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The politics of looking - visual cultures in conflict
Academic year 2007 - 2008
The recent controversy over the Mohammed caricatures, which initiated violent street protests in many Islamic countries, seems to reveal a paradigmatic conflict between the Western secular approach to visual consumption and cultures with religious and political iconoclasm. Visual codes are not neutral but rooted in diverging values and cultural norms. Though some scholars tend to view this conflict as an emerging clash of civilizations, it might be more fruitful to depict these phenomena of social protest, religious mass hysteria and collective anti-Western resentments as results of a complex interplay of global media, religious and ethnic codes of perception, and a deep political antagonism between secular and religiously-shaped lifestyles.
Whereas Western cultures are obsessed with pictures as part of their consumer and media spheres, Islamic cultures employ gaze according to strict rules of religion, gender and dignity. Thus, visual practices become a highly-contested terrain, in which both articulate a distinct but different dialectic of pictorial cult and taboos of looking. The technologies of instant communication and the media-driven logic of international politics favor confrontations between the "West" and "Islam". Political conflicts within Islam and between Islamic countries and their Diaspora communities in Europe are staged as theological conflicts, and Western countries are forced to negotiate the "earthly" economic and social issues of their migration policies in terms of religion.
The IFK re-orients its research_focus "Cultures of Looking" in terms of the politics of looking and thus invites analysis of the phenomenon of antagonistic visual cultures, which mirror different social codes of the gaze and different concepts of looking, desire, image prohibition, and shame. This focus includes the analysis of iconophilia, iconophobia, and iconoclasm within the wider context of Western and non-Western cultures and their modes of imagery, and wants to shed light on the interplay of media and the international renaissance of religious beliefs. We want to address the differences between Islamic and non-Islamic regimes of gaze and regulations of image production and consumption, and we intend to highlight different symbolic economies of religious and secular iconography. In terms of the globalization process, the research focus seeks to address visual practices that divide cultures and the transnational mechanism of media with their capacity to produce both - hybrid and delocalized cultures of looking and local resistance to generalized visual codes and modes of media consumption.
For the purposes of this research focus, the politics of looking can be interpreted as a phenomenon that exists within cultural constellations and complex semantic fields, in which symbolic, social, and subjective components come together in ways particular to each historical and local context. Understood in this way, the politics of looking represents neither a random nor arbitrary focus for enquiry. Rather, the phenomenon of looking can be understood as a focal point where various dimensions - aesthetic, social, historical, political, religious etc. - come into view. The complex nature of looking allows for the formulation of interdisciplinary projects pertaining to any number of possible contexts, discourses, media, and textual or visual genres.
The IFK discourages proposals that are either exclusively theoretical or exclusively empirical in character. It supports projects that combine empirical investigation with thoughtful theoretical work. Research proposals that present a clearly formulated problem, demonstrate familiarity with the scholarly field(s), and develop an interdisciplinary methodological framework stand the best chance of approval by the international advisory board.
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