Towards the Constitution of the Field of Visual Cultural Studies

Abstract

Traditionally, studies on the image have been dominated by issues such as copying, resemblance, similarity, realism, but reflection in the last years has taken other paths that question even the very notion of image, since this name encompasses a wide variety of things, even ideas. This diversity makes their understanding impossible, to the extent that we do not yet know how to define it, what their relationship with the verbal is, how they operate on the observer and on the world. The awareness that we do not see with our eyes, but with all our culture and history, makes us doubt whether, beyond the physiological threshold, it is possible to continue talking about visual images, not related to the information of the other senses, the knowledge and data from memory. Digital media raise the need to think that all the senses are involved in an experience that is not only
visual but multisensory. The vague nature of the notion of image suggests that the mere notion of a science of the image may be replaced with another, which assumes that visuality is not reduced to mere acts of vision but involves the entire bodily experience. This science would deal with the set of theoretical and methodological problems related to the knowledge of the practices of seeing and its articulation.