The phenomenon of visuality in the modern British-American scientific space

Abstract

In this article the phenomenon of visuality in modern Anglo-American academic space is studied. Special attention is paid to highlighting the phenomenon of visual turn in research, namely, why visual culture attracted the attention of scientists of the twentieth century and how visuality conquered various socio-cultural spaces. Visual rotation and the privilege of vision over other sense organs (oculocentrism) and the emergence of new technologies are analyzed. The penetration of the visual into cultural theory and the spread of images in culture itself are called the “visual turn” (sometimes it is called «pictorial turn» or «iconic turn»). It was presented in the research of one of the most prominent theorists of media and visual culture W. J.T. Mitchell. Over time the concept of “visual” has successfully established itself not only in culture itself, but also in cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, and history, which are increasingly intertwined through the image. Texts of cultural researchers and theorists such as Stuart Hall, Gordon Fife, John Law, John Peter Burger, Martin Jay, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Donna Haraway and many others much attention is paid to the study of various aspects of the problem of visuality, and the focus of academic research often shifts to the interdisciplinary level. In research, much attention is paid to the definition of visuality and other phenomena of the phenomenon of visibility, the ontology of sight and vision, the identification of boundaries between the visible and invisible, the problem of the image, the theoretical properties of the image in photography, cinema, art, education, etc. is highlighted. The problem of the visual has been elevated to the center of new research; the foundation has been laid for the emergence of new areas of research, visual. This marks the beginning of a new stage in the development of humanitarian research, when from the simple observation that we live in an era of image dominance, we move on to the theoretical conceptualization of this phenomenon.