What is visual culture?
Visual culture would have once been restricted to printed materials like magazines and newspaper, and what we encountered in shop signage, billboards and artwork. Nowadays, visual culture is everywhere and but its' centre is nowhere. We can’t pin down its exact essence because it is comprised of too much, but we can recognise it enough to understand that we are constantly immersed in it.
I’m interested in visual culture because it relates to the study of what we see - as a text or object - but also how, where, when and why we see it. Visual culture is more universal and easily transmissible (to borrow from the vernacular of epidemiology, like we are not all sick to death of that) than other media. We are subject to a bombardment of it every day whether we leave our homes or not. Where once having choices meant having more freedom, now having choices paralyses us into inaction. How many times have you suddenly flinched and caught yourself as you scrolled through Instagram? Did you remember how long you had been travelling down your feed? Did you have something else you were trying to get done but you became sidetracked?
My approach isn’t through the paradigm of wokeness, which I believe stifles critical thinking about what we see rather than encourages it. Nor is it embracing a far-right ideology dressed up in the convenient disguise of free speech and lust for provocation. But I do feel that it is important to try to inspire in all ages a consciousness of seeing. We must learn to resist the empty sensationalism the media and social technologies have learned to appeal to and try to engage our senses in the activity of looking and then understanding, rather than mindlessly scrolling.
Our post-postmodern way of seeing is either too passive (slightly open mouthed scrolling) or too misguidedly intense (either seeking out harmful content to engage our libido or claiming imagery alone is violence). What I believe we should aim for is a middle ground between the two that allows us to properly take in the contents of something and consider its wider context, without having its disembodied symbols haunting us at night or affecting the way we treat others a priori.
Why should we care about the impact of visual culture?
We exist at a time when we rely too much on visual culture: for our news, to meet our partner, to know what to wear and buy and where to be seen. We defer to it to understand how we are to present ourselves to the world, more often looking outward than inward, then wondering why we feel we lack a connection to our true selves or cannot be alone without feeling anxious.
The evaporation of the central cultural role of religion in the western world and the fragmentation of what we would once have called ‘communities’ has left a vacuum that we inevitably attempt to fill. Ruskin once said that great nations produce great art – So what will the borderless virtual landscape do? If the early days of NFTs are anything to go by, the bulldozing of any symbolic subtlety or aesthetic nuance speaks for itself in what Botz-Bornstein calls deculturation. Web 3.0 will dominate our lives as much as any national affiliation we have, which means we have little choice but to defer to memery and the Twitter ‘discourse’ of the day to make meaning.
Are inbred celebrity cats our new gods and idols?
With no grand narrative of the world and our place in it, and the exposure to every possible narrative and any time, we are left quite alone to construct our understanding of the world. It is strange that we now have access to more information than we could ever choose to process but we feel that we have to scrabble about looking for microscopic flecks of meaning within it.
This openness and abundance should be quite empowering – no totalitarian dictator of old spraying hateful spittle from a podium or need to flog ourselves for our sins – but without a toolkit, guidance, or often even the basic originating context to understand the imagery we are exposed to, it can disenfranchise and disillusion us. We know we should look away and disengage from most of it, we want to switch off and be outside more (‘touching grass’) and feel less anxious and experience less holiday envy, but we cannot.
We know that a lot of it makes us unhappy but are simultaneously too cynical to admit that being happier is even possible. We know that we can learn more than ancestors could ever have dreamed in their lifetime from the warm embrace of our duvet – and yet picking out any sort of meaning or retaining any information feels more impossible than ever.
Visual culture is the vehicle that best embodies and then shares the ‘mood of the moment.’ It has authority in its ubiquity, accessibility and our compulsion to consume it. We no longer have to specifically seek it out, either, it comes to you and envelops you whether you invite it to or not. That is broadly speaking why we must accept the importance of acclimatising to post-millennium visual culture rather than labelling any discussion of the subject as Liberal Arts college theory-maxxing nonsense (although inevitably, a lot of the people who want to discuss it are academics at these sorts of establishments of their equivalents, myself included).
If we can explicitly see the huge sway that imagery has, particularly when combined with the technologies of instantaneous global dispersion, deep fakes and algorithmic virality, then why do we still struggle to develop a more self-conscious and analytical attitude towards it?
Of course, many of these aforementioned academic types, who use words like aforementioned, have tried to quantify and explain the impact that visual culture has on society. But these theories use dense esoteric language and rarely explain or reflect our lived experiences. I’ve taught 18-year-olds about Semiotics for years, and although they all instinctively know that imagery is multifaceted in meaning and used to manipulate, getting them to marry this up with the truncations of De Saussure and Barthes is altogether less obvious. The what and how of imagery is never a question, but the why is often much harder for them to articulate.
Liberals scoffed at the thought of Donald Trump winning the election in 2016. Who cares about the 4chan losers and their edgelord-courting racist memes? They were basement-dwelling virgins (and weirdest of all, proud of it). The liberals, on the other hand, professionally and managerially gainfully employed and supposedly socially vibrant did not understand cyberculture well enough to mount a capable defence. Instead, they tried to be virtuous - the bigger people - and all that they produced was cringe. It was like watching your mother try to order in broken French at an Italian restaurant. They were embarrassing and ineffective – and likely would have been a second time around were it not for the global pandemic. Now, they have resorted to the same bullying tactics to maintain relevance online; they should be glad the platforms are often owned by those who share their interests. I say this as a lifelong left-wing voter: so far, we have lost the visual culture wars and the unsexy, rambling pastel Instagram infographic is partially to blame.
The cultural contradictions that set apart our age affect our ability to cope with our immersion in it and betray fundamental discrepancies that undermine our sense of common humanity. Grasping at a consensus that is increasingly difficult to solidify does the work of making the order of the world look flimsily constructed and fragile. Adam Curtis has often spoken about this phenomenon in his documentaries - that if the established order only ever looks breakable, it may as well be. We submit to ever more pervasive forms of surveillance and biopolitics because we are convinced of threats from all sides to our comfortable way of life.
The swirling mass of visual culture gives us the impression of the diversity of thoughts and abundant possibilities – and yet the mystic algorithmic and corporate forces that characterize its spread mean that this ‘individualism’ and ‘heterogeneity’ itself is just illusory. We become convinced of our own uniqueness yet increasingly any attempt to be distinctive in fact groups us in with a now innumerable number of subcultures or micro-aesthetics, all easily searchable via hashtag or subreddit, barely achieving the biting transgression we were aiming for.
Post-Modern Visual Culture and Anxiety
We are pacified by a sense of overwhelm and we stop trying to understand it because it feels like such an impossible task. Debord saw the society of the spectacle as a tool of pacification and depoliticisation to keep populations from the true source of personal fulfilment by replacing creative actualisation with consumption. The rhetoric around mental health (that has rightly destigmatized it) has also gone so far as to normalise it. The current visual culture is feeding us mass-pathologisation as a paradigm for understanding ourselves and others. We resign ourselves to feelings of inadequacy or anxiety or anger (and call them symptoms) yet rarely examine the source of them. Why should we? If we already have a convenient name for it that exists in an authoritative leather-bound book somewhere and neat little pills portioned out to ingest every day? As long as we feel the prevailing culture is legitimising our discontent, we accept it as a condition of existence rather than a problem to be actively solved.
The internet allows for a space that is at once ‘too real’ and ‘not at all real’, that encompasses all cultures while having no unified identity of its own, where finding common ground in humanity feels like such an infinitely immense task that it is not even worth starting. This seems absurd - surely a shared sense of humanity should be immediately identifiable in the universal emotions and experiences that bind us all together: death, sex, love, shame, family, friendship, fear etc.
The pandemic of mental ill-health pinned on ‘social media’ and ‘selfie culture’ makes it clear that we feel disempowered by images even when these are images we take ourselves of our selves. The price we pay for the current richness and variety of visual culture is a sense of selfhood and security.
We cannot really opt out of the internet as modern citizens. To accept the conditions of post-post-modernity is also to accept that we are unlikely to change them anytime soon. The branded self is here to stay, as is hybrid working, meme politcking and data-harvesting. What is feasible though, is to consciously consider this relationship to the cyberworld and to the imagery it feeds us - to make sense of it and become capable of healthy distance and reflection.
If art was once said to be the only thing that endures, what would last of our visual legacy of decaying data?
It is absurd to think that we can understand it all. But we can consciously choose to reflect on it more. We can choose to ask ourselves ‘what is normal? What is healthy?’ and choose to decide what that might look like for us. We are in an age of hyperindividualism yet seem so immune to the idea that people can find their own internal solutions to dealing with the fallout of cybernetic culture. We don’t all have to be scopophiles (people obsessed with looking and observing) or academics of aesthetic theory, but we can start to build our defences against those who pray at the altar of technological determinism who think that technology alone will guide and shape how culture unfolds in the future.
We commonly hear people speaking of a ‘sick’ society – we all take enjoy in outlining the symptoms of the illness but we rarely consider the potential for treatment and cure. I would suggest that is because we already understand that to be a part of the solution we need to renounce the grotesque pleasures of voyeurism, curiosity, visceral fear, rage and exhilaration that accompany the more extreme forms of visual cyberculture and the channels it reaches us through. It also implies that we would have to recognise the hypocrisy on both the far left and right to play to these emotions and leverage them for their own ideological ends.
Having read and thought about this a lot over the past year, I am working on a podcast series that might help to encourage people to make connections between what they see and the cultural phenomena around them. It hopes to underline the unusual and unexpected ways that visual culture manifests in our contemporary world and how the internet, identity and society have a part to play in shaping this complex area of thought, study and observation. It also aims to prompt people to think about their relationship with their Netflix account, iPhone, and Vogue subscription and find a solution that is personal to them. The goal is to feel engaged but not snowed under, informed but not stunned into submission.
I don’t condone widespread blissful ignorance, because it is not constructive and hampers discussions and progress about how to make things better. But to use an internet colloquialism; we don’t have to know all of the things and see all of the stuff either.
I’ll update the website when the first episode - I’m aiming to do 6 on various subjects… and I’ll update the blog when the first one is out.