W. J.T. Mitchell in his Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture in the Journal of Visual Culture, August, 2002 says that visual studies emerged from the critique of the natural attitude, namely, that vision and visual images, things that are apparently automatic, transparent, and natural, are actually symbolic constructions,like a language to be learned, a system of codes that interposes an ideological veil. He adds that it is not just that we see the way we do because we are social animals, but also that our social arrangements take the forms they do because we are seeing animals.

Mitchell says that the disciplinary anxiety provoked by visual studies is a classic instance of what Jacques Derrida called the ‘dangerous supplement’:

Visual studies stands in an ambiguous relation to art history and aesthetics. On the one hand, it functions as an internal complement to these fields, a way of filling in a gap. If art history is about visual images, and aesthetics about the senses, what could be more natural than a subdiscipline that would focus of visuality as such, linking aesthetics and art history around the problems of light, optics, visual apparatuses and experience, the eye as a perceptual organ, the scopic drive, etc.? But this complementary function of visual studies threatens to become supplementary as well: first, in that it indicates an incompleteness in the internal coherence of aesthetics and art history, as if these disciplines had somehow failed to pay attention to what was most central in their own domains; and second, in that it opens both disciplines to outside issues that threaten their boundaries. Visual studies threatens to make art history and aesthetics into subdisciplines within some expanded field of inquiry whose boundaries are anything but clear.

I accept the idea of the field of visual culture in which art history, media studies and aesthetics are subdisciplines and acknowledge that this creates defensive postures and territorial anxieties in academic institutions. Maybe, as Mitchell suggests visual studies belongs in the first year in university, in the introduction to graduate studies in the humanities, and in the graduate workshop or seminar.

Mitchell usefully outlines ten myths about how visual culture is understood--these are a whole set of related assumptions and commonplaces that have become the common currency of both those who defend and attack visual studies as a dangerous supplement to art history and aesthetics.

1. Visual culture entails the liquidation of art as we have known it.
2. Visual culture accepts without question the view that art is to be defined by its working exclusively through the optical faculties.
3. Visual culture transforms the history of art into a history of images.
4. Visual culture implies that the difference between a literary text and a painting is a non-problem. Words and images dissolve into undifferentiated representation.
5. Visual culture implies a predilection for the disembodied, dematerialized image.
6. We live in a predominantly visual era. Modernity entails the hegemony of vision and visual media.
7. There is a coherent class of things called visual media.
8. Visual culture is fundamentally about the social construction of the visual field. What we see, and the manner in which we come to see it, is not simply part of a natural ability.
9. Visual culture entails an anthropological, and therefore unhistorical, approach to vision.
10. Visual culture consists of scopic regimes and mystifying images to be overthrown by political critique.

He then goes through and criticizes these assumptions. I will refer to the second of these to indicate how Mitchell approaches these myths. He says that this myth refers to the pictorial turn that acknowledge the perception of a turn to the visual or to the image as a commonplace, a thing that is said casually and unreflectively about our time. The pictorial or visual turn, then, is not unique to our time. It is a repeated narrative figure that takes on a very specific form in our time, but which seems to be available in its schematic form in an innumerable variety of circumstances. He adds:

The mistake is to construct a grand binary model of history centered on just one of these turning points, and to declare a single great divide between the age of literacy (for instance) and the age of visuality. These kinds of narratives are beguiling, handy for the purposes of presentist polemics, and useless for the purposes of genuine historical criticism.

It looks at the strange things we do while looking, gazing, showing and showing off such as hiding, dissembling, and refusing to look. In particular, it helps us to see that even something as broad as the image does not exhaust the field of visuality; that visual studies is not the same thing as image studies, and that the study of the visual image is just one component of the larger field. Visual studies is not merely a dangerous
supplement to the traditional vision-oriented disciplines, but an interdiscipline that draws on their resources and those of other disciplines to construct a new and distinctive object of research. Visual culture is, then, a specific domain of research, one whose fundamental principles and problems are being articulated freshly in our time.