A Genealogical Study Of Western Visual Modernity Theory In The 20th Century

In the latter half of the twentieth century,as a part of Western modernity enlightenment,whether does visual study provides a standard for value judgment or not has been fully explained.In the 1990s,with the appearance of visual culture reading materials and its research methods,the construction work of visual culture became the focus of the study.Under this trend of thoughts,visual culture is not only regarded as an interdisciplinary research method,more importantly,but it also regains its unique independence and autonomous identity.However,the existing theory studies of visual culture have not constructed a universally applicable theory system,and they are isolated within their own areas of visual studies,only opening the scope of culture study forcibly,or building up little connection with professional complexes of interdisciplinary knowledge.This article intends to provide a systematic cognition perspective for the theory construction of visual culture by studying the pedigree of Western visual modernity theories,which will guide the value judgment of artistic and cultural phenomena in the context of globalization.In the first part of this article,by interpreting Jay's research method of the visual regime,it can be found that there is a two-sides narrative about visual metaphors behind the Western philosophy discourses,and the author has successfully included visual culture study into the tradition of Western modernity philosophy discourses.The second part of the article analyzes the pictorial turn of Michel and criticizes that this theory is a kind of pictorial science of fake life.The third part analyzes the archaeology of visual technologies of Clary,pointing out that Clary has overemphasized the manipulation of capitalism to the physical attention of the observers,but has ignored Benjamin's enlightenment route of dialectical images in visual modernity.The fourth part analyzes the landscape society of Debord,pointing out his negative power as a landscape,which provides an explanatory path for visual culture theories;while the general urbanization plan of Debord proposed in the context of landscape society has also turned the research direction to the theory of artistic anthropology as visual ethnography.While putting the modernity plans of four visual culture theories together and making criticisms,this article introduces the concept of Debord's "landscape society" in particular.This is a scholar of Marxist alienation theories that is gradually being forgotten by visual culture researchers,the theory of whom is now reintroduced into the system of the feasibility schemes of Western visual modernity.And the attention of visual modernity is turned to the critique of capitalist ideology.