The visual turn in the social sciences

The visual turn in the social sciences – both in theory and research – is a fairly recent phenomenon. The visual turn gained quite some momentum during the 1990s and today, well into the twenty-first century, it has become part of the mainstream in theoretical exploration and empirical research (for an overview of the theoretical literature on the visual, and the interest in images in particular, see the anthology in Manghani et al., 2006). It could of course be argued that the history of the interest in the visual in the social sciences goes further back in time. Let’s take criminology, for example. Was it not the case that nineteenth-century researchers such as Cesare Lombroso were already very much interested in images (in Lombroso’s case: photo- graphs of convicted offenders from whose facial and cranial characteristics he tried to infer the presence, or absence, of ‘atavistic’ criminality)? This is true (see on this Rafter, 1997 and 2014), but Lombroso’s basic assumption was that ultimate objective truth could be read from the surface of images and bodies. The visual turn that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, as we shall see, started from radically opposed premises.

It could also be argued that already during the 1970s we had theorists and scholars who were preoccupied with the visual, or with vision. Michel Foucault’s well-known work (1977) on Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century idea of the Panopticon prison- house, and its broader social and governmental implications, focused a lot on the importance of vision, or the gaze, in problems and practices of social control (see again Rafter, 2014). The idea here was that the gaze of the controllers has an impact on the behaviour of those that are thus controlled, and vice versa. Again, this is true. But authors such as Michel Foucault, or his followers (e. g. Edward Said, 1978, who worked on how the West has historically tended to look upon the Orient), did not focus on images as such. They were much more interested in what they called ‘dis- course’, or ‘discourses’, i. e. collections of ways of thinking and speaking about the world that shape and somehow pre-structure the ways that those who share them indeed think and speak about the world. This is an important point though. If it is indeed the case that we, as criminological researchers, or just as individuals, tend to think and speak about the world in ways that are somehow, at least to some extent, pre-structured by the ‘discourses’ which, in the course of our life, we have come across, and that surround us, and that we may have adopted without really realizing it, then the likelihood of there being an ultimate, objective truth ‘out there’ for us to access, becomes very remote indeed. It is this insight (or better: awareness) that prompted a considerable number of social scientists, including criminologists, to change tack and leave their longstanding fixation on language behind.

Language comes in different forms. You have everyday colloquial speech, but there is also scientific, academic or philosophical language which is highly abstract and conceptual. Concepts are language-based instruments that help scientists and researchers to think about the world, or about particular topics in that world (say,

‘crime’, or ’punishment’, ‘justice’ and ‘order’). No amount of language though is able to really ‘get to grips’ with the world. Depending on where we are standing, and where we are thinking and speaking from, or to rephrase this, depending on our ‘perspective’, or our ‘discursive’ positioning, we will think and say this or that about the world, using this or that concept. But the world itself will always elude our lan- guage. However many conceptual instruments, and however much language we generate in an attempt to reach the real, objective essence of the world (or the prob- lem under consideration therein), the world itself will remain out of our linguistic grasp. Language cannot ‘grasp’, although it can have an impact on the world: if I tell you, out of the blue, that I think you are untrustworthy, a ‘criminal’ even, then this will have an impact on you and on our relationship.

But here we are already entering the realm of ‘ experience ’. If language is too weak an instrument for ‘grasping’ the world, and life in it, then perhaps ‘experience’ is more useful. A focus on ‘experience’ in social sciences research is as such not new. You know that much ethnographic research is very much about gathering insights in ‘experience’ and, indeed, about ‘experiencing’ itself. In criminology, this has been the case since the days of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology in the 1920s and 1930s. During the visual turn of the final decades of the twentieth century though, the focus came to rest on explorations of sensory experience, visual experience in particular, and the role and importance of images in how people, in different cultural contexts, make sense (read again: make sense) of their world and their life experi- ences (see e. g. the collection in Hayward and Presdee, 2010). In the quotation in Box 19. 1, one of the editors of Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image (2010) points to the importance of research that is focused on studying images.

But more is to be said here. In the dying decades of the twentieth century, life had changed considerably, particularly in Western democracies. In an extremely intensive consumer culture, or a ‘society of the spectacle’, as French cultural theorist Guy

Debord (1967) once called it, there are of course a lot more images (‘spectacles’) around. But the changes referred to above are more complicated than that. For a variety of reasons, life became a lot less structured and ordered than it used to be. Just think of the collapse of what we used to call ‘the welfare state’, with its pre- structured and institutionalized life trajectories and provisions. Life today, in this age of what sociologists call de-institutionalization, has become a lot more uncertain and insecure, unhinged even, some might say. Individual life trajectories have become highly dependent on chance and opportunity. This process has come with consider- able levels of anxiety. In a world where we are now forced to forge our own path in life, many of us have become quite wary, obsessed with ‘risk’ and its ‘control’, and highly emotional. The institutions that used to keep high levels of emotionality in check are no longer there. Emotionality now runs almost unhindered through the veins of our lives. This, in turn, has added to a sharpening interest, in social science research, in the emotional dimension of life experiences, and in related themes such as bodily and sensory experience, including visual experience. Sensory, and therefore also visual experience, is imbued with ‘feeling’, and with emotion. It is this feeling and this emotion that researchers of the visual and the image often explore in an attempt to ‘get to grips’ with life and life experiences.