“The Visual Culture Reader” by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 1998

Key quotes:

“The disjunctured and fragmented culture that we call postmodernism is best imagined and understood visually, just as the nineteenth century was classically represented in the newspaper and the novel.”

“….the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the prac- tices of observation, surveillance and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, inter- pretation, etc.) and that ‘visual experience’ or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable in the model of textuality.
(Mitchell 1994: 16)

“One of the most striking features of the new visual culture is the visualization of things that are not in themselves visual. Ramer than myopically focusing on the visual to the exclusion of all other senses, as is often alleged, visual culture exam- ines why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.”

“Visual culture does not depend on pictures but on this modern tendency to picture or visualize existence. This visualizing makes the modern period radically different from the ancient and medieval world in which the world was understood as a book.”

“It has had some of its most dramatic effects in medicine, where everything from the activity of the brain to the heartbeat is now transformed into a visual pattern by complex technology. As this example shows, visualizing does not replace linguistic discourse but makes it more comprehensible, quicker and more effective.
One of the key tasks of visual culture is to understand how these complex pictures come together. They are not created from one medium or in one place as the overly precise divisions of academia would have it. Visual culture directs our attention away from structured, formal viewing settings like the cinema and art gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life. At present, different notions of viewing and spectatorship are current both within and between all the various visual subdisciplines. It does, of course, make sense to differentiate. Our attitudes vary according to whether we are going to see a movie, watch tele- vision, or attend an art exhibition. However, most of our visual experience takes place aside from these formally structured moments of looking. As Irit Rogoff points out in her essay in mis volume, a painting may be noticed on a book jacket or in an advert; television is consumed as a part of domestic life rather than as the sole activity of the viewer; and films are as likely to be seen on video, in an aeroplane or on cable as in a traditional cinema. Just as cultural studies has sought to understand the ways in which people create meaning from the consumption of mass culture, so does visual culture prioritize the everyday experience of the visual from the snapshot to the VCR and even the blockbuster art exhibition.

“Yet the visual is not simply the medium of information and ‘mass culture. It offers a sensual immediacy that cannot be rivalled by print media: the very element that makes visual imagery of all kinds distinct from texts. This is not at all the same thing as simplicity but there is an undeniable impact on first sight that a written text cannot replicate”.

SUBLIME

because die sublime is generated by an attempt to present ideas that have no correlative in the natural world — for example, peace, equality, or freedom — ‘the experience of the sublime feeling demands a sensitivity to Ideas that is not natural but acquired through culture’ (Lyotard 1993: 71). Unlike the beautiful, which can be experienced in nature or culture, the sublime is the creature of culture and is therefore central to visual culture

‘The Construction of Social Reality’ by John R. Searle, 1995.

Main ideas and Key concepts:

• Social Reality is “weightless and invisible”

• Social Reality is ‘observer relative’- ‘can not exist without human participation’. The objects of social reality function within an assigned and certain context: ‘X counts as Y in the context of C’. Social reality ‘serves assigned functions’.

• Social Reality assumes ‘collective intentionality’, which is based on ‘institutional reality’ and ‘institutional facts’ or ‘social facts’ such as money, property, marriages, government. Institutional reality consists of these social facts determined by ‘collective intentionality’. Institutional fact are ‘self -referential’, it means ‘if everyone stops believing it to be money, it ceases to function as money’.
• Institutional facts were “self-referential”, it means if “everyone stops believing it to be money; it ceases to function as money”; Institutional facts have systematical relationship, like marriage is always related to certain commitments and promises. It is important to say that the Institutional facts are processes and not the objects because they exist in the context of certain actions; patterns of human activities;
• All Institutional facts function in in dispensable relationship with a language because “the brought into existence by declarations, like “I appoint you to this position”, “The war is declared”. Searle says that the language is symbolic and representational; “Brute facts are logically prior to institutional facts”; “Brute Facts” are the facts that have no explanation”;
• Language is a main precondition, primary key factor of social reality: “….language is precisely designed to be a self identifying category of institutional facts”.

Bibliography: 1) “Review of the Construction of Social Reality”; by John R.Searle” by Klaus Krippendorf, Annenberg school for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, http://www.repository.upenn.edu; 2) “Understanding Brute Facts” by Ludwig Fahrbach, Jstor journal, http://www.jstor.org;