Introduction

Abstract

Few people today, in the late 1990s, would deny that sight, or vision, is as vital and important a system of human communication and cultural expression as language. Indeed, it has become something of a commonplace in the past thirty or forty years to point out the literal and metaphorical centrality of vision and the visual in western cultures. Guy Debord (1977), writing in the 1960s, has argued that modern society may be described as ‘the society of the spectacle’. People passively consume images and representations, spectacles, that are divorced from real life and their real needs. Michel Foucault (1977), writing in the 1970s, also thinks that western societies are organised in such a way as to privilege the visual although he disagrees with Debord, saying that ‘our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance’ (1977: 217). People are not watching, but rather being watched, inspected and recorded all the time; they (we) are reduced to appearances, to be scanned and scrutinised by anonymous and unseen authorities. And the 1988 report, entitled Humanities in America, for example, which was produced by the National Endow-ment for the Humanities, suggested that ‘our common culture seems increasingly a product of what we watch’ (quoted in W. J. T. Mitchell 1994: 1). Martin Jay has referred precisely to this ‘visual turn’ that has