Cultural relativism and the visual turn

Abstract

The recent explosion of interest in visual culture has often been premised on the assumption that distinct scopic regimes or visual practices are relative to the cultures out of which they emerge. Any naturalist hope of locating transcendental visual experience prior to its cultural coding is thus taken to be in vain. This article takes issue with this premise, not by returning to a discredited naturalism, but rather by putting pressure on the culture concept itself. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Bruno Latour, David McDougall and Régis Debray, it argues that visual experience presents a challenge to the belief that it is ‘culture all the way down’. Although it does not claim that arguments for relativism can be entirely refuted, it does conclude that an exploration of visuality shows that grounding them in the alleged incommensurability of cultures is unpersuasive.