Torbett - Blog Topic- Carrol Text - Fascilitating Investigations

The article that I chose was written by W.J.T. Mitchell, and Titled Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture.  Mitchell refers to visual culture as "iconology," and defines it as the general studies of images across the media.  Iconology focuses on the cultural construction of visual experience in everyday life as well as in the media, representations, and visual arts. "Visual culture is, in short, an "interdiscipline," a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines" (Mitchell).

Mitchell introduces 3 specific kinds of interdisciplinality:

1.  Top Down - A comparative, structural formation that aims at reproducing itself in a new disciplinary form or is content to remain an ad hoc or transitional moment.

2.  Bottom Up - a compulsive and compulsory interdiscpiliarity that is dictated by a specific problem or event.

3.  Inside Out - an indisciplined or anarchist moment in interdisciplinarity.

It is referred that Cultural studies are considered "the awful truth" that was concealed for so long under euphemism of interdisciplinarity. Visual Culture is a new hybrid interdiscipline that links art history with literature, philosophy,studies in film and mass culture, sociology, and anthropology.  In making the case for art history, Mitchell claims that visual culture would be an "inside out" interdisciplinary, as it looks like an "outside" to art history opening out the larger field of vernacular images, media, and everyday visual practices. On the other hand, it may look like an "inside" to art history's traditional focus on the sensuous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual, as art history relies on pre-conceptualized models that have already been put into place for the viewer.

It is Mitchell's feelings that disciplines such as mass media and and film would fit more comfortably in the visual culture shell, as both are the most powerful and persuasive forms of visual culture. Mitchell finalizes on Five key points necessary to define visual culture as a true discipline:

1.  Visual culture should be "mindful" of the different disciplinary histories that have blended within its terminology.  

2.  It must recognize that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication that is as fundamental and widespread as language.

3.  It has to resist the consructivist reflex and reopen the question of culture's boundaries with visual nature.

4.  Visual Culture from the standpoint of vision must lead us to aesthetic and semiotic boundaries.

5.  (Interesting) - Visual culture must be grounded in noth only the interpretation of images, but the description of the social field of the "gaze," the construction of subjectivity, identity, desire, memory, and the imagination.

This article really helped me define  visual culture.  It gave me a better understanding of what visual culture actually is.  It also opened my mind to the interdisciplinary structure of visual culture (its makeup).

Incorporating language in visual culture must be taken into action in order for one to understand the literacy behind this movement.