A Phenomenon of Visual Turn and Visual Studies in Contemporary Culture

With help of such well known scholars of visual culture as T. Mittchel, M. Jay and V. Flusser, the author examines the phenomenon of the visual turn, shows how and why twentieth century philosophers and scholars are interested in visual culture, and how visuality conquered various sociocultural spaces. Interfaces between the pictorial turn and privileging of vision over the other senses (ocularcentrism) and the new technologies are analyzed. The visual turn should not be understood as a mechanical copying of reality or an act without creativity. Thus, the author highlights the differences between the ancient theory of mimesis and the present concept of the visual. The present concept does not represent a return to a traditional theory of adequacy, but rather it represents a re-discovered post-linguistic image created by interaction of the imagination and visual and visible reality. Interfaces among popular visual studies and various social sciences and humanities are analyzed; their testing problems and methods are highlighted. The author concludes that the attention of scholars on visual studies and the rousing of new visual studies programs at various universities and high schools is connected with the domination of the visual aspect in contemporary culture and to the rapidly growing need for specialists who could work in various fields of visual culture. The author argues that visual studies is an interdisciplinary phenomenon, but it could be treated as a separate discipline having a rather studio nature. The aim of visual studies is to create and present theories to help understand how images function in the wider culture.