Ethnologica Dalmatica, Vol. 20 , 2013.
Original scientific paper
Political and Ideological Boundaries in Visual Culture
Marko Kardum
orcid.org/0000-0002-0797-6677
; Plješivička 8, 10000 Zagreb
Abstract
In this paper, the dichotomy of natural and cultural is explored in terms of visual culture. The research that encompasses the works of W. T. J. Mitchell, W. Benjamin, M. Foucault and J. Baudrillard is used to show the historical role of the visual and the meaning it can have in a broader social context. The inability to define visuality as an exclusively natural human trait is determined and thus the role which ideological and political mechanisms have within it is laid out. The ideology of the image is uncovered as omnipresent, especially with the technological development and above all the rise of photography, film industry, television and the internet. With these developments, the ideology of the image advances toward the ideology of the visual as the real, while in the background it loses any reference point in reality. However, since the vision cannot be entirely devoid of the natural, it is shown that the visual should be observed in a continuous interaction of the natural and cultural. This two-way relationship also demonstrates the (un)hidden power of the visual, but also not always predetermined ideological power of images. The immobility of an exclusively natural or ideological paradigm of visuality is abandoned and products of visuality no longer occupy a predefined position of the subject of power and thus create the boundary of ideological and political in visual culture.
Keywords
ideology; politics; visual culture; critical theory; simulacrum
Hrčak ID:
107481
URI
Publication date:
19.9.2013.
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