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7. Seeing as a Political Resource in Visual Culture Studies

Visual culture studies has become a sprawling field. Every conceivable discipline is now making links to visual culture, from art history to art education, film, media and theatre studies, literary theory, and the other usual suspects, through to anthropology, history, sociology, jurisprudence, theology and even computer science, neurobiology, medicine, and other natural sciences. In 2006, Marquard Smith remarked: “the huge number of books [about visual culture] tells us that the phrase ‘visual culture’ is becoming ubiquitous, omnipresent, that it can and is being used to signify works or artefacts or spaces from any historical period, geographical location, thematic concern, or combination of methodological practices. Because of this, the phrase visual culture conveys little that is specific to our past or present visual culture per se. It seems that visual culture is everywhere, and thus nowhere, wholly overdetermined and almost meaningless simultaneously.” In the same spirit, visual culture was often included in the titles and introductions of publications to give conventional takes on subject matter from all manner of disciplines an aura of topicality. Eleven years after being cited byMitchell in 1995 as prospects, the themes, objects and methodologies listed by Smith give a picture of the field that is every bit as vague as Mitchell’s attempt to characterize visual culture without restrictive definitions. The thematic framework of the publications may be historically synchronous or diachronic, regional or national; it may orient