Culture, Heritage and Representation

Perspectives on Visuality and the Past

Steve Watson, Emma Waterton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351946780
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The 'visual' has long played a crucial role in forming experiences, associations, expectations and understandings of heritage. Images convey meaning within a range of practices, including tourism, identity construction, the popularization of the past through a variety of media, and the memorialization of events. However, despite the central role of 'the visual' in these contexts, it has been largely neglected in heritage literature. This edited collection is the first to explore the production, use and consumption of visual imagery as an integral part of heritage. Drawing on case studies from around the world, it provides a multidisciplinary analysis of heritage representations, combining complex understandings of the 'visual' from a wide range of disciplines, including heritage studies, sociology and cultural studies perspectives. In doing so, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical and methodological tools necessary for understanding visual imagery within its cultural context.

PART I
Relocating the Visual

Chapter 2
Inside/Outside: Ways of seeing the World

Tony Schirato and Jen Webb

Contemporary culture is, media commentators, educators and cultural theorists inform us, visual culture; and this brings to the fore a particular problem of knowledge: how do we see and know what it is we see? According to the art historian Jonathan Crary, contemporary visuality is undergoing a transformation ‘… more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective’ (Crary 1990, 3). Crary argues that this process must be understood as an imbrication of technologies, techniques, subject positions and discursive orders; and he provides a comprehensive list of the specific developments he sees as simultaneously constitutive and characteristic of this new visual regime:

The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast array of computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer-generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual ‘spaces’ radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography and television. These … corresponded to the optical wavelengths of the spectrum and to a point of view, static or mobile, located in real space. Computer-aided design, synthetic holography, flight simulators, computer animation, robotic image recognition, ray tracing, texture mapping, motion control, virtual environment helmets, magnetic resonance imaging and multispectral sensors are only a few of the techniques that are locating vision to a plane severed from a human observer. Obviously other older and more familiar modes of ‘seeing’ will persist and coexist uneasily alongside these new forms. But increasingly these emergent technologies of image production are becoming the dominant modes of visualization according to which primary social processes and institutions function (1990, 1–2).

This technological shift is thus associated with an abstraction of vision from human beings and its relocation to the technological plane. This is not to suggest that vision has ever been unmediated; people’s capacity to see and perceive has always been framed by norms, conventions and rules, and dependent on cultural contexts and on training. But something more is at stake now: the imbrication of new technologies, techniques and discursive orders has brought about not just a ‘problem of vision’ (Crary 1990, 3) but also the problem of the observer. With the abstraction of vision from the body, it may be that the body itself is losing its integrity in ways not previously considered. With the combined subjectification of vision, and problematizing of the viewer, it is possible that the subjects themselves could disappear behind the networks of digital information.

In his analysis, Crary is not simply suggesting that technical and technological factors (the move from analogue to digital culture, the dislocation of space) are agents of change. Rather, he is at pains to demonstrate how technical changes and technological developments (from the seventeenth century onward) are: first, part of the programs, values, incitements and discourses associated with modernism and modernization; second, commensurate with and derived from modernism’s most prominent and influential visual regimes (normalization and discipline; capitalism; science); and third, connected to the promotion of the visible as the main criterion for negotiating questions and problems of truth, authenticity, proof and value.

Crary uses Foucault’s notion of the modern discursive regime, which was predicated on the development of scientific categories, knowledge, techniques and attitudes, in order to suggest how and why new ways of understanding vision came about at the same time. The development of scientific techniques, procedures, logics and forms of knowledge not only increased what could be seen, it also changed the way the practices and mechanisms of seeing were understood. Prior to the modern period, perceptual experience was considered to be largely ‘given’ to us by and from the external world; in other words, we more or less received the truth of the world, rather than saw it in a subjective way. Science in the modern period, however, produced a different way of understanding perception, what Crary refers to as ‘the idea of subjective vision’, which involved ‘a severing (or liberation) of perceptual experience from a necessary relation to the external world’. As Crary writes:

… the rapid accumulation of knowledge about the workings of a fully embodied observer disclosed possible ways that vision was open to procedures of normalization … Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation (1990, 12).

The insight here is both quite profound and paradoxical: the realization that the basis of vision lay ‘in the body’ and was thus subjective arose at the same time as the development of science and its objective and objectifying ways of seeing, categorising and normalizing people and populations.

This chapter will follow through and explain some of the main ramifications of this insight, in particular the cultural technologies of seeing that inform understandings of visual culture, and will explore issues relevant to the context of heritage-based research. The basis of the account, exemplifications and discussions that follow is Bourdieu’s observation that while ‘there is no way out of the game of culture’ (1989, 12), some level of objectification is possible if one is willing and able to interrogate and understand the relation between what is seen and the authorized ways of seeing (see Waterton this volume).

Analysing Vision: The Linguistic Turn

Central to the work of normalizing vision and establishing conventions and techniques for seeing are the analytical frameworks through which visual material can be understood. This shifts the discussion away from the physical realm of eyesight and neurological perception to the modes by which we make sense of what we see. Academics give names to these modes, and lay out the various steps and processes applied; most people in their everyday lives do not name these modes or apply them consciously but, nonetheless, through the processes of normalization of thought, they are likely to make sense of what they see in a limited number of ways. One of these is semiotic analysis. Although we have made the point above that the world is now increasingly one of visual rather than literary culture, this does not necessarily mean that we know what we are doing when it comes to the work of perception, particularly since seeing is a social activity, predicated as it is on the dispositions to see and make sense that are part of the habitus of each individual in a culture. Therefore, seeing is also always a changing activity, subject to the dynamic forces of culture and society, and its changing perspectives on what is important, what is visible, and what should be understood from the world around us.

If seeing is as much a social as a natural process, then how we see must be managed – like all social practices – both through self-regulation applied by individuals, and through the various mechanisms of control that, as Foucault has shown in his works on power and disciplinary practices, thread through society. One of the ways of managing the process of seeing is by determining what visual texts might mean, and how they can be read, and here we turn to the technologies of ‘reading’ the visual. Martin Jay (1993) points out that though we are living in a period that is filled with visual texts, we are in fact living in a deeply non-visual period because we make sense of the world by using non-visual analytic devices. This is certainly evident if we look to twentieth century scholarship, which is marked by what is called the ‘linguistic turn’ – a move within the humanities to use the analytical modes associated with literary texts to make sense of society, visual images, individual psychology, and so on. Under this approach, all social practices were understood as meaning-making practices, or semiotic events (Evans and Hall 1992), and visual texts were considered to communicate according to linguistic rather than iconographical rules. Certainly semiotics is a useful analytical technique: by reducing everything to signs, it draws attention to the property of readability in all that surrounds us, and to the fact that we do not simply see, but actually make sense of, what is in our visual sphere. It also draws attention to the principles of difference in all human communication or meaning making; principles many people, in fact, apply in a naïve or unconscious manner when looking at the world around them.

Figure 2.1Streetscape: Wanchai, Hong Kong, 2006

In viewing Figure 2.1, a streetscape in Wanchai, Hong Kong, for instance, we can read it as ‘sign’ by focusing on the principles of difference. An important starting point is to differentiate the text from other texts in order to secure its meaning. So, we can confirm: it is not a landscape, it is not a family portrait, it is what it is – a streetscape – in no small part because it is not something else. Difference operates also to make sense of the signs, or objects, that are juxtaposed within this text: note the hard vertical lines of the buildings set against the soft, fernlike palm trees planted in the median strip, or the matt, absorbent quality of those fronds compared with the glossy surfaces of the buildings. The former allow connection and contact; the latter speak not just of mirroring, but also of impermeability: they allow no access, not even for air. One reading of these sets of differences is of the triumph of capitalism and technological development over nature, in the dominance of roads and buildings over the fragile trees – the only signs of nature in all that space. Certainly a semiotic analysis might suggest this text as a celebration of capitalism.

But it is also possible to read the image not in terms of the difference of semiotics, but as a story shaped by analogy, and to see the streetscape as part of a totality that makes up the image of an urban space. The multi-lane roads and cars go together to tell a story of the movement of many people around the city spaces; the tall glass-and-steel buildings are statements not just of modernity and capitalism, but also of accommodating cultural activity within nature’s constraints: squeezing floor space into a limited urban area. The palm trees in the median strip support this story of the pressures of nature on culture – and vice versa – and of their imbrication within one another. The (comparative) height of the palm trees and the vertical quality of their trunks are mirrored in the height and verticality of the buildings, while the trees’ lower level is matched and continued by the buildings on the horizon line.

We can read this image, then, in terms of semiotics and/or analogy, and make sense of the image not only by evaluating difference – the digital on-off/same-different of the linguistic model – but also through the combination of internal elements. It is necessary, indeed, to look beyond semiotics in reading visual texts. Semiotics is, after all, a linguistic model and, as Roland Barthes (1977) points out, the visual may be like a language, but it does not possess the grammatical elements, organization and structure that we expect from words. As such, the work of reading visual matter is not simply a matter of observation, but a constant and constantly adjusted way of fitting the material world to whatever constitutes the ‘truth’ of society as it obtains in a particular context, under a particular visual regime, and a constant and constantly edited narrativizing of that visual material.

Analysing Vision: The Narrative Turn

Narrative logic offers a fresh way of reading a visual artefact though, as with semiotics and analogy, possible readings depend on the content of the text, who reads it and where it is read; in short, its cultural context. Each reader of the visual text-as-narrative will bring with them their own interests, concerns and histories, and also the way in which they have been ‘produced’ by discourses of governmentality and normalization, to make sense of what they see. The image of Borofsky’s Man Walking to the Sky (Figure 2.2) is obviously a piece of visual culture; it is a work of art produced by a recognized artist, selected for exhibition in Documenta (one of the more important international art shows), and purchased by the city of Kassel, where it has the status of a ‘must see’ cultural icon. But this does not complete its story; various commentators offer their own readings of it. Gernot Böhme, for instance, writes about it from an architect’s point of view: ‘Borofsky’s Man Walking to the Sky is simply an explicit rendition of what lines, beams, ledges, or ridge turrets do to space: they furnish it with a suggestion of movement’ (Böhme 2005, 403). So for him, it tells a story of spatiality, and its elements focus on architectural technique. He is reading it, in short, from within the delimited field of his own discipline.

Figure 2.2Jonathan Borofsky, Man Walking to the Sky, 1990, Kassel, Germany

Source: With permission of Jonathan Borofsky

The artist, by contrast, reads it according to a very different narrative, as is clear from the following artist statement:

This 80 foot steel and fiberglass sculpture was first shown at Documenta IX, in Kassel, Germany, 1990. But, the idea for this sculpture, no doubt reaches back into my childhood. When I was six years old, I used to sit on my father’s knee, and he would tell me stories about a friendly giant who lived in the sky. The important thing about this giant was that he did good things for people. In his stories, my father and I used to go up to the sky and visit with this friendly giant every day (Borofsky 2004).

For him, then, it doubles as personal memoir and fairytale. The vantage point captured by Figure 2.2 certainly supports the latter, with the sheep looking curiously across at the Man.¹ It is thus a story when read by an artist, and an exemplification of lines in space when read by an architect. One focuses on the man/giant, and the other on the projection of steel into space. Each reading is valid, in its own terms; but neither is true in the formal sense of the term. Rather, each responds to the narrative inflection that is necessarily part of the object and the image it conveys.

Note, here, the qualification embedded in the phrase ‘narrative inflection’ rather than being a narrative itself. It does not constitute a story in terms that would be acknowledged by narratologists, for whom a text is ‘narrative’ when it not only tells someone about something or someone, but is structured to tell in a relatively coherent fashion, including temporal and causal elements. Man Walking to the Sky is a text with narrative potential, but is not a story per se because it is able only to provide springboards for stories that the readers/viewers must produce for themselves.

Among these tools for making and reading story are plot, character, time, event and causality. The representation of a human figure is a good way of conveying character in visual texts, and conveying action and mood. The position of the body and limbs, and expressive movements such a smile, a look of fear or sorrow, a hand extended in friendship or a fist raised in anger, establish an obvious appeal to empathy in images, as Gombrich explains (1982, 84–6). Narrative can also be implied or identified in visual material by devices such as the arrangement of the iconography or the use of perspective to provide a central focus. Lines, shapes and angles help to tell the story; and the use of light, particularly, structures the reading of the narrative. Lighting draws attention to particular features in a text and ensures we make sense of the images. Bright colours and a whimsical style, for instance, create a light, possibly fantastical sense; dark images convey melancholy or threat; while black-and-white im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I Relocating the Visual
• Part II Representation and Substitution
• Part III Visual Culture and Heritage Tourism
• Part IV Constructing Place
• Index