About visual culture?

The characteristics of visual culture are produced after cultural studies, weird theories and African-American studies. It has changed from a useful term for art history, film and media studies, sociology and other visual researchers to a fashionable and perhaps controversial new method to study interdisciplinary science. Visibility is valued because today's human experience is more intuitive and concrete than ever before. In many ways, people in industrialized and post-industrialized societies now live in visual culture, which seems to distinguish the present from the past to some extent. The mass newspaper industry has been paying close attention to the emergence of digital images, the development of later images and medical images in the film industry, not to mention the endless comments on the Internet. This widely recognized visual globalization needs new means of explanation. At the same time, in order to explain the "visual turn", this change in the post-modern situation also requires a historical explanation of modernism and modernity.

Of course, postmodernism is more than just a visual experience. In the post-modern society that Argent Appadurai called "complex, overlapping and scattered", consistency is unpredictable. Whether you look at the coffee house culture praised by Habermas in the18th century or the printing capitalism of newspapers and publishing industry described by Benedict Anderson in the19th century, there was no such unity in the past. Just as these authors ignore other wider choices and only highlight a certain feature of an era as an analysis method, visual culture is a strategy to study the pedigree, definition and function of post-modern daily life. What we call separated and broken post-modern culture is best imagined and understood visually, just as it was presented in newspapers and novels in the19th century.

Western culture has always regarded oral English as the highest form of intellectual activity, while visual representation is the second form of conceptual interpretation. At present, the emergence of visual culture as a research topic has developed Michelle's "image theory" and challenged the traditional discourse hegemony. According to this theory, today's western philosophy and science understand the world through image mode rather than text mode. This poses a great challenge to the view that the world is a written text. Since the movement based on linguistics such as structuralism and post-structuralism, this concept has dominated the discussion in the intellectual circle. In Michelle's view, the image theory comes from:

Such an understanding, watching (watching, staring, scanning, watching, monitoring and visual pleasure) may be as profound as various forms of reading (decoding, decoding, translation, etc.). ). It is impossible to fully explain "visual experience" or "visual education" with text mode.

Second, the basic content of visual culture

1. The spread of visual culture, especially the development of cultural communication, is showing a trend: culture is divorced from language-centered rationalism and increasingly turns to image-centered, especially image-centered sensibility. Visual cultural communication refers to a unique form of cultural communication formed through the implementation of image media, especially image media. The spread of visual culture not only marks the transformation and formation of a cultural form and mode of communication, but also means the transformation of human thinking paradigm.

2. Visual cultural communication is not only a new cultural form, but also an important industrial form. With the gradual rise of Marxist symbolic political economy theory, it focuses on the post-Fordism mode of production of late capitalism (the international flow of monetary capital, commodities, production tools and labor). At the same time, the study of consumption pattern and visual culture communication pattern has always been in an important position in this research field.

3. Based on the above theoretical paradigm, the study of visual culture will form an idea that the production objects of contemporary society are no longer limited to those pure material products, and today's society is producing more and more "visual symbol products". Visual symbol products are divided into two categories: one is goods with certain cognitive content and post-industrial information; Second, postmodern commodities with aesthetic content. The research on the production, circulation and consumption of these "visual symbol products" constitutes a new topic of visual culture research.

4. In the language-centered cultural form, the production, circulation and consumption of language symbols occupy a dominant position, while in the image-centered visual cultural form, the production, circulation and consumption of visual symbols occupy an important position (both in quantity and influence). During this period, the production, circulation and consumption of film and television visual symbols have become a very huge industrial form in the world.