From Image To Simulacrum

The world today is flooded with all sorts of dazzling pictures and spectacles, which has dramatically changed people's living experience and cultural circumstances. As a theoretic feedback, researches on visual culture have become the most distinct and significant field in today's cultural studies. As early as 70's in 20th century, Daniel Bell, a famous scholar in the U.S, claimed that contemporary culture was changing into a sort of visual culture. W.J.T. Mitchell, another celebrated scholar considered that a Pictorial Turn, as the most important turn in culture nowadays, has led the contemporary society into an era of Picture.In the era of Picture, people view the world by visual machines and visual technologies. Since the invention of photography, images that were shot by camera lens, mechanical eye or electronic eyes have become the final key visual objects and the most important visual intermediary connecting people and the world. Based on the technical principle of automatic producing and the super-verisimilitude effects, images have brought an epoch-making shift in the visual paradigm of human. The confusion of reality and beauty has become the weirdest logic and the most profound paradox of the visual culture in the era of Picture. In this sense, the visual paradigm in this era is in fact an aesthetic Paradigm. In other words, the development of the visual media in this era, from photography to movie, then to TV, and finally to the digital image of virtuality and new media, is also deepening of the paradox of human's visual paradigm. Meanwhile, this would certainly cause a series of contradictions and problems and exert a tremendous influence on the improvement of the contemporary cultural studies.Based on the technical-aesthetic features of image and the development of media culture, this dissertation focuses on the subject's aesthetic sense in the visual course, and analyses the logic and law of evolution of the visual aesthetic paradigm. As for methods, this dissertation on one hand combines the technical analysis of visual media with the psychological analysis of aesthetic subject and the cultural analysis of contemporary society, while on the other hand; it combines phenomena description with case studies and logic thinking. The dissertation aims to draw a multi-dimension profile of the evolution of human's visual aesthetic paradigm in the Era of Picture. Based on this, the dissertation criticizes and makes reflections on some phenomena concerning visual culture in our society. The content of this dissertation is as follows:Chapter 1 gives definition to the key words of the paper, and analyses their relations, such as "what is picture", "What is the era of picture?" "What is image and simulacrum?" "their relations" "the visual aesthetic paradigm" "What special features do these paradigms in the Era of Picture has?"Chapter 2 reviews two important visual objects, the drawing picture and literary image in the Pre-picture Era, and analyses their distinctions and connections, then discusses the corresponding visual aesthetic paradigm of drawing picture and the literary image respectively in light of the practice of plastic art and literature.Chapter 3 to chapter 6 describes the evolution of the visual aesthetic paradigms in the era of picture and analyses the technology logic and sociology logic behind it. This part is the main body of the dissertation. According to the patterns and developments of the visual media, this paper analyses the features of visual aesthetic paradigms of photography, movie and TV, and then reveals their distinctions and connections. By combining the analysis of aesthetic experience of the visual subjects with the analysis of media technique and that of social culture, this part draws a profile of the visual aesthetic paradigms in the Era of Picture.Title for each chapter in this section is as follows: chapter 3.Photography, the fixed and faithful representation and mechanical reproduction; chapter 4,Movie, the storyteller, the dream maker and cultural industry; chapter 5, The pastiche TV and mass culture; chapter 6, The hyperreal and implosive simulacra and the consumer society. These chapters unfold the different steps of development of the visual aesthetic paradigm in the Era of Picture. But the change from image to simulacrum is not a mechanical variation, but a complicated evolution. In other words, image is a concrete object to eyes; however, simulacrum is an abstract logic of the developing trend of pictures in the Era of Picture. Accordingly, in chapter 6, no concrete comparison to visual media, i.e. photography, movie and TV is made as simulacrum is concerned. In fact, as early as the age of photography, simulacrum had sowed their seeds in the field of images. The digital image of virtuality is the most beautiful flower that has grown up from the seeds of simulacra.In chapter7, based on the descriptions and ananlysis from chapter 3 to chapter 6 and according to the theory of paradigm of Thomas S. Kuhn, this dissertation summarizes the inner logic of the evolutionof the visual aesthetic paradigmduring the course that the images transfers to simulacra.Chapter 8 concerns the contemporary culture in the view of visual aesthetic. In light of visual productive force and visual literacy, this paper criticizes some typical cultural phenomena and tries to provide some advice to people in the Era of Picture. In the ending part, this dissertation scans the...