ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO VISUAL CULTURE IN EUROPEAN HUMANITIES

New Challenges in the European Area Young Scientist's 1st International Baku Forum

20-25 May 2013

South-West University “Neofit Rilski”Nora Goleshevska, PhDE-mail: nora.goleshevska@gmail.com

Visual Culture Studies

• Visual Culture Studies appeared as a particular Area in North-American and European academic contexts

• Visual Culture has emerged as a growing interdisciplinary field of study where Visual Culture is not an object orientated discipline but a kind of interface between different disciplines in the humanities and social science dealing with the visuality of the culture

Visual Culture?

• a postmodern Art History• a “Visual Front” of Cultural Studies

• a model for an alternative Cultural History

Intellectual community comes together around the question of the cultural determinations of visual experience. This community considers ‘visuality’ as phenomenon that presents a critical discourse as well as cultural habit of seeing

"visual culture" embraces a wide range of pluralistic approaches to the cultural, social, political and heuristic significance of visual images, visual practices and visual experience. Often they are described as:

Visual Culture/ Visual Cultures?

•As a theoretical tool Visual Culture intends not just the social construction of vision but also • the visual construction of the social sphere itself

From Political theory to

Visual StudiesGiovanni Sartori

HOMO VIDENS * VIDEO-CHILD * VIDEO-PAIDEA*

VIDEO AUTHORITY * VIDEO POLITIC

THREE MAJOR FIELDS OF HIS POLITICAL SCIENCE:

- THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY; - PARTY SYSTEMS; - CONSTITUTIONAL ENGINEERING

VIDEO-CHILD

Watching TV before learning to read and write produces a negative mind-set for school learning

Thinking becomes dependent on the images received

• With the appearance of television/establishment of the television industry human development was interrupted and reversed, for image perception began to replace abstract thinking

• Homo sapiens (zoon politicon /animai symbolicum) is being dethroned by HOMO VIDENS - with the prevalence of vision, the symbolizing creature becomes the seeing creature

Video-paideia

• The TV is not only media but also a paideia

• From Rome to Sofia, from London to New York no matter how different the situation or the culture, popularity dominates the market; the rating rules.

• Every country in the “global village” has converted society into an audience

Video-paideia

• paidea - referred to the rearing and education of the member of the polis – The concept incorporated both practical, subject-based schooling and a focus upon the socialization of individuals within the  order of the polis

• Such concepts as nation, democracy, rights, sovereignty, liberty, justice, etc. are ‘invisible’

• video politic (videopolitica) – radical transformation of the ‘political being’ and the mode of the political governance - the dimension of the power of the video in the sense of its influence on the political processes in contemporary societies

• video authority (video potere) - television “strongly conditions the electoral process, whether in the election of candidates” or in “governmental decisions” by distorting the proper functioning of democratic systems

• Video power implies a direct appeal of the leader to the mass public via the electronic media – personalization of the party system

Video Authority

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