Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary
This book on visualization, media, and culture though published in 1995 maintains a strong presence in a field where obsolescence of content and methodology is swift and brutal. Professor Ron Burnett was formerly Director of the Graduate Program in Communications, McGill University, and is now President of Vancouver's Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Though attention is given in this book to Canadian individuals like Michael Snow and institutions such as the NFBC, the Canadian dimensions to this text are located much more in the perspectives offered to the problems under examination than in the media practices themselves. In the Canadian context, an organic link exists between communications and media studies and Canadian intellectual traditions. From Innis and McLuhan to Dallas Smythe and a host of contemporary writers and thinkers, Canadians have been prominent in the relatively recent dialogues formative of the debates in this field.
Burnett's book, in this regard, is a substantive and critical intervention. It builds an argument on the strength of a rigourous treatment of visualization, a manner of questioning the boundaries between seeing and imaging, between those practices which place the eye at the center of a mass-mediated social subject. Burnett's argument is woven like a tapestry rather than built Kuleshovian style "brick by brick." "Clint Eastwood's Magnum" and "The Death of Kurt Cobain" are offered as slivers of reflections which parallel and cross other threads of analytical work including commentary on a number of films from Fassbinder to Woody Allen.
This is not a critical media text in which the reader can retreat into comfortable binarisms of theory and practice or subject and object. Media practices are placed in the context of specific arguments (e.g., the political effectivity of video activism or the communalizing efforts of visual media) and here, in the cross-fertilization of unlikely bedfellows, insights are formulated in the most original of meetings: art video and political video; Sadie Benning and Jean Baudrillard; Aboriginal media and Seinfeld.
Without a doubt this book is playing the role of a transition text in the field of media and cultural studies--occupying the dimensions of the spectrum which span mass media and new media. Finding new media aesthetics in the post-mass media of the 1990s, Burnett is keen to push the limits of media and cultural theory to permit the full range of media its varied and contradictory impacts. Further analysis of a simultaneous yet highly contradictory set of "other" media--media of the Other and by the Other--finds the postmodern and the postcolonial as fading yet grasping intellectual turns unable to reconcile the traditional and spiritual elements of modernity with the pressures they exert on community and social life. Rather than map this contradiction, Burnett has traversed its territory finding the extraterritoriality of the media in the evacuated space of national and cultural formations. In stressing the reading, seeing, and making of media, Burnett is really setting up a series of conversations about media as a form of thought in which the dialectic of seeing and thinking becomes the language through which media speaks its subjects . . . and through which its subjects reflect on the practices which extend their influence socially and politically.
Those seeking a reconstruction of the media imperialism thesis in a conventional politics of the mass media will be disappointed. This is an anti-essentialist text about media effect and affect--indeed the discursive strategy of the book is anti-essentialist--resisting conventional authenticity accounts of indigenous media and the concomitant imperializing character of Western media. This is also a limitation of the book which, however powerfully it renders the victim-of-cultural-exploitation thesis the impotence it deserves, needs to restore constructions of mass media which have socio-political significance which the cultural imperialism thesis has neutralized. Nor, as Burnett argues, is there great advantage in adopting the "media consumer as hero" thesis in which so-called resistance to media is decontextualized and depoliticized. It would seem that globalization (a word significant by its absence in this book) of media which may be the de facto currency of post-inflationary capitalism now suggests a new level of social leverage of mass media. The very issues so carefully dissected in this book surrounding local and community media and the politics of representation critically opens a very specific path for the examination of the complexities of globalizing media and its manner of marking yet another stage in the late modernism of the twentieth century. In this regard Burnett has provided an extended bracket around the moment of rupture in the mass media of modernity and demanded an uncompromising complexity in the formulations of media and cultural theory.