Visual Literacy and Social Imaginaries Hans Alma Abstract The central question in this article is how visual literacy relates to capacities people need to participate in 'modern social imaginaries'. According to James Elkins an important field visual literacy addresses is that of politics, social construction and identity. Elkins assumes that our sense of self, both individually and collectively, is made and remade in and through the visual, and he stresses that people need visual literacy to think and act responsibly in contemporary late capitalist culture. This view makes visual literacy of crucial importance in thinking about late modern social imaginaries. To elaborate this line of thought, I focus on the work of three important thinkers: Charles Taylor's view on social imaginaries, John Dewey's view on (moral) imagination and Arjun Appadurai's view on the imagination as a social practice. I will shortly discuss these views before relating them to visual literacy in the face of global challenges. It will be argued that Taylor leaves little room for critical awareness of social imaginaries, whereas Dewey points to the possibility of appraisal and change through the imagination. To evaluate the capacities people need to participate in modern social imaginaries, it is fruitful to think of the imagination in terms of a space of contestation, strongly influenced by 'mediascapes' (Appadurai). The impact of modern media on our culture is evaluated in both positive and negative ways. What seems to be needed to participate in modern social imaginaries is visual literacy, seen as the capacity to navigate and negotiate a social sphere or even arena where images have their hold on us both on conscious and unconscious levels. Relating visual literacy to the field of social imaginaries gives it a critical role in being able to participate responsibly in the face of global challenges. Key Words: Image, imagination, social imaginaries, visual literacy, social construction, globalization. ***** 1. Introduction In cultural studies, the concept 'imaginaries' has become popular. It is used in several contexts: social imaginaries, technoscientific imaginaries, environmental imaginaries etc. These uses may be traced back to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis 1, Benedict Anderson 2 and Charles Taylor3. I'll examine how

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__________________________________________________________________ imaginaries and the imagination they suppose are related to images. My central question will be how visual literacy relates to capacities people need to participate in 'modern social imaginaries'. According to James Elkins4 visual literacy is much broader than the domains of arts and aesthetics. An important field it addresses is that of politics, social construction and identity. Images shape perceptions of the self, and they reflect and project collective and national ideologies. Elkins assumes that our sense of self, both individually and collectively, is made and remade in and through the visual, and he stresses that people need visual literacy to think and act responsibly in contemporary late capitalist culture. This view makes visual literacy of crucial importance in thinking about late modern social imaginaries. To elaborate this line of thought, I focus on the work of three important thinkers: Charles Taylor's view on social imaginaries, John Dewey's view on (moral) imagination and Arjun Appadurai's view on the imagination as a social practice. I will shortly discuss these views before relating them to visual literacy in the face of global challenges. 2. Social Imaginaries and Moral Imagination Charles Taylor defines a social imaginary as "the way our contemporaries imagine the societies they inhabit and sustain".5 Social imaginary is about "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations".6 How ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, is often not expressed in theoretical terms. It is carried in images, stories, and legends. It is shared by large groups of people or even the whole society. This common understanding makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. "It is in fact that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have. It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines, because of its very unlimited and indefinite nature."7 For Taylor, the notion of social imaginary is closely related to the notion of moral order. Moral order is more encompassing than a definition of what is right, it also defines the context in which it makes sense to strive for and hope to (partially) realize the right. To elaborate on this connection between social imaginary and moral order, it is fruitful to study the view on moral imagination John Dewey provides. In his book John Dewey and moral imagination, Steven Fesmire distinguishes two types of imagination that recur as themes in Dewey's writings. 8 The first type is 'empathetic projection' or 'taking the attitudes of others'. The second type, central to Dewey, is 'creatively tapping a situation's possibilities'. "Imagination is the capacity to concretely perceive what is before us in light of what could be."9 It functions as a vicarious, anticipatory way of acting, searching

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__________________________________________________________________ for ways to settle difficulties and ambiguities. We experiment with alternatives and picture ourselves taking part in them. Both aspects of imagination, empathy and creative tapping of possibilities, operate simultaneously. According to Dewey, imagination intervenes deeply in moral life and makes it possible to reflect critically on the expressions of our social imaginaries, even though they are deeply rooted in our cognitive unconscious. 3. Social Imaginaries and Moral Imagination in a Globalized World Taylor studies how modern social imaginaries come into being. In his analysis, people seem to be rather passive recipients of their imaginaries: they develop them through their practices, but they don't seem to be critically aware of them, let alone be able to influence them. Dewey leaves room for appraisal and change, to be stimulated by the confrontation with alternative metaphors for moral conduct. This raises the important question how the moral imagination develops in a globalized world that confronts people with social imaginaries totally different from their own. This question is addressed by the social theorist Arjun Appadurai, who holds that the imagination is the key component of the new global order. Contemporary world is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life, strongly reinforced by the rise of electronic media that offer new resources for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds. Appadurai argues that electronic media are resources "for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons."10 Self-imagining becomes an everyday social project. In his book Modernity at large Appadurai shows "that the work of the imagination (..) is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern."11 This crucial insight underlines the relevance of social imaginaries and moral imagination for understanding the cultural dynamics in the context of globalization. According to Appadurai, they have become collective, social facts: they transcend individual volition, are weighted with the force of social morality, and must be seen as objective social realities. Furthermore, in contemporary societies we live with a plurality of imagined worlds. The work of the imagination is transformed through the everyday cultural practice of contemporary people. Appadurai speaks of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes. Imagination is a property of collectives, in the same sense as Taylor's social imaginaries. Again, the mass media play an important role in this regard: they make it possible that a group begins to imagine and feel things together. This can apply to groups who have never been in face-toface contact, and who can move from shared imagination to collective action. Appadurai uses the term 'mediascapes' for a dimension of global cultural flows that is a building block for what he calls 'imagined worlds': "the multiple worlds

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__________________________________________________________________ that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe."12 Imagined worlds are lived in by many persons on the globe thanks to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information, and to the images of the world created by the diverse media. This is what Appadurai means with mediascapes. They provide large and complex repertoires of images and narratives to viewers throughout the world. They offer elements (images, characters, plots) that people can use to form scripts of their own imagined lives: the metaphors by which people live. "Even the meanest and most hopeless of lives, the most brutal and dehumanizing of circumstances, the harshest of lived inequalities are now open to the play of the imagination."13 This need not be a simple matter of escape, for it is possible that a new imagined community is formed, generating new kinds of collective expression. 4. Visual Dimensions of Globalization One of the strengths of electronic media in appealing to people throughout the world is that they are not necessarily dependent on language. They address people through images and sounds. In their theories with regard to social imaginaries, moral imagination and imagined worlds Taylor, Dewey and Appadurai don't elaborate on the role of music or other sounds, but they do explicitly refer to the importance of images. For a better understanding of the role of images in the social processes in a globalized world, I turn to the field of visual culture. Patrizia Faccioli raises the question how the global scenario enters individual's social practices, imagination and identity. She points to the fact that through the electronic media and migration, "our world is full of visual signs that make us experience the global scenario as an everyday given."14 She emphasizes the visual dimensions of globalization, that include not only images in the media, but the entire 'seen' reality surrounding us, for example the grocery selling exotic fruits. People are surrounded by visual data that partly refer to a local dimension, partly to a global cultural flow, and that most often present themselves in a 'glocal' hybrid form. To understand the impact of the visual dimensions of globalization on the individual, we need to know how images work with regard to the clarification of norms and values, the regulation of interactions, the definition of differences and belonging and the creation of imagination - in short, how images are related to the building of social imaginaries. To answer this question, we have to take into account that visual data are liable to very different interpretations that strongly depend on the cultural frame used by the viewer. Furthermore, "vision always occurs in particular social contexts which mediate its impact: the induced type of vision enters a body of different social practices that change its meaning and uses."15 Social practices may change according to the specific places in which vision occurs, affecting the way images are seen as they appear in different places.

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__________________________________________________________________ Faccioli stresses that the interpretation of visual data is tied to social practices and identities. A similar view can be found in Mitchell's discussion on visual culture.16 Yet, he argues that the object of visual culture cannot only be seen as the social construction of the visual field. The reversal need also be explored: the visual construction of the social field. "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."17 He calls the idea of the pictorial turn, according to which the hegemony of the visible is a product of new media technologies, a fallacy. The visible is a fundamental component of human cultures as such, but the notion of vision as hegemonic is not helpful. The specific relations of vision to the other senses, especially hearing and touch, as they manifest themselves within particular cultural practices, need to be described. He pleads for an approach that treats visual culture and visual images "as go-betweens in social transactions, as a repertoire of screen images or templates that structure our encounters with other human beings."18 According to Mitchell, vision itself is a product of experience and acculturation; our pictorial representations are of a world already clothed in our systems of representation. Just as visual images structure our social encounters, they themselves are the product of what Taylor would call social imaginaries. If images and imaginaries are so intertwined, what can visual studies learn us about the imaginative process in which imaginaries come into being, and the critical appraisal and change Dewey holds possible? In his introduction to the book Visual Literacy James Elkins raises the question whether or not a university education can be based on images. We should consider the possibility that literacy can be achieved through images as well as texts and numbers. He stresses the need of a university-wide conversation "on what might comprise an adequate visual introduction to the most pressing themes of contemporary culture." 19 I read this plead as an expression of the idea that the critical appraisal of our social imaginaries would benefit from a more deliberate use of images in education. This is closely related to his view on visual literacy as addressing the fields of politics, social construction and identity. "The underlying assumption might be something like this: our sense of self, both individually and collectively, is made and remade in and through the visual, and therefore it is fundamentally important to learn to understand images as social constructions rather than reflections of reality, instances of aesthetic pleasure, or marketing tools. Visual studies and media studies, in this view, can help to educate people to think and act responsibly in contemporary late capitalist culture."20 5. Visual Literacy and the Participation in Modern Social Imaginaries We need not conceive of the visual as hegemonic to understand that modern culture, with its strong advance of audiovisual and digital media, challenges the human psyche. Taylor characterizes the modern social imaginary in terms of the

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__________________________________________________________________ basic idea that human beings are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit. He discusses the positive and negative consequences of this dominant social imaginary that leaves little room for other imagined worlds, and the contradictions that ensue from it. The modern social imaginary gains hold of human beings through social practices they participate in. An important practice supporting the modern imaginary is the storage and exchange of information. Modern media strongly influence, stimulate and change this practice. They enable many people to participate in it, thus strengthening the modern ideal of equality. Being able to participate in virtual worlds where people can design their own characters, corresponds seamlessly with the modern idea of free individuals that are free from conventional, predetermined hierarchical orders. However, the impact of modern media on our culture is evaluated in different ways. According to Ann Marie Seward Barry visual communication dominates every area of life in the United States. She evaluates this negatively. Instead of acting as reflective, visually aware critics, people just watch and instantly belief. She strongly urges for more sensitivity to how images shape the fabric of our lives, and stresses the need to educate people to the implications of an image-driven society. She gives the following definition of visual intelligence: "Visual intelligence (..) may be described as a quality of mind developed to the point of critical perceptual awareness in visual communication."21 "More than a single attribute, visual intelligence is a way of looking at the world, a critical visual awareness that can be developed and exercised in order to think more creatively and to better comprehend the pattern of forces that govern our existence."22 Defined in this way, visual intelligence is of crucial importance in giving a critical dimension to living our social imaginaries. Just as Fesmire stresses the role of the cognitive unconscious in the moral imagination, Barry emphasizes that images have impact on a level below conscious awareness. However, critical appraisal is possible. Through exercising our critical function we detect how we can be moved by images that are deliberately manipulated for commercial, social, or political purposes. Digital technology gives ample opportunity for manipulation to produce specific effects - either of an aesthetic or of a commercial character. A more positive motivation for the promotion of visual literacy is to be found with Thomas Mitchell and James Elkins. As a teacher, Mitchell attempts to awaken students to the 'wonders of visuality'. "My aim in this course has been to overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn it into a problem for analysis, a mystery to be unraveled."23 For Elkins as well, visual literacy can be attained through education that "encourages students to attend to the world around them, to wonder in its details and in its patterns. (....) the world would be a richer place, thought not literally so, if more people were educated to wonder in it."24

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__________________________________________________________________ Positive and negative evaluations seem to be balanced in the view of Peter Dallow, who proposes to "think of the visual as being like an interface or cultural zone of social exchange, a space where the conventions in the construction of visual imagery and the prevailing or imminent social and cultural practices meet: a social sphere or arena where contemporary views of reality are displayed. Hence, a notion of visual literacy would be the capacity to negotiate or 'navigate' this visual cultural zone."25 From this perspective, both the imagination and the visual are spaces of contestation, in which people are both influenced by and active participants in the construction of imagined worlds. 6. Conclusion As we have seen, Taylor leaves little room for critical awareness of social imaginaries, whereas Dewey points to the possibility of appraisal and change through the imagination. To evaluate the capacities people need to participate in modern social imaginaries, it is fruitful to think of the imagination in terms of a space of contestation, strongly influenced by 'mediascapes' (Appadurai). The impact of modern media on our culture is evaluated in both positive and negative ways. What seems to be needed to participate in modern social imaginaries is visual literacy, seen as the capacity to navigate and negotiate a social sphere or even arena where images have their hold on us both on conscious and unconscious levels. Relating visual literacy to the field of social imaginaries gives it a critical role in being able to participate responsibly in the face of global challenges.

Notes

1

Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London/New York: Verso, 1983). 3 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 4 James Elkins, 'Introduction: The Concept of Visual Literacy, and its limitations' in Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1-9. 5 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 6. 6 Ibid., 23. 7 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 173. 8 Steven Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). 9 Ibid., 65. 10 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Ibid., 33. 13 Ibid., 54. 14 Patrizia Faccioli, 'Globalization as a Seen Phenomenon' in Framing Globalization: Visual Perspectives, eds. Patrizia Faccioli and Jacqueline A. Gibbons (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 5. 15 Ibid., 8. 16 W.J. Thomas Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture', Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 165-181. 17 Ibid., 171. 18 Ibid., 175. 19 Elkins, 'Introduction', 3/4. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 Ann Mary Seward Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press), 6. 22 Ibid., 8. 23 Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing', 166. 24 Jon Simons, 'From Visual Literacy to Image Competence' in Visual literacy , ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 87. 25 Peter Dallow, 'The Visual Complex: Mapping some Interdisciplinary Dimensions of Visual Literacy' in Visual literacy, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 98. 2

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London/New York: Verso, 1983. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Barry, Ann Mary Seward. Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Dallow, Peter. 'The Visual Complex: Mapping some Interdisciplinary Dimensions of Visual Literacy'. In Visual literacy, edited by James Elkins, 91-103. New York: Routledge, 2008. Elkins, James. 'Introduction: The Concept of Visual Literacy, and its limitations'. In Visual Literacy, edited by James Elkins, 1-9. New York: Routledge, 2008. Faccioli, Patrizia . 'Globalization as a Seen Phenomenon'. In Framing Globalization: Visual Perspectives, edited by Patrizia Faccioli and Jacqueline A. Gibbons, 1-12. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Fesmire, Steven. John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. 'Showing Seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture'. Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 165-181. Simons, Jon. 'From Visual Literacy to Image Competence'. In Visual literacy, edited by James Elkins, 77-90. New York: Routledge, 2008. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. –––, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Hans Alma is Professor of Cultural Dynamics in Psychological Perspective at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Her research interest has always been related to the human search for meaning in life. Currently her research concentrates on the role of the imagination and the arts in personal and social transformation.