Reflections on Understanding Visual Culture

This will be my penultimate post - one more for the Assignment 5 feedback, then UVC will be completed.

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed this course. It has been hard work, has taken many more hours than I anticipated; probably well over the 400 hours OCA use as a guide. It is not just the reading and research, but also the blog maintenance (Blogger behaves in strange ways occasionally; one post was lost completely and had to be retyped).

Outcomes

In the introductory post of exactly 11 months ago, I set out three anticipated outcomes:

1. The challenge of "understanding and criticising more general theories in a visual context". This has undeniably been met: the theories of Berger, Marx, Debord, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Freud and Lacan (to mention just a few) have been read. Interpreting them has been a significant challenge in some cases, particularly due to the arcane language used in places, as discussed below;
2. Broadening the range of academic skills to incorporate those seen as relevant to this course: knowledge and understanding; research skills; critical and evaluation skills; and communication. Tutor has judged Assignments 1,2 & 4 as excellent across all criteria, and Assignment 3 as very good across all. Subject to comments on A5, this objective has been met also (postscript 10 December 2014: A5 was marked as outstanding in all respects);
3.  The final outcome of relevance to future courses will be outstanding for some time. but it seems highly likely that the concepts and theories in UVC will be useful in future modules. Completion of UVC marks a significant milestone: I have now completed Level 1, having started in 2011 with The Art Of Photography, followed by People and Place, and now Understanding Visual Culture. I have decided to carry on to Level 2, commencing with Landscape  then, probably, Documentary. The decision has been made easier by the move in the new syllabus towards reading, challenging, interpreting, and communicating via the photographic medium: to 'articulate your individual perspective of place' in the words of the course summary for Landscape. Documentary encourages us to advance communication skills and apply semiotics to images. Specifically, one assignment in each module is a 2,000 word essay. This all seems to chime with the approach in UVC.

But studying UVC has provided much more than these three outcomes. It has broadened my knowledge generally; I freely admit to knowing little about Art now, but at least I know more than 11 months ago. Visiting the Tate Modern a few weeks ago, I felt more confidence in understanding what I was looking at. I have some idea of the theories of Freud, Lacan and others. And, most of all, I have enjoyed the 'voyage of discovery'. Unlike the photography modules, I started many of the sections of UVC with zero knowledge. Reading and interpreting the works in the course was challenging, but even better was researching material for the Assignments. 

Despite the cautionary note in Assignment 5, digital technology has been empowering in this course. All the notes, logs and assignments have been created and stored digitally and, more important, the internet has been the source for a large chunk of my Assignment material. As well as the work of Jeff Koons, Sherry Turkle, Sarah Lucas, Hannah Höch, to mention just a few well-known names, I came across and used sources and authors that were writing on matters and in ways that were not directly relevant to what one might term 'academic UVC', but struck me as very relevant to the subject-matter. There are several examples in Assignment 4 - the use of the story about the uniform of the Colombian women's cycle team and Brogan Driscoll's coverage of nude sports photography in the Huffington Post. A quote from a blog by Christy Stewart-Smith was used in Assignment 3.  

And in a wider sense, the course has provided opportunity to explore media that I otherwise would not have: Jay-Z and others performing rap videos in Gendering the Gaze, and watching the films: Vertigo, Simba, Battle of Algiers, The Matrix and Blade Runner. Battle of Algiers is an outstanding film; I have suggested it to many family and friends since watching, as it has an almost disconcerting relevance to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. There were, too, some references that added humour with their irreverence: Craig Brown's My Turd , a satire of Tracey Emin's My Bed, is one I returned to several times when despairing of understanding what a particular article was driving at.

I learnt more too about using software, and annotation. An internet search revealed how to ensure that a link, when clicked, opens in a new page; important so I could incorporate links to annotated pdfs in the blog that open in a separate page. (The default position in Blogger, is such that viewers are required to use the back button to get back to the original post after clicking and reading a link). Thanks to my wife, Sue, who helped with MS Publisher, the software used for the annotations. Not studying Art, I had to assume how an annotation worked for an academic assignment; seems that the results are satisfactory as had no adverse comment from tutor. Sue also found a link on how to insert superscript for use in the text to refer to notes, used in Assignment 5, another of those little touches that provide a more professional result. Wordpress would probably be a better software than Blogger, but the latter has worked so far in the three OCA modules. 

It is what you make of it

To quote again from the  introductory post:

"Probably my main concern is not understanding the subject, finding the jargon arcane, and the arguments highfalutin. I have little time for academic study that is deliberately opaque so as to appear more difficult than it truly is. The challenge will be to avoid scorn or dismissiveness when reading an commenting on such material."

This was prescient, or at least the first part (I think I have avoided scorn and dismissiveness, albeit shown some exasperation at times). A lot of the reading - Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Debord, Altthusser, Baudrillard - is really very difficult to interpret in the original for an unpractised reader (for anyone). My favourite phrase was by Althusser, referred to in Reflections on Chapter 1:

 "[The Absolute subject] subjects the subject to the Subject..." I was whimsically reminded of Major Major Major Major, a character from Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22. 

Latterly I have come to wonder why it seems necessary for these authors to be so oblique. Is it some sort of conspiracy or game with the audience, challenging them to struggle and make meaning of the writings? 

Firstly, let's bear in mind these thinkers come from a strong French tradition of philosophical thinking. Philosophy remains a strong influence in French education so it is hardly surprising that it has produced some leading academics on philosophy and related subjects. It can be argued that it is not the place of leading thinkers to be accessible; let those coming behind do the spade work of helping the rest of us understand the opaque prose. My second sentence in the above quote is therefore misguided - these are difficult concepts that do not lend themselves to direct and easily readable prose.

An internet search of 'Why are French philosophers so difficult to understand?' adduced nothing of assistance but refining the search came up with a review of a book by Bruce Fink (2004). The following extract from the reviewer's comments is instructive:

"Firstly, he [Fink] reads Lacan literally to the letter, arguing that if one is prepared to undertake a close reading of the text, he is quite often not obfuscatory, but actually says what he means.  Secondly, he reads Lacan to the letter in the sense that he attempts to understand him on his own terms as having an artistic, literary style of writing.  This argument is sustained by Lacan himself, who often seems to have more in common with literary criticism than clinical psychoanalysis.  Lacan criticizes analysts who over-use the word “analyze”, because they “no longer know what it means to interpret.”

Fink, the reviewer continues, contends that Lacan’s mode of writing is a part of his philosophy, and attempt to psychoanalyze psychoanalysis. One could perhaps say that Lacan looks at the reader looking at his work. He challenges the reader to interpret, rather than to analyze. 'Interpret' in the English language has connotations of of holism and of individuality, that one person's  'interpretation' will be different from another's; 'analyze' has connotations that the subject can meaningfully be disaggregated into smaller more understandable parts each of which will have an objective truth. Nusselder (2009, loc52), in a similar vein, quotes Lacan as saying that it is so much better when one does not understand his writings, since it gives a chance to explain them. Lacan, at least, it seems is challenging his reader to make sense of his prose. Shades too of Derrida, who reportedly tired of explaining "il n'ya pas de hors texte" in his later life.

So it is up to us to read, interpret and (by implication) set out what we consider the meaning is without fear of contradiction because each 'intepretation' is unique. It is perhaps not a giant leap of generalising faith to extrapolate this to all the writers above, because that is the way with arts and the social sciences: universal, unassailable, objective truth is hard to to find. This remains an incomplete explanation of the issue of the tortuous nature of the language - you can openly invite your reader to interpret your work in his or her own way without writing in riddles - but it goes some way to explaining it. 

Conclusion

2014 has been an eventful year personally: retiring from employment in August, and completing The South West Coast Path (followed in October by the much shorter Ridgeway.) It is an arresting thought that considerably more hours were spent on this course than walking 630 miles (albeit that many hours were spent planning and travelling to and from each stage of SWCP as well as the 283 actually walking). Both projects require structure: SWCP requires planning of accommodation, transport and itineraries; UVC requires reading, researching material, executing projects and assignments. Yet within the structure, there is room for improvise, to confront the unexpected, to explore something different than was planned. Some things exceed expectations, others disappoint. Open mindedness is an essential. Not only have SWCP and UVC been in their own ways intrinsically challenging and rewarding, they have also been cathartic.

References:

Fink, Bruce (2004) Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (ebook version)

Nusselder, André (2009) Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology Kindle version. Amazon