{{Thoughts on W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Showing Seeing: a critique of visual culture.” (Journal of Visual Culture, Aug 2002, Vol. 1 Issue 2, p165-181)}}

First let me begin with a confession: the rust on my ‘art speak’ is enough to make a tetanus-shot-happy-shootin nurse squeal with joy. Second, I hadn’t realized this lamentable fact until reading Mitchell’s article.

But I digress, before I’ve even begun. My apologies. I will give Mr. Mitchell the benefit of the doubt that he was not intentionally trying to alienate and torture me personally; but that he really wanted to share with the world his critique of this fascinating concept called “Visual Culture” -- a subject which he taught for almost ten years, at the time his article was written. Also, he promises to describe his method of “showing seeing”, but only at the conclusion. I am intrigued by the idea, and like many-a-news program that I never meant to watch, I determine to stay tuned through all sorts of horrors, be they bloody, boring, or bloody boring, to get to the good part.

For the first three pages, this expert and advocate of “visual culture” declares not only that he cannot categorically define what such a thing really is but that he cannot even say why it exists. It seems that the traditional fields of Aesthetics and Art History already cover anything and everything you could possibly want to know about the visual arts. He even goes on to accuse Visual Culture of adding to the mix “ . . . a vague, ill-defined body of issues that are covered quite adequately within the existing structure of knowledge.”

At this point, I’m getting a little tired of not knowing what it is I’m reading about, and so I resort to Wikipedia {cue choir of angels singing}:

“Visual Culture as an academic subject is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images.”

Okay, not helpful and utterly vague. {exeunt post haste choir of angels}

After the first full reading, along with some cursory internet searching, I conclude that “visual culture” is, as yet, indefinable because it is a growing, evolving and malleable thing. I don’t know if I’m excited about it (can I learn a new way of ‘seeing’?) or irritated by it (fearing it is little more than a trendy philosophical invention – and potentially the direct result of people taking themselves, life and art entirely too seriously.)

At this point I must attempt to define the concept for myself, and will start with the dictionary [http://www.collinslanguage.com/]:

Visual:

1. done by or used in seeing,

2. capable of being seen, Latin visus sight

Culture:

1. the ideas, customs, and art of a particular society,

2. a particular civilization at a particular period,

3. a developed understanding of the arts,

4. development or improvement by special attention or training, physical culture,

5. the cultivation and rearing of plants or animals,

6. a growth of bacteria for study,

The definition for visual is pretty clear. As for ‘culture’, I am inclined to think that #6 is our best bet; and I even suspect Mr. Mitchell might agree with me, as he says:

“My aim in [teaching Visual Culture] has been to overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn it into a problem for analysis, a mystery to be unraveled.”

Visualize all ‘visual media’ as a bacterium that grows, thrives, and even feeds upon our society. Now take a microscope apart, examine the pieces, become utterly familiar with its inner workings, clean the lenses and re-assemble it. Now stick the bacterium under said microscope, have a look-see and go for a coffee, allowing this new perspective to inform the visual input you receive on the way to your muddy liquid salvation. Now I think we’re approaching, if not a completely accurate analogy, at least an interesting visualization of ‘Visual Culture’.

Let’s break down that quote above:

“ . . .  overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing . . . ”

When something becomes familiar, there exists no cause or reason to examine it. Only if a problem arises, will something ‘familiar’ be interrogated.

Because you can look at something, doesn’t necessarily mean you are actively seeing it. I liken this to hearing what is being said versus actively listening.

“ . . . turn it into a problem for analysis . . . ”

All of us fortunate enough to enjoy the sense of sight will think that naturally we know very well what it is too see. In the context of Visual Studies, it is precisely this assumption that is tossed out the nearest window.

If it’s familiar – question it. Look at it. See it. See how it is that you see.

My working definition is now that Visual Studies examines the tools and methods with which we interpret visual input. Furthermore, visual culture suggests that these tools are not limited to just the eyes – but to all the sensory organs; and the methods include not just the physical interaction of viewing/seeing/looking, but also the environmental, emotional, psychological, physical and historical contexts on both a personal and societal level within which the viewer interprets what is being seen.

The meat of Mitchell’s article is spent on his “Ten myths about visual culture,” “Eight counter-theses on visual culture,” Five “constitutive fallacies or myths of visual culture,” Five “main theses of a counterposition” to the Five “constitutive fallacies” and finally, missing from his prodigious lists, but half expected on my part, was not a single partridge in a pear tree. This bulk seems to be largely a political diatribe that is truly overkill for anyone who isn’t currently attempting to install a Visual Culture course at their local university or conversely trying to save their Art History 101 professorship. So I’m going to skip to the good bits.

On visual media:

“ . . . I do object to the confident assertion that the visual media are really a distinct class of things, or that there is such a thing as an exclusively, purely visual medium . . .”

He goes on to give literature as an example of something that is not generally considered a visual medium – and yet it is intrinsically visual. You have to look at a series of symbols (text) that are a code that then translates into language and then into thought. It gets even more intriguing when he suggests that included in the realm of visual culture would be those things that we imagine when we are reading/being read to, that they are “no less real for being indirectly conveyed through language”; ergo our powers of creative thought and ability to visualize are included as well.

“The important task is to describe the specific relations of vision to the other senses, especially hearing and touch . . . Descartes regarded vision as simply an extended and highly sensitive form of touch, which is why (in his Optics) he compared eyesight to the sticks a blind man uses to grope his way about in real space.”

I like the idea of vision being tactile, as though there are beams coming from my eyes and landing on all I see. It brings a sense of connectedness and is a reminder that seeing is actually a complicated series of steps that are largely taken for granted: your brain tells your eyes to look in a direction, your eyes move, focus, light enters your eyes, the visual  data is sent to be interpreted by your brain into thought (basically, as I’m no scientist.) Furthermore, if my eye beam makes a connection, is it a two-way beam? If so, is the thing I’m looking at sending me more than data regarding it’s physical appearance?

This brings us to a later point he makes about two theories of vision: extramission (light/fire/beams come from the eyes and lands on things, a theory Plato wrote about in the 4th century B.C. and that even Leonardo da Vinci had advocated at one point) and intramission (light comes from things and lands in the eye).

He gives as an example something called a ‘cat’s cradle’ in reference to Jacque Lacan’s theory of the ‘gaze’. This mystified me until I again referred to Wikipedia. ‘Cat’s cradle’ is the thing kids do with a long loop of string, where you make a successive series of motions, manipulating the string into different patterns around your wrists and fingers. Sorry if I’m not explaining it well, click the link to see for yourself. Mitchell uses it as a metaphor to describe the physicality of the gaze: “The two hands that rock this cradle are the subject and the object, the observer and the observed. But between them, rocking in the cradle of the eye and the gaze, is this curious intermediary thing, the image and the screen or medium in which it appears.”

And so this theoretical physicality of vision becomes a prime metaphor for the idea of vision as “a psycho-social process”:

        It provides an especially powerful tool for understanding why it is that images,

        works of art, media, figures and metaphors have lives of their own, and cannot be

        explained simply as rhetorical, communicative instruments . . . why it is that

        objects and images look back at us . . . why vision is never a one-way street,

        but a multiple intersection . . . why the child’s doll has a playful half-life . . .

        why the fossil traces of extinct life are resurrected in the beholder’s

        imagination . . . why the questions to ask about images are not just what do

        they mean, or what do they do? But what is the secret of their vitality – and

        what do they want? (Mitchell, p176)

Finally, we get to the proverbial dangling carrot:

“Showing Seeing”

Mitchell describes it as an altered version of good ole ‘show and tell’. Only he asks his students to show the class what is ‘seeing’. They must assume that their audience has no idea of what it is to see – as though they are aliens that lack a culture and history and social structure based on beings that see. Which would mean, necessarily, that they wouldn’t even have the vocabulary to describe things of a visual nature.

He goes on to list a variety of amusing tales of the ways in which his students have resolved the lesson. I like the one where the student presented to his audience the age-old ‘staring contest’ where you look at our opponent as long as you possibly can, until your eyes water, and the first to blink loses.

As I read this list of tales, I see all kinds of concepts that I wouldn’t have associated with the act of showing seeing, like: “[acting out] blushing and crying, leading to discussions of shame and self-consciousness at being seen, involuntary visual responses, and the importance of the eye as an expressive as well as receptive organ.”

My natural reaction to the exercise would have been to demonstrate the technical aspect of how sight works – it would not have dawned on me to explore the emotional and social intricacies that result from being able to see.

Then there’s one I can personally relate to: a woman brings her 9-month-old baby in as her ‘prop’. She contemplated the aspects of his character that added up to the concept we know of as ‘cute’, concluding that “it must be an important aspect of visual culture, because all the other sensory signals given off by the baby – smell and noise in particular – would lead us to despise and probably kill the object producing them, if it were not for the countervailing effect of cuteness.” I can vouch for that, and have spent many a happy hour at the local pub pontificating on this very point with my husband over a drink. Or two. And a toast to the babysitter as well.

Personally, I would have headed straight to my bookshelves and found my copy of ‘Flatland’ - a satirical novella written by Edwin A. Abbott in 1884. It is certainly the most singularly fantastic introduction to the concept of sight that I can think of - it tells the story from the perspective of a square, giving us a first-hand account of living in two dimensions. This square has a dream about ‘Lineland’, a one-dimensional world inhabited by points. These point creatures cannot, of course, conceive of more than one dimension, for they cannot perceive them. The square then meets a sphere of 3 dimensions from ‘Spaceland’, and he is now in the same predicament as the point guy… he cannot conceive of more dimensions than the ones he is accustomed to living in and has the capacity to perceive. Finally he sees ‘Spaceland’ for himself, and is enlightened, but when he returns home to share the happy discovery, no one will believe him. At this point we feel very much for him, because we immediately try to imagine what it would be to ‘see’ the fourth dimension. What would it “look” like? How, or with what tool or method, could it be perceived? What of the fifth dimension? And so on…

Mitchell then concludes by summing up the various advantages of the showing seeing presentations:

1. 1. The students must necessarily ask themselves from the beginning, the essential questions that the entire curriculum deals with: “What is vision? What is a visual image? What is a medium? What is the relation of vision to the other senses? To language? Why is visual experience so fraught with anxiety and fantasy? Does vision have a history? How do visual encounters with other people (and with images and objects) inform the construction of social life?”
   

2. 
   

3. 2. The presentations serve as useful references, being first-hand, concrete examples of the complex and abstract theories covered later on.
   

4. 
   

5. 3. They make those abstract concepts a shared experience in the physical world versus a solitary intellectual meditation.
   

6. 
   

7. 4. “One final thing the showing seeing exercise demonstrates is that visuality, not just the social construction of vision, but the visual construction of the social, is a problem in its own right that is approached, but never quite engaged by the traditional disciplines of aesthetics and art history, or even by the new disciplines of media studies.”
   

I quoted that last part, because it seemed so important to him and I’m not sure I quite get it yet. He mentions this “visual construction of the social” several times in the article, and I have a feeling it is key to understanding Mitchell’s version of visual culture – but I just don’t seem able to wrap my head around it. Hopefully it’s not the philosophical psychobabble that I mentioned earlier.

I’ve already seen how these concepts are positively affecting my world – as I drove to rowing this morning, I was aware of how I was looking at things. I contemplated the ‘strings’ that connected my eyes and myself to the world around me, and how I myself was entangled in other people’s webs. Hmm, perhaps I’m starting to get it after all?

by, tracy yarkoni

Bacterialized “Petri Glasses”  -or-  A literal Culture of the Visual

an interpretation by tracy yarkoni