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by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright
Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.
385pp, illus, Trade.
ISBN: 0-19-874271-1.
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand.
E-mail: seanc@waikato.ac.nz


Visual Culture is turning into something of a growth industry in the academy. There are a variety of sources. Photographic historians broadening their perspectives; media critics wanting to expand their horizons; art historians alert to the elitism of their tradition and interested in the convergence of art history and design studies in a new field more relevant to their students. Apparently broader than the study of fine art or photography or film studies, the new discipline attracts scholars and students looking for that wider hermeneutic perspective on a wider range of subjects. You could trace it back to John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing', now nearing its thirtieth birthday, though of course the roots go back to Benjamin and earlier.

Sturken and Cartwright's book joins the readers prepared by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall for the Open University in the UK and Nicholas Mirzoeff for Routledge in the US, and challenges the pioneering monograph Mirzoeff did in the late 1990s. The authors have stirling pedigrees, and the book lives up to them, a broad, open, challenging work that embraces the breadth of a global culture all too often excluded from undergraduate teaching, the obvious destination of this work. They offer to explain how images 'are an integral and important aspect of our lives' (8). They do so well.

But it is a sad truth that the discipline risks coming to the world stillborn through the act of premature baptism, an action usually undertaken only in the case of premature birth. Not that we do not need something to stir up the pious antiquarianism of art history -- God knows we do. The Plato-to-Nato, cave-to-the-grave survey course, watched over by out-at-elbow studio teachers concerned only that students can tell their Giotto from their Watteau still haunts the embattled lines between practical and analytical education in the Western art schools. If there is right on the side of the studio chiefs, and contextual studies folk have tended to ignore the craft which they want their students to understand, so too there is a correctness about the demands of a broadened horizon, so that new generations of makers have a chance to understand what it is they are doing to other people and themselves.

So the principle behind making a new discipline is a good one, and survives the horrified askance glance of the guardians of Quality (see the shocked essays in 'October's' special issue devoted to the frenzied defense of art, no 77, from the summer of 1996). But the naming problem is surely not difficult to discern for readers of these pages: the last hundred years have been notable for the rise of audiovisual culture. While a number of critics and philosophers have been swift to point towards the fear and abjuration of the visual among poststructural and earlier theorists, nonetheless, the titanic struggle is not that between literate and visual culture, those institutionalised ghosts of the 19th century's obsessive disciplinarianism, but the illusory division of text, image, graphic and sound media.

I do not pretend, nor do our authors, that there is some easy alchemical matrimony going on between the disparate mediations these forms evoke. Cerainly sound may be discussed alone (although I doubt the same can be said of music). But in a period in which scholarship has turned so vigourously to the analysis of the relationships, fraught, bewildered, contrapuntal, between image and sound have found such remarkable new ways to reconsider the necessity of movement, the temporalities of the image, and the possibilities of illusion, delusion, collusion and diffusion, why would we wish for a silenced discipline? Why, in short, not audiovisual studies?

The answer, I presume, is that we already have them, and they are called media studies. Visual culture, in this sense, is a specialism of media studies, and I don't think anyone of sense has a problem with that relation. What I fear is another disciplinary boundary, not so much among scholars, where specialism is not only enforced by the sheer scale of the issues we confront but powerful, as Bachelard argued half a century ago, as the engine which discovers the deconstructive mote in the eye of established wisdoms. Without the arcana of symbolic logic's assault on number theory in the hands of Godel and Turing, no computers. Without CERN's lunatic quest for ever less-existent particles, no world wide web. QED. Neither the generalisations of economists nor the macro-market-driven modellers of education have offered, in seventy years of trying, any conclusive proof that specialisation is not the engine of futurity.

But visual culture is not only a specialisation; it is also a generalisation. At its heart is the interpretive mode of examination. Sturken and Cartwright quite correctly point their readers towards both the political economy of image-making and the plurality (but not pluralism) of modes of reception across and within cultural formations. But their central theme is the ways in which images construct, retain, manipulate, obfuscate and generaly produce meaning. Not an unmanageable hypothesis, save that the circumscribed and overdetermined job of writing text books does not allow for the kinds of sophistication and more specifically the kinds of uncertain modesty that makes such a work permissible.

Again, these are more than competent, these are trusted, acute commentators. But confronted with a feckless student on the one hand and a rude institutional budget on the other, the job of clarification is far from the mode of experiment, the tentative touch, the seduction and rejection, the oscillations and inversions of the analytical-interpretive process. I write as one who has himself committed a textbook -- in sympathy and fellowship.

The book -- finally. Well structured, and complete. An introductory chapter on the politics of images; two chapters on the powers of interpretation as social activity, then chapters on visual technologies, including sassy material on digital media, on the public sphere, consumer and popular culture, an excellent chapter on scientific looking drawing on the authors' work on medical imaging especially, and a final, once again excellent chapter on global flows. Were any of us constructing a course, these are surely among the topics we would hope to address, and all of us would be proud to say we had addressed them as well as Sturken and Cartwright. They needle, they aggress, they transgress and they impress. If only they were also permitted to listen. The emergent discipline, whatever it be, has to be even more ambitious. If science and art are ever to find a dialogue, it will be somewhere on ground not far from here. It just is not this ground -- not yet.

REFERENCES
Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall (eds) (1999), Visual Culture: The Reader, Sage, London.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed) (1998), The Visual Culture Reader, Routledge, London.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1999), An Introduction to Visual Culture, Routledge, London.

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