Visual Culture Lecture Notes

Flashcards of vocabulary terms and definitions from the lecture notes.

Visual Culture

Material artifacts, buildings and images, plus time-based media and performances, produced by human labor and imagination, which serve aesthetic, symbolic, ritualistic or ideological-political ends and /or practical functions, and which address the sense of sight to a significant extent.

Culture

What humans have done or added to nature by their inventiveness and labor.

Base

Material resources, means of production (labor, industries, machines, technologies), the economy.

Superstructure

“Spiritual” phenomena: ideology, art, religion, science and philosophy.

Ideology

Shared set of societal values and beliefs

Hegemony

Dominant ideologies are always in flux.

Civilization

Culture synonym with broader and evaluative connotations; mannered; paradox of civilization increasing potential for destructive power.

Kitsch

Visual artifacts judged to have little or no aesthetic value.

Camp

Recodes kitsch as valuable, sees value through its status in invoking class standards of bad taste – “connoisseur of kitsch”.

Connoisseur

Master of “taste” - rules of subculture.

Folk Culture

Rural societies (in decline).

Mass Culture

Modernity, industrialization & mass communication.

Mass Culture

Made by professional designers and artists.

Popular Culture

Made by common people for masses.

Pluralist Culture

Many cultures; a flexible, dynamic process.

Trans- or Cross-Cultural

Looking for commonalities.

Intercultural

Ways cultures interact.

Multiculturalism

Need to incorporate values and ideas which do not reflect merely the dominant group ideology; dangers of tokenisms.

Apperception

Visual information merges with other sensory information along with existing memories and knowledge.

Synaesthesia

Colors and shapes associated with sounds, smells and feelings.

Ocularcentrism

Critique says vision complicit in social oppression via surveillance & spectacle.

Panopticon

“All seeing” prison design.

Panopticism

Humans internalize scrutinizing gaze.

Biopower

State has indirect control over citizens.

Feminist Critique

Associated with male dominance (patriarchy); eye objectifies and masters; “the Gaze”.

Visuality

Socialized vision; knowledge, interests, desires and social relations between perceiver and perceived.

Representation

Use of language and images to create meaning about the world.

Mimesis

Mirroring the world.

Social Constructionism

Making meaning only through specific cultural contexts.

Media Visual Representations

Intentional, encoded communications.

Mediatization

A theory that argues that the media shapes and frames the processes and discourse (conversation) of political communication as well as the society in which that communication takes place.

Haptic Sense/Perception

Touch, texture and contour.

Kinaesthetic Sense/Perception

Movement in muscles, tendons, joints.

Scopic Drive

Desire to see.

Invocatory Drive

Desire to hear.

Pierre Bourdieu

Literary or artistic field is field of forces and field of struggles tending to transform or conserve same.

Hegemony (Gramsci)

Power relations in constant state of flux.

Habitus

Field exists before entry with rites of passage; individual assumes position within it (often unconsciously).

Edward Said

Concept of “the other”; center vs. periphery.

Primitivism

Cult and appropriation of tribal arts by modern artists.

Orientalism

Exotic conceptions of East as European inventions.

Theory

A coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomenon.

Karl Popper

All theory provisional.

Ekphrasis

Detailed description of works of art.

Criticism

A genre of writing that describes and evaluates particular examples of visual culture for the benefit of non-specialist readers.

Frankfurt School

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.

Exchange Value

What something costs.

Use Value

How useful/necessary something is.

Lack (Lacan)

Loss from separation at birth

Interpellation

Advertising images interpellate viewers as subjects – address “you”.

Metacommunication

An exchange where topic is act of communication itself; reflexive.

Signifying Practice

Goal of producing meaning as well as object.

Auteur Theory

Idea of defining individual style.

Authorship

Barthes’ “death of the author” with “birth of the reader” with emphasis shift from production to reception.

Bricolage (Appropriation)

Taking existing artifacts and recoding them for new subgroup meanings.

Counter-Bricolage

Mass culture re-appropriating (co-opting) the bricolage.

Scopophilia

Erotic gratification derived from looking.

Mirror Phase (Lacan)

Developmental stage where infants recognise their image in mirrors as self and yet not—project control.

Cinematic Apparatus

Traditional social cinema space—darkened theater, mirror-like screen—invites regression to childlike state.

Literate

Able to read or write, more generally, educated or learned.

Semiotics

Study of signs.

Dominant-Hegemonic Reading

Unquestioningly identify with the dominant ideology.

Negotiated Reading

Combine various interpretations.

Oppositional Reading

Completely disagree, reject or ignore.

Gender-Bending

Rereading with queer subtext.

Trans-Coding

Putting positive spin on negative.

Rhetoric

Type of speech used to persuade an audience; field of study which examines modes of communication.

Visual Poetics

Examines rhetorical devices (figures of speech or tropes) in images and language.

Simile

One thing is likened to another.

Metaphor

A stronger connection than a simile.

Metonymy

A change of name.

Synecdoche

Part standing for the whole.

Hyperbole

Excessive exaggeration.

Personification

Abstract ideas embodied in some person or animal.

Symbols

Signs or objects that have, over time, acquired fixed secondary meanings.

Allegory

A treatment of one subject under the guise of another; a presentation of an abstract meaning through concrete forms.

Antithesis

Opposition; contrast—visual opposite juxtapositions.

Chiasmus

Two phrases are juxtaposed with the key word order reversed in the second.

Intertextuality

References to other works in the genre “quoting”; game with audience, reflecting their sophistication as knowledgeable viewers.

Manifest Content

What is shown; objects recognized by most—obvious or literal.

Latent Content

Attached secondary meanings.

Denotational (Mythologies)

What is shown (Roland Barthes).

Connotational (Mythologies)

How it is shown/what it means (Roland Barthes).

Iconography (Erwin Panofsky)

Branch of art history which studies content (representation); “descriptive and classificatory”.

Iconology (Erwin Panofsky)

“Interpretive”; synthetic.

Genre

French - “species, kind or sort”; in art, a classification or grouping of artworks that share certain iconographic elements, themes and stylistic conventions.

Type

Architecture: airport, hospital, bungalow; design: product type - car, chair, telephone.

Form

Color, shape, value, lighting—what things look like; formalist critics or historians.

Style

Handling, manner of expression—how something is said rather than what is said.

Semiotics

Study of signs within society; fashionable beginning in 1960s.

Sign

Something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity (C.S. Pierce).

Referent

What it stands for; can be real or imaginary.

Language

All that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement that one thing will stand for another (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Signifier (Sr)

Material dimension of sign (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Signified (Sd)

Conceptual dimension of sign (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Syntagm

Collection of signs in linear sequence (letters<word) (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Paradigm

A set where each unit has something in common and is obviously different from the other units (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Analog Code

Paradigm with no easily fixed number of units (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Digital Code

Paradigm with fixed number of units (Ferdinand de Saussure).

Object (C.S. Pierce)

External reality.