Journal of Visual Culture http://vcu.sagepub.

com/

Cultural relativism and the visual turn

Martin Jay Journal of Visual Culture 2002 1: 267 DOI: 10.1177/147041290200100301 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/1/3/267

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Journal of Visual Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/1/3/267.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Dec 1, 2002 What is This?

Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Saiona Stoian on October 31, 2013

journal of visual culture

Cultural relativism and the visual turn Martin Jay

Abstract

The recent explosion of interest in visual culture has often been premised on the assumption that distinct scopic regimes or visual practices are relative to the cultures out of which they emerge. Any naturalist hope of locating transcendental visual experience prior to its cultural coding is thus taken to be in vain. This article takes issue with this premise, not by returning to a discredited naturalism, but rather by putting pressure on the culture concept itself. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Bruno Latour, David McDougall and Rgis Debray, it argues that visual experience presents a challenge to the belief that it is culture all the way down. Although it does not claim that arguments for relativism can be entirely refuted, it does conclude that an exploration of visuality shows that grounding them in the alleged incommensurability of cultures is unpersuasive.
Key words

constructivism culture relativism the visual turn visuality

On 30 April 1988, the Dia Art Foundation in New York hosted a well-attended conference on the theme of vision and visuality. It brought together a number of scholars working on the then nascent field of visual culture: Hal Foster, Jonathan Crary, Rosalind Krauss, Norman Bryson, Jacqueline Rose and this author. The slim volume of conference proceedings, including vigorous debate among the participants, was published later that year as the second volume in Dias Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Foster, 1988). In hindsight, Vision and Visuality, as the book came to be called, may be seen as the moment when the visual turn or as it is sometimes called, the pictorial turn (Mitchell, 1994) really showed signs of turning into the academic juggernaut it was to become in the 1990s. Although anticipations can easily be found in the work of art historians like Erwin Panofsky and Michael Baxandall, cultural critics like John Berger, philosophers like Richard Rorty, and literary critics like W.J.T. Mitchell, only at the

journal of visual culture Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(3): 267-278 [1470-4129(200212)1:3;267-278;025250]

268

journal of visual culture 1(3)

time of the Dia Foundation conference did a critical mass begin to come together around the question of the cultural determinations of visual experience in the broadest sense. Not only did the participants in the conference soon publish a number of influential new books or make important additions to those they already had written, but a slew of anthologies with titles like Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Levin, 1993), Sites of Vision (Levin, 1997), Vision and Textuality (Melville and Readings, 1995), Visual Culture (Jenks, 1995), Interpreting Visual Culture (Heywood and Sandywell, 1999), Languages of Visuality (Allert, 1996), Vision in Context (Brennan and Jay, 1996), The Visual Culture Reader (Mirzoeff, 1998) and An Introduction to Visual Culture (Mirzoeff, 1999) quickly followed. Established journals like October conducted symposia on the challenge of visual culture to traditional art historical practice (October, 1996), while new forums like the journal of visual culture and Visual Studies were launched to accommodate the flood of work being done in all corners of the humanities and social sciences on visuality. In the preface to the collection generated by the Dia Art Foundation, Hal Foster asked the question why vision and visuality, why these terms? and gave the following answer: Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature is to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical: here, the difference between the terms signals a difference within the visual between the mechanisms of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations a difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein. (Foster, 1988: ix) Although carefully crafted to resist a reductive congruence between vision and visuality on the one hand, and nature and culture on the other, Fosters distinction within sight raises an important question that touches on the main theme of this article: what is the role of the visual in either confirming or transcending what has come to be called cultural relativism? Are there, to borrow once again a term from the French film theorist Christian Metz, discrete scopic regimes, which can be understood as analogous to the various forms of life that have become known as distinct cultures in the anthropological sense of the term (Jay, 1988)? And are these regimes distinct enough to defeat easy translation between or among them, producing a kind of ultimate incommensurability comparable to that which cultural relativists attribute to the other objects of their inquiry? Can we say, as Lyotard famously did with language games, that there are unbridgeable differends separating the visual equivalents of phrases in dispute (Lyotard, 1988)? Or to put it somewhat differently, is it ever possible to disentangle vision from what Foster calls its discursive determinations? Are the views we have of the world, in short, always like the intellectual worldviews that theorists since Dilthey have claimed were only partial perspectives on the reality they purported to describe and evaluate?

Jay Cultural relativism and the visual turn

269

One way that this issue was addressed prior to the visual turn was to distinguish between words as conventional signs and images as their natural counterparts, a distinction that can be traced back to Platos Cratylus (Mitchell, 1986: 74). For Plato, there were two ways of representing a man, either by saying his name or by drawing his portrait. Whereas words were taken to be arbitrary signifiers without any necessary relation to what they signified, images were understood to be tied by natural forces to what they resembled, iconic analogues of their objects. Mimesis of the real was assumed to be better served by vision than by any other sense.1 Although for some commentators the conventionality of words was taken to betoken their superiority as expressions of human creativity and imagination, for others images had the advantage because of their ability to transcend specific cultural contexts and show ostensively what could not easily be said or merely described. In W.J.T. Mitchells (1986) summary of this time-honored position, which he was at pains to refute: The naturalness of the image makes it a universal means of communication that provides a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of things, rather than an indirect, unreliable report about things. The legal distinction between eyewitness evidence and hearsay, or between a photograph of a crime and a verbal account of a crime, rests on this assumption that the natural and visible sign is inherently more credible than the verbal report. The fact that the natural sign can be decoded by lesser beings (savages, children, illiterates, and animals) becomes, in this context, an argument for the greater epistemological power of imagery and its universality as a means of communication. (p. 79) This assumption had not, of course, gone completely unchallenged Ive already mentioned Panofsky, whose 1927 exploration of the role of symbolic form in visual experience undercut the claim that perspectival representation was true to life (Panofsky, 1991)2 but by and large it reigned supreme for a very long time. Indeed as late as 1980, Roland Barthes could still claim that despite all its vulnerability to ideological distortion and connotative power, the particular visual object called a photograph was an image without a code, an indexical emanation of the reality to which it referred denotatively (Barthes, 1981: 88). After the recent visual turn, however, the claim that images can be understood as natural or analogical signs with universal capacities to communicate has almost entirely come undone. Mitchell, to take a salient example from his influential collection Iconology, dismissively calls such a notion the fetish or idol of Western culture (Mitchell, 1986: 90) and insists that images be situated firmly in the world of convention rather than nature. What Norman Bryson has called the discursive as opposed to the figural aspects of images, by which he means their embeddedness in language, has increasingly gained the upper hand in any discussion of their cultural significance. Witness the claim of John T. Kirby (1996) that ... all images have a discursive aspect, at least insofar as we attempt to consider them cognitively or (especially) to communicate our cognition to

270

journal of visual culture 1(3)

another person. And to consider an image cognitively, to engage in discourse about it ... is to textualize it. (p. 36; emphasis in original) Or listen to John Tagg (1988), who claims, contra Roland Barthes, that the evidentiary status of a photograph ... rests not on a natural or existential fact, but on a social, semiotic process ... what Barthes calls evidential force is a complex historical outcome and is exercised by photographs only with certain institutional practices and within particular historical relations. (p. 4) Or, to take a final example, observe Umberto Eco (1982) who boldly asserts that ... everything which in images appears to us as analogical, continuous, nonconcrete, motivated, natural, and therefore irrational, is simply something which, in our present state of knowledge and operational capacities, we have not yet succeeded in reducing to the discrete, the digital, the purely differential. (p. 34; emphasis in original) Although one can attribute such hyperbole to the hubris of certain over-confident methodologists, the primary source of the new insistence on the discursive, textual or institutional constitution of images, which makes any appeal to their natural, universal or transcendental status seem naive, can be found elsewhere. It lies, I think it fair to argue, in the exponential explosion of what might be called the technical and cultural mediation of visual experience. This outcome followed from the scientific discoveries of the 19th century that showed vision was physiologically dependent rather than a matter of the laws of refraction and reflection operating on a passive and neutral eye. For as Jonathan Crary (1999) has noted, once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation (p. 12). What the French film critic Jean-Louis Comolli (1985) dubbed the frenzy of the visible (p. 122) was already emerging a century or so ago, producing increasing opportunities for fresh visual experiences but also intensified anxieties about their veridical status. The new techniques of the observer developed in the 19th century and explored in Crarys influential book of that name were expanded and refined in the 20th century to the point that some observers like Jean Baudrillard could claim we inhabit entirely a realm of hyperreal simulacra without objective correlatives and others like Rgis Debray argue that we now live in a videosphere whose dominant ideology is the relativism of opinions (Baudrillard, 1988; Crary, 1990; Debray, 1996: 171). If, as Guy Debord famously claimed, the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it has become an image (Debord, 1994: 24), then perhaps all of our images in the age of global capitalism are mediated through and through by the commodity form. Whether it be via technological virtualization or socio-cultural mediation, or perhaps both at once, the image as a natural sign, a straightforward analogue of its object, is an assumption whose time, it seems, has clearly gone. The new doxa is

Jay Cultural relativism and the visual turn

271

hostile to any claim that the eye can be innocent. Symptomatically, the word image has regained much of the negative connotation that it had amassed during earlier episodes of iconoclasm, a shift already evident in such books as Daniel Boorstins celebrated 1961 study of American popular culture and politics simply entitled The Image. Instead of trusting in the integrity of the visual, we now comfortably talk about the hermeneutics of seeing, iconic utterances, the rhetoric of images, imagistic signifiers, visual narratives, the language of films and the like, all implying that the decoding of both texts and images as cultural artifacts share a common vocabulary, but one originally generated for linguistic investigations (Mitchell, 1980). Visual culture, in other words, has come perilously close to being turned into a branch office of the cultural studies conglomerate, in which ocularcentrism is trumped by logocentrism and the autonomy of visual experience is denounced as an outdated ideology of high modernist art. Can we then conclude that along with the new fascination for visual culture has come the triumph of cultural relativism in visual terms, that hard, rigorous relativism that regards knowledge as a social product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including different languages, ideologies, and modes of representation (Mitchell, 1986: 38) explicitly advocated by Mitchell in Iconology? Can we argue that visual experience is always circumscribed by the protocols of the culture out of which it is generated, always an effect of the codes of that culture, and therefore cannot provide a means of transcending its limits? Are scopic regimes congruent with and dependent on the cultures that subtend them? Is the visual no longer separable from visuality, to recall Fosters terms; is it culturally coded all the way down, with no excess beyond what the cultural mediation itself dictates? Before we try to address these questions, it will perhaps be useful to pause a moment with the larger issue of cultural relativism itself.3 Stemming from the Romantic response to the universalizing naturalism of the Enlightenment, a relativist respect for discrete and irreducible forms of life provided a healthy warning against the claims of any one of them to inherent superiority based on putative accordance with natural norms. It challenged the pretension of any one language or code to serve as the metalanguage or metacode for the species as a whole. Often understood in terms of national or ethnic entities, the anthropological culture concept proved elastic enough to be extended to virtually any other community able to generate a collective identity with normative constraints and affective demands on its members. In the context of our postmodern age, it is perhaps more frequently applied to groups within the nation-state, sub-cultures as they are sometime called, rather than the larger particularities favored by earlier cultural pluralists like Herder. But as the recent events in the Balkans attest, the equation of culture with national identity is by no means exhausted. And yet, however large the unit deemed a discrete culture, the argument remains that no transcendental standpoint, no umbrella identity, no deeper essential human nature, can trump its mediating power. The result is that for cultural relativists, whatever is left of the real is located not in something we designate as nature, but rather in that diacritical term called culture

272

journal of visual culture 1(3)

or, more precisely, in the plurality of different cultures that resist universalization. One familiar consequence of this conclusion is the rise of an identity politics that trusts only concrete subject positions rather than any alleged omniscient view from nowhere. Although there may well be a hidden residue of the natural in the cultural as the initially agricultural concept of cultivation suggests is the case a radical cultural relativism insists it can never be accessed except through its particular cultural mediations. Like Kants elusive thing-in-itself, it forever defies attempts to encounter it directly, an inability that led many late neo-Kantians in the 19th century and after to get rid of it entirely, and which is repeated in the current claim that it is culture all the way down. As might be expected, however, the radical culturalist argument has often come under fire in ways that will help us address the more focused question of visuality and relativism. One familiar riposte, which is made to relativism of all kinds, is that the doctrine of cultural relativism must itself be relative to a particular culture, which undercuts its own universal claims. The so-called myth of the framework means that radical conventionalism cannot account for its assumed ability to stand outside of its own context and know that all frameworks are constraining. In visual terms, it fails to overcome the tension between the meta-perspectival view of the whole that knows all cultures are partial and the particular perspective of each individual culture. This is a version of the familiar argument against performative contradiction, which involves asserting cognitive relativism through a statement that tacitly invites universal assent.4 This argument has, of course, been around for a very long time, but somehow hasnt succeeded in suppressing all relativist qualms, and Im not sure it will work here either. Somewhat different reproaches against radical culturalism have been made by historical materialists like Sebastian Timpanaro, Kate Soper and Terry Eagleton (Timpanaro, 1975; Soper, 1995; Eagleton, 2000). Arguing that culturalism is no less an essentializing reductionism than other mono-causal and undialectical theories like biologism or economism, they worry about the loss of critical purchase entailed by a pluralism that has no external standard by which to measure the values of each discrete culture. If all are equally ethnocentric, they wonder, why tax the West for its blindness towards Others, in the manner, say, of Edward Saids celebrated critique of orientalism? For if radical culturalism is right, how else could any culture function? Moreover, what if talk of universals say that of human rights can be shown to emerge out of and remain intrinsic to a specific culture? Are these to be dismissed as nothing more than the expression of a partial worldview? In Eagletons words, if talk of universals functions fruitfully enough within these local set-ups, enriching the language and enforcing some productive distinctions, why censor it? Pragmatism, a creed which many cultural relativists promote, would seem to yield no grounds on which to do so (Eagleton, 2000: 923). This ironically pragmatist defense of universals against the official pragmatist critique of them does, to be sure, little to challenge the radical culturalist argument on more substantial grounds. One way to begin this task is to put pressure on the culture concept itself, a concept inherited largely from an anthropological tradition that has in fact long since lost confidence in its self-evident power. What James Clifford called the predicament of culture in a widely read book, written at

Jay Cultural relativism and the visual turn

273

virtually the same time as the visual culture juggernaut began to gather momentum, meant an embarrassed awareness in the anthropological community that it was impossible to limit the boundaries or ascertain the internal coherence of those allegedly autarchic entities called cultures. The concept of culture used by anthropologists, Clifford remarked, ... was, of course, invented by European theorists to account for the collective articulations of human diversity. Rejecting both evolutionism and the overly broad entities of race and civilization, the idea of culture posited the existence of local, functionally integrated units. For all its supposed relativism, though, the concepts model of totality, basically organic in structure, was not different from the nineteenth-century concepts it replaced. Only its plurality was new. Despite many subsequent redefinitions the notions organicist assumptions have persisted. Cultural systems hold together; and they change more or less continuously, anchored primarily by language and place. (1988: 273) Ironically, the organicist notion of individual cultures was itself beholden to a holistic concept of integration taken from the nature it sought so mightily to abject (while forgetting, moreover, that natural organisms are themselves structures of complexity open to some extent to the environments in which they are embedded and with which they engage in some sort of exchange). That there may even be problematic political implications of this displacement has not gone unremarked. Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann (1996), for example, has noted with concern that visual culture may suggest to some notions of visual mentalit. But more darkly, echos of Volksgeist seem to me unmistakable, even if unintended, in discussions of national visual culture (p. 48). If, however, it can be shown that no allegedly distinct and integrated culture is really coherent and boundaried, none able to police its borders successfully against pollution from without, none organized like a living organism, then the idea that different cultures produce incommensurable views of the world cannot logically hold. For no individual within such a porous container as a culture, at least once populations begin to interact, can be totally determined by it. He or she is necessarily in contact with something outside it that is always already within. Here the tacit alliance between culture and language is split apart as an implicitly deconstructionist version of linguistic complexity undermines the binary opposition between interiority and exteriority, one form of life from another. Thus the strong argument for cultural determinism and incommensurability begins to waver. An attempt to topple it entirely comes from the historian of science Bruno Latour (1993) in his provocative little book, We Have Never Been Modern. In addition to questioning the boundaries separating different cultures, he extends the skepticism to that between the cultural and the natural. Arguing against the assumption that there is a single natural world on which distinct cultures have different perspectives, which in our terms would be the claim that the vision of the natural human eye is always filtered through discursive screens, he notes that the very separation of culture (or plural cultures) from a single nature is itself an historical creation, which he calls the rise of modernity. Prior to the conceptual split, and still operative after it

274

journal of visual culture 1(3)

in a sub rosa way, there are only hybrid nature-cultures, which are simultaneously worlds of humans, non-humans and divinities. Without falling back on a universalist notion of a real natural world, which Latour argues is always a conceit of modern Western science claiming to bracket its own cultural moment, he nonetheless challenges the relativist assumption that versions of nature are nothing but the conventional projections of discrete cultures. What he calls the hyperincommensurability argument of post-modernists like Lyotard is based on a simplistic reversal of the modern faith in natural universalism. Latours alternative is what he dubs relational relativism, rather than absolute relativism, an alternative that sees the world made up of hybrids, quasi-objects that include as much as they exclude. How can one claim that worlds are untranslatable, he asks, when translation is the very soul of the process of relating? How can one say that worlds are dispersed, when there are hundreds of institutions that never stop totalizing them? (p. 113). Ironically, Latours argument in We Have Never Been Modern undermines the function that vision in one of its guises plays in supporting the discourse of cultural relativism. That is, it calls into question the visual metaphor of different perspectives on the real world, which produce different culturally filtered worldviews or phenomenological profiles of an objective real forever beyond our perfect understanding. For if there are hybrids prior to the very split between cultural viewer and natural viewed, the metaphor of perspective is patently inadequate. You cant look, after all, from different angles at an object that no longer exists as an external reality by itself. Hybrid imbrication suggests a more haptic than visual interaction between subject and object or rather quasi-subject and quasi-object in what Merleau-Ponty famously called the flesh of the world. In an even more fundamental respect, Latour can be said to enlist visual experience against the more radical claims of culturalist constructivism. For what he alerts us to with his notion of hybridity is the impossibility of reducing figurality entirely to discursivity, images entirely to texts, the visual to nothing but an effect of the same codes that underlie the linguistic. That is, it is as impossible to reduce natural visual experience to its cultural mediations as it is to disentangle it entirely from them. We need only look as far as the silent film, which swiftly transcended the boundaries of the specific culture out of which it emerged to achieve global success, to see a clear example of the capacity of the visual to break free from linguistic and cultural constraints. Moving images, it was quickly apparent, didnt need dubbing or subtitles to move beyond cultural boundaries. No better evidence of this capacity is the power of pornographic images as opposed to texts in foreign languages, even ones that a reader has mastered, to perform their intended titillating function. Equally telling is the ability of images of human suffering to stir compassion across cultural and linguistic boundaries. As many students of physiognomy have shown, interpreting the meaning of a facial expression may well have a cultural component, but there are also many transcultural constants in the way it registers delight, passion, fear and pain. Although one can present comparable acoustic examples from the world of music or gustatory ones from the realm of cuisine, the relative ease with which images cross the line undermines the assumption that they are entirely relative to specific cultures, which are incommensurable with their neighbors.

Jay Cultural relativism and the visual turn

275

This is not to say, I hasten to add, that images can once again be seen as natural, unmediated signs, which can shed all their cultural encoding. It is rather that however much they are filtered through such a screen, however much they are connotatively deflected by the magnetic field of culture, they remain in excess of it. Cultural relativism is thus not called into question by a naive return to transcendental universalism in which all mediation is overcome, but rather by the inability of images to be relative to a specific culture understood as a boundaried and coherent way of life. In fact, much of the power of images, we might conjecture, comes precisely from their ability to resist being entirely subsumed under the protocols of specific cultures. As Rgis Debray (1996) has noted, ... to encode is to socialize (a language and a group go together). Such a gesture involves furthermore a will to curb the unsociable, to regularize what is irregular and disordered. Have we semiotized visual forms in order to be rid of them, dissolve their insistent barbarity in the analytical acid of linguistics? ... The feared dizziness of vision may be precisely its monstrous and intimidating silence. (p. 152) Although the rhetoric of monstrous barbarity may underestimate the ways in which images are themselves alternative modalities of civilized experience, Debrays defense of their resistance to subsumption under linguistic codes is worth taking seriously. As the Australian filmmaker and anthropologist David MacDougall (1998) has noted in his recent analysis of enthnographic film entitled Transcultural Cinema, the materiality of images ... fails to participate in the creation of either narrative or symbol. This excess creates a fundamental psychological disturbance in all human endeavors to construct schemata of the world. It is nevertheless the source of much of the fascination of the photographic media, and a contributor to the underlying erotics and aesthetics of both art and science. Barthes describes this as figuration, in contrast to representation, for it traverses the grain of significance. (p. 73) Filming the Other thus leads us away from a simple belief in the pristine sanctity of different cultures espoused by cultural relativists, for it entangles us in more complicated relations with the cultures on view. Visual anthropology, MacDougall (1998) writes with a nod to phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Vivian Sobchack, ... opens more directly onto the sensorium than written texts and creates psychological and somatic forms of intersubjectivity between viewer and social actor. In films, we achieve identification with others through a synchrony with their bodies made possible in large part by vision. (p. 262) MacDougalls evocation of the psychological dimension of visual experience comes from a largely phenomenological point of view, but one can discern similar implications in the case of those theorists who have found Lacans thoughts on vision a stimulus to their analyses (Rose, 1986; Brennan and Jay, 1996). That is, by

276

journal of visual culture 1(3)

formulating such concepts as the mirror stage or the chiasmic intertwining of the eye and the gaze, Lacan was also asking us to consider the transcultural, perhaps even universal, mechanisms of visual experience. Whether or not one accepts all of his arguments, or inclines to other schools of psychoanalysis (or perhaps to none at all), the recognition that sight is entangled with psyche suggests the limits of an exclusively culturalist approach, and with it the relativism that follows. For even if one discerns cultural biases in psychological discourse, calling into question its universalist pretensions, the tension between psychic interiority and social or cultural exteriority is not thereby effaced. And if we take seriously the idea of the figural moment in psychic life, which Freud himself recognized in the visual representation of the dreamwork, then it cannot be culture all the way down. Indeed, Debray (1996) has gone as far as arguing that ... the image as corporeality takes us back and short-circuits our humanities, interrupts courtesies, approaches making perceptible for us the idea of animality. It disrupts the smooth symbolic order of surfaces like the flesh before and behind the Word. This eruption is more traumatizing still with what Peirce called the indexical fragment than with the icon: the index, a physical trace, may be recognized in that even animals are sensitive to it. (p. 153) Although one might well argue that the other senses, especially the so-called lower ones of smell and taste, remind us even more powerfully of our roots in the animal world, sight, no matter how seemingly disincarnated it may appear in certain scopic regimes, never loses its links with the flesh in which it is embedded. Even in the heady days when visual culture came into its own and vision seemed in danger of being subsumed entirely under visuality, this stubborn residue of what culture thought it had left behind was never entirely overcome. Now that the tide of cultural studies is beginning to recede a bit and the limits of radical culturalism are becoming increasingly apparent, relativism no longer seems as inevitable an implication of the abandonment of transcendental naturalism. The return of that alternative, to be sure, may well be foreclosed for any but the most benighted enthusiasts of what Edward O. Wilson (1998) called consilience, the hostile takeover of the humanities by the natural sciences.5 But as the persistent disruption of the organic, holistic concept of culture by visual experience reveals, we can do without choosing between extremes and live comfortably within the negative dialectic of culture and nature, knowing that neither term can suffice without the other. Relativism, cognitive and normative, may not be overcome, but the assumption that cultural difference is its source cannot be plausibly sustained. Notes
1. The history of the vexed concept of mimesis shows, of course, how multifarious the implications of this assumption might be. See Gebauer and Wulf, 1995. 2. Others like Marx Wartofsky and Robert Romanyshyn have also defended a strong culturalist position on vision. See the extensive references to their work in Jay (1993a: 45). 3. For useful recent discussions of culture and cultural relativism, see Hartman, 1997;

Jay Cultural relativism and the visual turn Eagleton, 2000; Mulhern, 2000. For a concise and insightful investigation of the concept of culture itself, see Markus, 1993. 4. For a discussion of its efficacy, see Jay, 1993b. 5. For a critique of his argument, see Jay, forthcoming.

277

References
Allert, B. (ed.) (1996) Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature. Detroit: Kritik. Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Simulacra and Simulations, in Mark Poster (ed.) Selected Writings. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Boorstin, D.J. (1961) The Image. New York: Harper & Row. Brennan, T. and Jay, M. (eds) (1996) Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comolli, J.-L. (1985) Machines of the Visible, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds) The Cinematic Apparatus. New York: St Martins Press. Crary, J. (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crary, J. (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books. Debray, R. (1996) Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth. London: Verso. Eagleton, T. (2000) The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Eco, U. (1982) Critique of the Image, in Victor Burgin (ed.) Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan. Foster, H. (ed.) (1988) Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press. Gebauer, G. and Wulf, C. (1995) Mimesis: Art-Culture-Society, trans. Don Reneau. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hartman, G.H. (1997) The Fateful Question of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Heywood, I. and Sandywell, B. (1999) Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. London: Routledge. Jay, M. (1988) Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press. Jay, M. (1993a) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. (1993b) The Debate over Performative Contradiction: Habermas and the PostStructuralists, in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique. New York: Routledge. Jay, M. (forthcoming) The Menace of Consilience: Keeping the Disciplines Unreconciled, Stanford Humanities Review. Jenks, C. (ed.) (1995) Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Kaufmann, T.D. (1996) Response to the Visual Culture Questionnaire, October. Kirby, J.T. (1996) Classical Greek Origins of Western Aesthetic Theory, in B. Allert (ed.) Languages of Visuality. Detroit: Kritik. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

278

journal of visual culture 1(3) Levin, D.M. (ed.) (1993) Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, D.M. (1997) Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacDougall, D. (1998) Transcultural Cinema, ed. Lucien Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Markus, G. (1993) Culture: The Making and the Make-up of a Concept (An Essay in Historical Semantics), Dialectical Anthropology, l8. Melville, S. and Readings, B. (eds) (1995) Vision and Textuality. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Mirzoeff, N. (ed.) (1998) The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, N. (1999) An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Mitchell, W.J.T. (ed.) (1980) The Languages of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1986) Nature and Convention: Gombrichs Illusions, in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) The Pictorial Turn, in Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mulhern, F. (2000) Culture/Metaculture. London: Routledge. Panofsky, E. (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell. Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan Education. Timpanaro, S. (1975) On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner. London: Humanities Press. Wilson, E.O. (1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 19231950 (University of California Press, 1996[1973]; Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukcs to Habermas (University of California Press, 1986[1984]); Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1994[1993]); and Cultural Semantics: Keywords of our Time (Athlone, 1998). Address: Department of History, 3229 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. [email: martjay@socrates.berkeley.edu]