시각의 헤게모니 속에서

Within the Hegemony of Vision

This article addresses the dimensions of ‘ocularcentrism’, the hegemony of vision. First, it argues that visual images are the dominant components of our everyday environment. No matter how vivid and concrete, images fall into the danger of ex-realization(Ent-Realisierung) of the human life, where they eventually turned out to be dominant. Secondly, it proposed that the hegemony of vision appears as the domination of epistemological position to show that the world can be understood perfectly and clearly as if it were seen at a close distance under a bright light. This kind of objectivistic epistemology coincide with the modern period that human being as ‘Being-in-the World’ began to be denied and that the world became the subject to be dominated and controlled. Finally, this paper shows that the hegemony of vision in modern life represents that vision enjoys more its privilege in the perceptual relationship of people. That is to say that one generally values more the others’ appearances than their words. Asymmetrical power relations among people are vivid when one treats the other as an object of visual supervision or a spectacle. The attitude to recognize and accept this problem naturally also clarifies them. Training the ascetic attitude to visual images and emphasizing auditory senses instead of vision cannot be the ideal solution to liberate vision. At the present moment, all in all, it is necessary to examine the social mechanism producing images for pleasure and to question how the other human virtues are alienated. In this perspective, non-ocularcentrist art should work.