Visual Culture (part 1)

We live in a visual world. More specifically, we live in a "world of images." Mitchell paraphrases Derrida when he says we live in "a world in which [...] there is nothing outside the picture" (41) Is this the truth? Is our world now brought into existence, not just represented by like we see in postcards, by "picture making"? This is not a completely foreign concept. Irit Rogoff, a rhetorical theorist who studies visual rhetoric in a more digital world, would attest to Mitchell's notion. Rogoff believes in images their is a centrality of vision and how images in a more visual world help to produce meanings for their observers, as well as their creators, help to establish and maintain aesthetic values, maintain gender stereotypes, and the power relations within a culture. Rogoff brings the idea of "spectatorship" into the forefront, or the active engaging with images that directly or indirectly affect the psyche. In relation to Derrida's différance, Rogoff was unable to reveal the freedom of the signifier, a way to understand meaning in relation to images and spaces that are not necessarily perceived by operation in direct, casual, or epistemic relation to their context or to one another.

Rogoff states that "visual culture provides the visual articulation of the continuous displacement of meaning in the field of vision and the visible" (Studying Visual Culture 383). Rogoff very much believes there has been a shift from the 1980s in which we found a wide range of assortments and tools of analysis for visual culture and artifacts, to now, a time in which we are producing new cultural objects and finding new and alternative languages to reflect our contemporary awareness. Redefining the text, as we have been discovering through our analysis of Daniel's "Public Secrets" and genre as social action, is creating new languages in which to perceive our reality. This concept of intertextuality, or intertextuality is helping to create not only new ways in which to perceive a subject, but a new language to be able to communicate, "speak about," and "speak to" one another and to the text/art/art form/discourse itself.  It is a concept that I really wish to explore further when I am able to better articulate and situate these texts and theorists together.