Visible Discourses and Invisible Ideologies? The Image as Global Political Theory (original) (raw)

Visual information in the form of images shape almost every event of our phenomenological existence, profoundly affecting the ways we understand and take action in the world around us. Moreover, the reign of the visual is ever-increasing, and it comes as no surprise that the 'pictorial turn' has supplanted the 'linguistic turn' in the study of culture (Mitchell, 1995). On Instagram alone, 40 billion photos have been shared since the application was launched in October 2010 and an average of 95 million photos are uploaded daily (Omnicore Group, 2018). Indeed, visual images, continuously produced in forms and on a scale never experienced before by human beings, have come to dominate our experience of the world. They not only represent and reflect the world in which we live but, more importantly, they contribute to constructing and continuously changing it. As a result, visual images play a strategic role in the symbolic and social construction of people's collective imaginaries and historical consciousness. Images are able to reshape people's mindset, sustain revolutions and set off wars and conflicts, but they also contribute to reconciliation and building peace (Durante, forthcoming 2019). At present, images are generated, spread, and consumed mostly through the massive use of personal electronic devices such as smart-phone cameras and tablets, but also professional cameras, drones, satellites, and surveillance cameras. Images are ubiquitous and are able to convey and represent almost everything. They can be analyzed for marketing, academic research, and scientific purposes, or stored in archives to be further interpreted in security contexts. Visual images in the global era of 'platform capitalism' (Bratton, 2012; Srnicek, 2017) are rapidly shared and consumed mostly in the different (digital) materiality of the social (global) web.