Visual Pervasiveness

Postmodern public life is a collage of visual realities that constantly invades and adjusts our private lives. Nicholas Mirzoeff in his discussion on visual culture contends that to a large extent this might be the case since much of the postmodern uncertainty has been the result of a paradigm change from a predominantly textual culture to a visual culture. Wheter his thesis is true or false that is debatabel, but nonetheless he makes a very interesting supposition about dealing with visualization. Mirzoeff suggests that living in a visual culture does not mean understanding the meaning of that culture (3). In a sense the assumption purports that visual culture by itself is not experiential and it needs more than experience to understand it. Given the vast canvass with which Mirzoeff is working with this might a possiblity since he tends to define visual technology as anything that can be looked at and "enhance natural vision" (3). The second part of his definition looks at visualization not in terms of "scene" but rather in terms of "agency"-- a conduit enabling sight. From this perspective, I believe that he is right in saying that we need to understand visualization first in order to experience it. We have to know the chanell, the "fluff," in order to experience the stuff i.e. the object of vision. This definition also extends the realm of visual culture to the domain of CMC where the latter acts as the agency.

On the other hand , Mirzoeff offers another view of "spectatorship"or visualization by shifting from the technical aspect to a more philosophical aspect, which he calls the "sublime" (9). Visualization not only fragments reality as mentioned in the earlier section of his discussion, but rather it weaves a composite artistry of reality. The visual reality or representation transcends the physical perception to a philosophical realization. Mirzoeff believes that through visualization one can not only experience what is immediate but also what is implied.

In the postmodern age where the interaction with the print culture is waning, the experience of sublime through visual is definitely a new way of experiencing the old.