Social theorists rightly interest themselves in the relationship between the way things are and the way we see and represent them (in language, images, rituals and so forth). This connection between seeing and saying lies at the heart of Barry Sandywell's ambitious Dictionary of Visual Discourse. Drawing on the rich tradition of social theory of Husserl and Bakhtin and Zizek and others, and associating his lexicon with the hyperreal interconnectedness of writers as various as Lem and Nabokov, Borges and Brillat‐Severin, Sandywell (a reader at the University of York in the UK) devises a dictionary of visual discourse that highlights the very challenges or problematic of using discourse to speak about visual discourse.
It is in other words a journey of deconstruction, as he says himself in the 100‐or‐so page introduction to the dictionary. The “thematic orientation” is to deconstruct visual rhetorics (like those set up by Western rationalistic theory, representational, and phallogocentrism – the distorted male gaze) and probe knowledge and truth and culture for “alternative ways of seeing” and a way of “being in dialogue”. This dialogic and experiential (and phenomenological) understanding of epistemology and visuality and the representation of reality not only rejects the cultural and aesthetic presuppositions of the paradigms it attacks (including the Western theoretical mind‐set) but also invites readers first to consider a more rhizomic (or networked and root‐like) heuristic (and its theoretical perspective) and second to read the dictionary in a way consistent with that “alternative” approach. Readers of writers like Deleuze and Derrida and others will be familiar with this approach, and readers within the field of art theory will have come upon the dialogic (and its role in creating and interpreting artwork) too.
So the paradox or problematic is set out: we have a dictionary that is intended to be used as if the reader is a flâneur/flâneuse engaged with bricolage – a browser (“a person with an interest in the fate of words that have shaped the fabric of reflection and visual culture” – Introduction). “The ideal user of this lexicon would be an intellectual bricoleur”, engaged with a work such as Benjamin's Arcades project (entry of “bricoleur”). The aim is “to initiate a general exploration of the more obvious terms of vision that inform many of the visual references in the arts, social sciences, and philosophy”, picking up on the implicit logic of identity that, for instance, creates patriarchal assumptions in human relationships, personal and in the public sphere. Sandywell suggests that these assumptions, and theoretical models, are instrumentalist (there is much talk of performative rhetoric), begging for deconstruction.
The dictionary takes on the field of the visual (art, film, television, aesthetics, media) in a dialectical way, then. The dialectics emerge in and through frames like West/East (though little is made of the East), male/female, traditionally philosophical (e.g. Platonic) models of truth and reality/postmodern and hyperreal experiential and rhizomic models of truth and reality, and the argument is that those traditional approaches have “occluded visual experience”, creating a need to “recover the sensory matrix of culture”. Things are dialectical, too, because seeing and saying are always in tension, and reality itself is a struggle of opposites (in which creative change and development, Hegel‐like, transformatively emerge). And, above all now, we live in a postmodern culture dominated by images: it is a visual culture, an iconosphere, where seeing (and believing we see, truly) fuses with representation (what is called ocular centrism), where the internet and globalization and our understanding of the reflexive and constructivist character of being and truth prevail. Even the language or discourse we use to explain and explore all this is itself shaped so (the mythos becomes the logos), and for that reason dictionaries like this, based on lexicons like this, need to be constructed.
This is the rationale, then, of the work under review, and, understandably, it has the feel and look of a dictionary but, drilling down, the feel and look of a literary adventure like reading Cervantes, Sterne, Borges, or Calvino. Language has many meanings – it is polysemic – leading to a heteroglossia of fluid terms, tropes, images, metaphors, and looking practices. Wittgenstein's language games are clearly at work. Given the central hermeneutic role of the dialogic and experiential, here, hinging as they do on ideas of reality and identity and the self, it makes sense that many of the main entries in the dictionary (some 500 pages of essay‐style entries, arranged alphabetically, followed at the end by a 100 or so, page general bibliography – most useful for any researcher and librarian) – follow this lead – perspectives, seeing, self, subject, reality, reason, reflexivity, and so forth. Around these hover constellations of other terms – avenues of intellectual and professional inquiry (aesthetics, beauty, camera, the eye, film, modernism, optics, picture, semiotics, television, theatre), philosophical and social theory ideas (certainty, cognition, dialectics, empiricism, ideology, mind‐body, nominalism, postmodernism, reality, reason), a body of entries in “cultural theory” (cultural praxis, gaze and spectacle, progress, sociology of culture, the Western construction of the visual, and many more), and a bevy of oddities (for the bricoleur, like the sorcerer's apprentice, truth's Achilles heel, stupidity, evil demon, impossible objects, and rashomon).
The author states (in the Preview and Methodology section of his introduction) that he is inviting the reader “to explore the codes and grammars that inform perceptual ideologies and image systems (‘videology’ for short)” and this is “a central aim of the following hypertext”. Entries bear out this approach: “discourse” is, of course, symbolic and propositional and the rest, but it also represents the logosphere which deals with connections between seeing and saying, a Heideggerian notion at base, where creative ideas and images come into being (ontopoiesis) and have their usual ontological, epistemological, and methodological problematic (especially ontological metaphors). Entries on metaphor capture much of the current interest in metaphor in social theory work. Even more central to the project, however, are the entries on the self, the reflexive, and perspective. The self is the working model of one's own identity and, philosophically, is understood as subjectivity; social theorists separate out the self from things like fields of belief, discursive practices, and institutional obligations. The entry on reflection identifies awareness and conscience, its criteria role, as part of an inner certainty, and (shifting on to reflexivity) ways in which it is affected (and expresses itself) in and through irony, takes ecological and feminist and narcissistic forms, and pervasively instantiates its own form of logo‐logic.
The dictionary reminds me of Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania in its omnivorous intellectual reach and delight in interconnections. Sandywell sets himself limits – he cut back on the history of sexuality, he says, and on slang, and on architecture and landscaping. Inevitably, there are times when the reader is an expert on an entry topic and where understandable limitations to the author's knowledge emerge, as with some of the material on God, but the overall aim is to deal with visual discourse and culture, and then shape other things around them: so the context is useful. As for likely readership, almost certainly academic and research communities using libraries where visual culture and social theory, and related topics, are formally studied and researched. The long introduction is worth reading for its own sake, even though, for those immersed in the field, it is familiar territory. It is not a book for beginners because of the innate complexity of the ideas (for instance, intentionality, subjectivation, consciousness) and the language in which the entries appear.
Across the piece, the principles of inclusion and the ways used to explain terms all suggest a wish to remain relevant, no small challenge in a field as wide as this. I really do not think the ideal reader of the dictionary would be a bricoleur, intellectual or otherwise: far more likely, a determined and conscientious and well‐focused student or researcher of how postmodern global culture impacts on and is shaped by visual discourse and culture. The book offers such a reader some real treasures, from its core, even though for others, particularly a convergent reader, it may seem wilfully obscurantist. But that is shooting the messenger: the field itself is a maelstrom (quagmire?) of determinedly complex neologisms and deconstructive claims, many arising from epistemological and methodological shifts in social research itself, and traditionalistic rationalistic models, thought to be dead and buried, are more alive (and deserve to be) than people say.
Seeing and saying is a worthy enterprise for any social theorist, and exposure to a work such as this may inspire – rather than deter – others to follow Sloterdijk and Zizek, Orbach and Rojek, and Sandywell himself (whose logo‐logical analyses began in the 1990s with a three‐part work from Routledge), and many others in this fascinating cross‐disciplinary area. A topical footnote on celebrity points out that to be seen is to exist, and another is that of watching oneself being watched: clues, if they are at all needed, that the issues raised by this work translate into, and help us describe and define, much popular human behavior (and that is what good sociologists have been doing for years).
