Visual Sociology

In the widest sense, visual sociology involves the use of photography and film as tools and/or subject matter for sociology. The metaphoric guideline for social science and philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century was the so-called linguistic turn. Toward the end of the 1990s, another major shift occurred, known as the iconic turn. The world is no longer text, as implied by the linguistic turn, which suggested that all information and cognition could be rendered and reduced to textual information; rather, it is pictures. Sociology has begun to heed this intellectual shift toward accepting the mutual dynamics of the social construction of pictures and the pictorial construction of the social.

Keywords Body; Doxa; Film; fMRI; Habitus; Iconic Turn; Idolatry; Linguistic Turn; Nature/Culture; Panopticon; Phenomenology; Photography; Semiotics; Tattoo

Sociology & Related Fields > Visual Sociology

Visual Sociology

Overview

The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be considered the foundation for the focus of the humanities and social sciences on language. Before him, and before British logicians such as Bertrand Russell and American thinkers such as John Dewey, the majority of influential scholars in Europe and the United States received interdisciplinary training that involved studies in philosophy and physiology. Therefore, the focus of this earlier generation of scholars was strongly directed toward the body, its expressions, and its functions, including above all the relationship between vision and cognition.

Whether in the works of Germans such as Hermann Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, or early Pragmatists such as William James and Edmund Burke Delabarre, such scholarship and use of metaphors and analogies betrayed a strong debt to visual perception and its study. With Wittgenstein, Russell, et al., the focus shifted. In the mid-1960s, American philosopher Richard Rorty edited a collection of landmark essays that focused on this transition. This collection, The Linguistic Turn (1967), became the guideline for a program that would steer the humanities and social sciences for decades to come. Hermeneutics, originally made fertile for philosophy in a long clerical tradition of exegesis of the Bible by Schleiermacher (1768–1834), became a new leading method for the social sciences and philosophy thanks to Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose seminal Truth and Method (1960) became an interdisciplinary bestseller and guide for generations.

Hermeneutics

In France, hermeneutics was discussed and improved intensively by Paul Ricoeur and turned into an ethical movement by Emmanuel Levinas. The method of Deconstruction was then launched by Levinas's disciple Jacques Derrida. Around the same time, the works of historian Michel Foucault and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu relaunched an interest in the body that culminated in the 1990s with the iconic turn, which is still moving ahead today.

Of central interest is the role of the work of the founding father of American Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Textual hermeneutics initially claimed Peirce within the linguistic turn, but Peirce's work on semiotics—the study of signs—can also be used to work in favor of the scholarship of the iconic turn. Peirce focused on the sign as a relation between entities:

• The sign itself always represents. That is its function.
• The object can be considered to be the entity that is the subject matter represented by the sign and referred to by the interpretant. This is the meaning of the sign; its truth-condition, so to speak.

Peirce also considered different classifications of signs. The most famous distinguished between icon, index, and symbol. An icon is a sign that has a quality of its own, while an index must have some real connection to its object. A symbol designates a rule that lies with the interpretant.

Photography & Film

In the most general of meanings, both photography and film can be understood to be the method or the subject matter of visual sociology. Photography and documentary filmmaking can be instrumentalized for sociological research. The filming or photographing of typical behavior, culture festivities, and rituals has been a method for ethnographic and anthropological research since the technology's inception. With the turn of these disciplines toward studying contemporary Western society and culture itself, even sociology has added these methods to its toolbox. But cultural products such as photography in art and journalism, as well as television and movie productions, have come under scrutiny in recent years by sociologists. Most prominent among these is the International Visual Sociology Association (visualsociology.org), which instigated a variety of visual projects and publications while holding institutionalized conferences and summer-school programs on visual sociology methods.

Further Insights

Science originally applied the use of filmmaking to physiology. Etiènne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), best known for his work in fatigue research, built a "photographic gun" that he used to record the movements of animals in order to study in detail the different phases of motion. He later began to shoot short movies and became one of the founding fathers of modern cinema. Another expert in fatigue research, the German Hugo Muensterberg (1863–1916), wrote one of the first critiques of the art of filmmaking, a book on the psychology of moving pictures called The Photoplay (1916).

Bourdieu & Photography

The iconic turn owes a lot to the work of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968). Panofsky was an art historian whose work became a major influence on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). Bourdieu's interest in sociology was sparked to some degree by his reading of the work of Max Weber as well as by the time he spent in Algiers, both as a lecturer and as a member of the French occupation under the reign of De Gaulle. His ethnographic research undertaken in Algiers was supported by his use of photography as a sociological tool. Bourdieu managed to show that social facts inscribe themselves into the body and can be identified in posture, movement, and practices that adhere to their own social logic.

Habitus & Doxa

To describe this level adequately, Bourdieu referred to the concepts of habitus and doxa, thereby clearly involving his education in classic philosophy and classic sociology in the process of theoretical concept formation. The habitus is a concept that describes the set of dispositions an individual incorporates from the responses he or she receives from the surrounding members of society to his or her actions. The habitus represents the "objective social patterns" inscribed into the subjective being and body of the individual. It bridges the gap between objective and subjective reality. Social reality is divided into different fields, such as the field of cultural production or that of economic life. Each field has its doxa — its implicit preference structure as inscribed in the individual. The physical aspect itself, the body inscribed, is thus the object of a sociology that relies on visual perception. Bourdieu thus reintroduced visual analysis into the sociological canon.

Foucault & the Body

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has also emphasized the role of the body in social and historical analysis. In one of his most famous books, Discipline and Punish (1975), he describes subjectification as a process of discipline, which is an action that imposes a regime onto the body. With this idea in mind, a discipline can be indentified in or on the body, sometimes in posture or movement, sometimes in practices such as tattoos or other forms of body art. Whether a person belongs to traditional Maori culture, the Japanese Yakuza, or a punk or goth subculture, physical ornamentation represents belonging and is laden with meaning that represents complex and sophisticated social facts and patterns.

Architecture

Discipline does not stop at the body, specifically not in regard to Discipline and Punish. Architecture, for example, fulfills social constructions as well as shaping social facts. The panopticon, a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, illustrates the interplay of form and function in social contexts particularly well, since its architectural design is shaped by the idea of surveillance, while imposing a regime upon the prisoner. In a panopticon, the prisoners' cells surround a central observation point from which an idea of omnipresence and continuous observation emanates.

From here it is not far to the idea that sociology has to take into account art, architecture, landscaping, geography, etc. Indeed, it should be stressed that the first British sociologists, L. T. Hobhouse and Patrick Geddes, who were involved in the studies of civics, initially understood the term "civics" and the task of social science to involve urban planning—although it should be stressed that there were grave ideological and methodological differences between Geddes's civics and regional movement and Hobhouse's Ethical School.

Modern Visual Sociology

Southampton sociologist Paul Sweetman, a leading voice in visual sociology in Britain, relies on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and expands it into questions of fashion (2001, 2003). Therein the distinction between nature and culture is reiterated. The body is a natural object that is reshaped and disciplined by culture; fashion, like art, is an entirely cultural fabrication that appears in the visual form.

Following a suggestion by anthropologist Paul Rabinow, the equipment of the human (anthropos) turns the logos into an ethos. Thus, following the visual ornamentation of the human body and the visual representation (such as graffiti, architecture, etc.) through its own logics tells us what it is to be human today. Although Rabinow is concerned primarily with the conceptual frames of science, his work, which he calls an anthropology or a history of the present, relates just as easily to visual sociology.

New Media Technology

Another interesting field of study in recent years is the emergence of new perception studies that center on the use of information technology, such as television and computers. Not only have these media turned modern culture into an increasingly visual culture, they also structure social action in their wake. The PowerPoint presentation, for example is an asset in business meetings or classroom presentations and has become self-evident in use. The visual structures that this tool provides also are a matrix of the possible turns an actual presentation can take.

But there is another aspect that should not be neglected. As tools, PowerPoints and websites do not only prestructure what can be shown to people and in what ways. People must also first learn to process the information that they see. It is not self-evident that a person can understand a website.

In many ways, the turn to icons is also a "re-turn" to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Combining Foucault, Derrida, and Peirce is an approach that David Shalin (2007) has called a Pragmatist Hermeneutics, which studies the "signing in the flesh." Shalin investigates the practices that precede and follow acts of interpretation, since he sees them as engraved into the human physique and motion. He sees within action a "word-body-nexus."

Current Discourse

Clinical vs. Molecular Gaze

The work of Michel Foucault has another visual dimension, namely, the gaze. In his study on the emergence of modern medical culture and the birth of the clinic, he also coined the term "clinical gaze." Nikolas Rose (2006) has recently postulated that the clinical gaze has disseminated from the nineteenth-century expert discourse among doctors, clinicians, and experimenters into the discourse of laymen today. This affects modern concepts of biological citizenship, dealing with the way most people think about how modern medicine approaches diagnosis and therapy. The general public, stuck to the clinical and therefore somatic gaze, thinks of the body as an entity that has a specific visual structure of limbs and skin and tissues, which can be gashed, scratched, broken, healed, ornamented, etc. Modern expert discourses, however, are guided by a molecular gaze, visualizing and imagining on a molecular level physico-chemical systems that deserve to be functionally optimized.

These different imaginations or gazes represent two different visual cultures. One is strongly biased by the culture of visual mass media, a topic that has influenced philosophy in recent decades. The other deals with constructions of visualizations of processes within the body, which are also subject to interpretation.

Objectivity in the Visual

A major influence on the reintroduction of the visual into philosophy was the work of Villem Flusser (1920–1991). Flusser addressed the influence of visual media in his abstract essays on idolatry and textolatry, the dichotomy between the primacy of interpretation from image to text. With the invention of photography, Flusser argued, truth transcended interpretation, because a level of objectivity was introduced through the visualization of ideas that was assumed to be identical to the truth. A similar case is argued by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007), who tried to give an account of the rise of the concept of objectivity through the different forms of representing knowledge in science, from the accuracy of illustrations to photography and the objective perspective.

With the development of advanced imaging technology in the medical sciences, such as positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the question of the objectivity of interpretation of pictures is reopened. The visual representations these technologies deliver are widely open to speculations about their meaning and are visual artifacts subject to social constructions, as Joseph Dumit has shown in his landmark study Picturing Personhood (2004).

Asemiotic Sociology

Another new direction in sociology that transcends the hermeneutic and revamps classic phenomenology in the wake of Merleau-Ponty (whose studies in the philosophy of perception are to this date unparalleled) is to be found in asemiotic sociology, spearheaded by Czech sociologist Ilja Srubar, who presented a paper called "Art as a Paradoxical Form of Communication" at the 2009 international conference Phenomenology, Social Sciences, and the Arts. Srubar has begun to think out a direction similar to that of Shalin, but with much wider implications in the social world.

In a similar vein, Bruno Latour (2006) has argued that traditional theory in sociology has focused on explanations that rest solely in the category of the social, leaving out a variety of relations that objects and entities enter as actors themselves. These constellations of actors and networks, from the view outside of the social entities that sociology has traditionally accepted as its own, have proven to be a very fertile point of analysis. And if it were argued that traditional sociology rests its methods on an analysis primarily of language, concepts, and, perhaps at the most reduced level, semiotic signs, then Latour and the asemiotic perspective may indeed constitute the future of sociology, for such a perspective seems much richer in perceiving real phenomena that occur outside the semiotic but are nonetheless structuring our everyday lives and affairs. The most important instruments for perceiving these asemiotic relations are our eyes, and therefore the methods of visual sociology deserve to be sharpened. Amongst classic sociologists, none was more aware of this than Georg Simmel, whose essay "The Sociology of the Senses" in his 1908 work Soziologie demonstrates this point, as do his studies on the sociology of fashion and jewelry.

The visual perception has in modern thought lived through many ups and downs, and it is specifically through French philosophical thought that its history has been such a roller-coaster ride. In 1993, historian Martin Jay addressed this question in his seminal work Downcast Eyes. Jay traced the career of the visual category in modern and postmodern thought, and his work remains the best introduction to how and why this category reemerged through French thought.

Such ups and downs represent the major turns in sociological discourse: from the organismic in the late nineteenth century to logic in the early twentieth, from logic to the linguistic in the mid-twentieth century, and eventually from the linguistic to the iconic in the 1990s. What these epochal turns all have in common is that they deal with the individual media of human life, whether in language or image. The next big turn will therefore be upon the discovery of what all the prior turns had in common; it will surely be the medial turn that will shape the things to come.

Terms & Concepts

Habitus: The concept of the habitus as it was used by Pierre Bourdieu has sources that reach deep into classic Greek philosophy. The habitus represents the arrangement of patterns that an individual human being is immersed in and has inscribed into his or her psychological makeup in such a way that his or her responses to social situations are restricted to this set of patterns.

Idolatry: The cultish worship of an image or an object is called idolatry. Villem Flusser distinguished from it the idea of textolatry, the worship of written text.

Linguistic Turn: In 1967, editor Richard Rorty published an essay collection titled The Linguistic Turn that addressed the change of tides in philosophical thought toward the primacy of language. Language became both the object of study and the explanatory device for human thought and action.

Panopticon: The panopticon is a prison building designed by Jeremy Bentham. Architecture can play a central role in the technology of surveillance. Bentham's architecture features cells that surround a central observation area, creating a space where a feeling of invisible omniscience is achieved. This establishes domination over the prison subjects that does not simply incarcerate the body, but, as Bentham himself described, exerts power over the mind. Michel Foucault used the example to illustrate the shift to disciplinary power.

Phenomenology: Phenomenology is the study of the phenomena, of "that which appears" (from the classic Greek). This philosophical direction, founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), studies the consciousness and the appearance of reality as it shows itself.

Semiotics: Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, and the processes of communication involving either. It derives its meaning from the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), for whom semiosis was a process between three entities: sign, object, and interpretant. Since Peirce was somewhat of a pariah in academic circles, his ideas were promoted mostly after his death. The importance of semiotics is largely due to the influence of Charles W. Morris (1901-1979). The most famous modern professor of semiotics is perhaps Umberto Eco.

Bibliography

Baetens, J. (2013). Image and visual culture after the pictorial turn: An outsider's note. Visual Studies, 28, 180–185. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=88893123&site=ehost-live

Burri, R. (2012). Visual rationalities: Towards a sociology of images. Current Sociology, 60, 45–60. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=70896070&site=ehost-live

Daston, L. & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. Boston: Zone Books.

Dumit, J. (2004). Picturing personhood. Cambridge: MIT Press

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage.

Jay, M. (1993). Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: California UP.

Latour, B. (2006). Reassembling the social. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Metcalfe, A. (2012). Imag(in)ing the university: Visual sociology and higher education. Review of Higher Education, 35, 517–534. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=78026171&site=ehost-live

Rabinow, P. (2003). Anthropos today: Reflections on modern equipment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.

Shalin, D. (2007). Signing in the flesh: Notes on pragmatist hermeneutics. Sociological Theory 25: 193-224. Retrieved September 20, 2008 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=26279491&site=ehost-live

Srubar, I. (2014). Art as a paradoxical form of communication. In M. Barber & J. Dreher (Eds.), The interrelation of phenomenology, social sciences and the arts. New York: Springer.

Sweetman, P. (2001). Everything starts with an E: Fashions in theory, fashion theory and the cultural studies debate. Theory, Culture & Society, 18 , 135-142.

Sweetman, P. (2003). Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus. Sociological Review, 51 , 528-549. Retrieved September 20, 2008 from EBSCO online database, SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=11565190&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Harper, D. A. (2012). Visual sociology. Abingdon, England: Routledge. Retrieved October 30, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database eBook Collection. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=513481&site=ehost-live

Knowles, C. & Sweetman, P. (Eds). (2004). Picturing the social landscape: visual methods and the sociological imagination. London: Routledge

Shalin, D. (2004, Dec.). Liberalism, affect control, and emotionally intelligent democracy. Journal of Human Rights, 3, 407-428.

Sweetman, P. (2007). Anchoring the (postmodern) self? Body modification, fashion and identity. In M. Barnard (ed.), Fashion Theory. London: Routledge.