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

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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.

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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: jcwagner@ucdavis.edu

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.!