In Sight of Visual Culture

Revising a conference paper for publication is usually an interesting exercise that forces me to be accurate about citations and to clarify basic arguments. This process was radically shifted for me following the World Trade Centre tragedy. Everyone will respond to that day in one way or another. For me, in addition to the personal issues it raises, the event brings home—in a visceral and stunning way—the importance of visual culture, my field of study. The towers represented America. The pentagon represented its power. The visual impact of these buildings meant that virtually no one anywhere does not recognize their outline. Newscasters commented on the symbolic presence of the buildings. Americans and Canadians alike turned to another clear symbol, the American flag, to assert patriotism, empathy and resistance. These events have affected the case study chosen—now one of the images from ground zero—as well as the imperative behind its analysis.

It is equally clear that we must learn not only to see but to understand the significance of the visual culture in which we live. What is being represented, why, and to what effect? As Sut Jhally said in reference to Stuart Hall’s intellectual endeavour in cultural studies, academic inquiry into representation and the media is absolutely crucial to contemporary understanding of representations of ourselves and our society—however we define “our.” Academics do not live in ivory towers. We might like to retreat to one, especially at times like these. We live in the everyday, an everyday that works in unseen and unspoken ways through visual communication, perception and reiteration. As I checked my citation for Michel de Certeau’s observation on the fiction that makes cityscapes legible, I was shaken because I had forgotten which buildings he used to make his point. He talks of the visitor to the World Trade Centre who, on the 110th floor, evades the grasp of the city and is transformed into the voyeur, who believes he truly can see the city from its edges (92). Yet we must ask: can we truly see beyond the fiction or myth (in the Barthesian sense) that has naturalized our relationship to that city? As Marshall McLuhan put it—he didn’t know who discovered water but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the fish. The fish takes its surroundings for granted. There is no reason to question “waterness.” Equally, most westerners understood the symbolic value of the twin towers as normal, no longer seeing the visual statement of power, finance and authority as a construction.

Now I am concerned. Can I talk about one facet of my response to this tragedy as a representational nightmare in an academic article? Is it too soon? Does being a Canadian matter? Yet I answer my own questions with the knowledge that I did talk about this with my students in our first class of the year. I know that representations matter. Visual culture matters. Every course I teach opens up students to the interdisciplinary site of visual culture and invites them into a world of responsibility and subjectivity in the academy—an academy which is unequivocally embedded in the everyday. So let me tell you about the process of obtaining insight in sight of a discipline which spent its first hundred years trying to avoid the everyday.

Visual Culture and Art History

“Visual culture” is merely a phrase. It is a short cut to describing a complex set of relations between visual phenomena, meanings, and actions. The study of these relations is crucial to understanding not only the intellectual concerns of the academy but the ramifications of symbolic actions in the non-academic realm of the everyday. How do images and visual phenomena come to have meaning at a given time and place? How is it that advertisers seem to know what will make us squirm with self-doubt? Or preen with pleasure? How do we know when something is Canadian? Or American? Why does it matter? At this moment in time, we know that it matters. The question for academics is how can this concern infiltrate our teaching and our...