This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Mitchell, W. J.T. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture

University of Chicago, wjtm{at}midway.uchicago.edu

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’.

Key Words: aesthetics • art history • communication • cultural studies • discipline(s) and interdisciplinarity • image studies • media and media studies • pedagogy • poetics • rhetoric

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2, 165-181 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/147041290200100202


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				M. Jay Introduction to Show and Tell Journal of Visual Culture, August 1, 2005; 4(2): 139 - 143. [PDF]

				M. Bal The Commitment to Look Journal of Visual Culture, August 1, 2005; 4(2): 145 - 162. [Abstract] [PDF]

				S. Jackson Performing Show and Tell: Disciplines of Visual Culture and Performance Studies Journal of Visual Culture, August 1, 2005; 4(2): 163 - 177. [Abstract] [PDF]

				G. Kleege Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account Journal of Visual Culture, August 1, 2005; 4(2): 179 - 190. [Abstract] [PDF]

				M. Smith Visual Studies, or the Ossification of Thought Journal of Visual Culture, August 1, 2005; 4(2): 237 - 256. [Abstract] [PDF]

				S. Biernoff Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St Francis Journal of Visual Culture, April 1, 2005; 4(1): 39 - 52. [Abstract] [PDF]

				M. A. Holly Responses to Mieke Bal's `Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture' (2003): Now and then Journal of Visual Culture, August 1, 2003; 2(2): 238 - 242. [PDF]

				M. Bal Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture Journal of Visual Culture, April 1, 2003; 2(1): 5 - 32. [Abstract] [PDF]