmatic attitude towards the research value of images can be found among researchers working in other fields. However, education may provide a somewhat more hospitable home than sociology or anthropology for work of this sort, for several reasons:
An interdisciplinary ethos
First, education is a profession in which topics of policy and practice cut across disciplinary divides: e.g. experimental studies, case studies, aggregate data analysis, etc. This creates some intra-profession pressure to reconcile or integrate different research paradigms as complementary methods. Of course, the education profession reflects just as much craziness as other professions about what constitutes "best practice," and ideological debates over method and study design abound. But it's also true that researchers are frequently forced -- by being a profession, and not just a discipline -- to consider alternative research strategies that might generate new insights into areas that they care about for reasons of policy or practice.
Policy pressures and opportunities
Related closely to its interdisciplinary ethos is an abiding interest within the education profession in using research to guide social and educational policy. This interest leads practitioners, researchers and policy-makers routinely to initiate planned variations and predictive tests of emerging research propositions and concepts. Numerous teachers and administrators have draw on Anne Dyson's work or the TIMSS data to try out new strategies in the classroom or to stimulate new discussions in their districts and communities. Some of these efforts will be systematically evaluated and lead to better informed studies in the future. Which is how we got these studies in the first place. The Downside: tremendous political valence for most studies, difficult moral terrain, fiduciary drift in intellectual focus (Ray Mack), difficulty of supporting long-term research (because policy shifts so frequently), etc. Upside:is: many opportunities to test predictive power of concepts and theories, particularly at the level of the classroom or program; keen public and professional interest in strategic studies, growing constituency of practitioners who are
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willing/eager to collaborate in designing studies and collecting data, increasingly sophisticated understanding of theory-practice interaction. Because social life is always more complex that social theories, this kind of "proof in the pudding" approach stimulates demands for alternative research approaches than can create a more complete framework for framing and setting educational policy. As I noted above, weaknesses in the predictive and analytical power of the first and second studies led directly to legitimating the video component of the TIMSS.
Blurred boundaries between researchers, subjects and practitioners
A third special feature of educational research is the blurred boundary that has emerged between researchers, research subjects and practitioners -- an ambiguity that has increased substantially over the last two decades with the growth of practitioner research communities. Blurred in several respects -- all researchers were once students and many were former teachers or are teachers now --creates a kind of insider-outsider dynamic that may not apply in social science per se; blurred also because of policy and moral valence noted above; in recent years, blurred also because of practitioner research communities, collaborative research, and clinical research.What's special about this? Broadens the moral community of social research, complicates the integrity of the "research act," and challenges simplistic romance of particular methods. e.g. LessonLab "forums," Tobin et al re: video tapes, dialogue.
Instructional media and pedagogy
A fourth distinctive feature is an affiliated interest in instructional materials -- including various combinations of text, image, and artifact -- and, by extension, the use of mixed media instructional materials by educational researchers themselves in presenting their work to others. Not universally true, but one consequence of blurred boundaries and the focus of educational research is an interest in pedagogical materials and questions -- including what used to be called "AV" -- overhead transparency, slide tape, movies, manipulatives, simulations, physical models, blackboards, etc. Notion that if we are studying education, we have a special responsibility to present our findings in a pedagogically sound manner -- particularly when reports are being made to teachers and prospective teachers. e.g. Dyson shows drawings; Stigler shows videos; Tobin does as well. One result of collaborative research is that information flows two ways. Researchers may pass on findings to subjects, but they also learn things from subjects about teaching and, more generally, about issues of knowledge representation and diffusion. Tobin: "We have included in this book, in addition to standard photographs, photos made from our videotapes. Although these lack sharpness, we believe that they will help readers better picture the three preschools in our study and give something of the feel of our visually centered research method." p. 4
The "Mainstreaming" Dilemma
Taken together, these four features of educational research may help account for differences in how image-based studies are portrayed within the professional discourse of sociologists and anthropologists, on the one hand, and among sociologists and anthropologists of education on the other. It's hard to tease out completely the effects of any one of these features, and it's not at all the case that image-based inquiry of any stripe has the blessing of senior educational researchers. However, when the use to which images are put is accompanied by some sort of paean to systematic, empirical investigation, little resistance appears within the educational research community itself. For research areas implicated by the studies I've mentioned here -- children's literacy development, cultural ideals for pre-school education, teaching mathematics, and so on -- images were not only tolerated, but affirmed as a valuable form of information that adds substantially to research analysis and reporting. Howard Becker noted a year or so ago that mainstream respect for visual sociology will depend on demonstrating that image-based research can make substantive contributions to mainstream areas of inquiry. The cases presented here illustrate how that can happen. However, they also reveal an intriguing paradox, because the legitimacy of this kind of "mainstreaming" challenges the notion that image based research is a province in its own right. This leaves visual sociologists and anthropologists with a difficult choice: Achieve mainstream legitimacy through pragmatic, unromantic and systematic use of visual imagery to examine substantive issues in mainstream domains of social research -- OR -- explore personal, at times romantic, and less systematic uses of visual imagery -- or the aesthetics and structure of visual imagery itself -- and forego mainstream social science legitimacy.!