Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture

TLDR

Visual studies is an emerging field that faces resistance in art history, aesthetics, and media studies, and is often treated as a “dangerous supplement” built on myths such as the de‑materialization of the image, the blurring of art/non‑art and visual/verbal boundaries, and the notion of distinct visual media, while questioning iconoclastic politics and proposing a Nietzschean critique. The essay aims to map the main issues surrounding visual studies as an emergent academic formation and as a theoretical concept or object of research and teaching. It concludes by outlining pedagogical strategies for teaching visual culture, centered on an exercise called “showing seeing”.

Abstract

This essay attempts to map out the main issues surrounding visual studies as an emergent academic formation, and as a theoretical concept or object of research and teaching. After a survey of some of the resistances encountered by visual studies in fields such as art history, aesthetics, and media studies, and a suggestion that visual studies is playing the role of ‘dangerous supplement’ to these fields, the essay turns to a discussion of some of the major received ideas that have seemed foundational to both negative and positive accounts of visual studies. These received ideas or myths include notions of the de-materialization of the image, and the erasure of boundaries between art and non-art, or visual and verbal media. They also include notions such as the very idea that there are such things as distinctly ‘visual media’. The political stakes of iconoclastic criticism (e.g. the overturning of ‘scopic regimes’) are also questioned, and an alternative (Nietzschean) strategy of ‘sounding the idols’ is proposed. The essay concludes with a description of pedagogical strategies in the teaching of visual culture, centered on an exercise the author calls ‘showing seeing’.