studies? What kind of skills can visual culture studies provide us with in negotiating the digital present?
A: Digital technologies have produced radically new possibilities for the production, circulation, and contextualization of images, along with new platforms for visual culture. Still, as you can guess from my previous answer, I would resist falling for the easy reduction of the present moment to period concepts such as “the digital age,” which is only a little bit better than the “post‐” prefix. Digitization can never be thought of with any precision without registering its inevitable dialectical relationship with the analog. The digital predates the computer by millennia. It has been with us since we learned to count on our fingers—the “digits” at the end of the hand (Fr. doigts < Lat. digitus, ‐i)—and arrived at a number system in base ten, or, even more radically, since the invention of the zero. Before Plato’s legendary god Thoth invents writing, he invents numbers. When Socrates teaches the slave boy to solve the algebraic formula of the Pythagorean theorem, he does so by resorting to the method of assembling tiles to produce a geometrical, graphic, and analog rendering of the theorem. I agree with Brian Massumi’s (2002) claim for the “superiority of the analog” as the master modality, one to which the digital plays the role of useful servant, and I regard the digital–analog binary as an unbreakable conceptual coupling, as in Nelson Goodman’s (1968) theory of notation or in Anthony Wilden’s (1972) structuralist analysis of their pairing. This is in no way to deny the revolutionary impact of the binary computer, only to grasp the way this revolution is played out at the level of new possibilities for the analog.
Q: Thinking of your role as a teacher, what are the most important ideas you want to convey to the next generation of visual culture scholars? What kinds of pedagogical challenges does visual culture studies present as field of study? Have changes in visual culture and developments in the field affected how you teach?
A: As a teacher, I always think of Joseph Conrad’s remark: “my purpose is to make you see.” This means that my goal is to offer students what John Berger called “ways of seeing” through the arts, media, and the swarms of visual and verbal images they encounter—that is, fresh ways of looking at the world. I don’t necessarily want to change the way they see; but I hope to affect the way they think about seeing as a social practice and as a field of ethical demands and political power, as well as about the production of knowledge and illusion. Nick Mirzoeff (2011) is right that “the right to look” is already a form of resistance. Could it also be the right to show, to be seen, to be recognized—or not? Has the right to make oneself invisible completely vanished from the world? Are there any hermits left on the planet, any people who wish not to be seen, who shun society? Is there any right to be unseen? Is that what privacy was all about?
The problem, and the opportunity, with visual culture is to activate the link of optical technologies with the numerous metaphors of the visual, the transparent, the organ of light, color, and form, the figure of geometric reason, of empirical, experiential, publicly verified truths, the sovereign sense, the sense that is vulnerable to illusion and hallucination. What Tom Gunning calls “cultural optics” is the recognition that vision is not just a mechanical, optical process but one of learning, like in learning a language (see Bishop Berkeley’s 1709 An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision), and more: it is a practice of installing cognitive search templates, filters, blinders, and prostheses that produce visual meaning and link it to the other senses, especially hearing and touch. Vision is never exclusively optical; it is also a synechdoche for all the senses—and for understanding as such, if you see what I mean.
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.
(Blake, 566)
“With,” I take it, meant for Blake the uncritical eye, the passive, lazy eye, the mind’s eye that is blind and deaf to the “marks of weakness, marks of woe” he sees and hears on the streets of London. This “corporeal” or “vegetative eye” is not to be questioned, but to serve as the window for a visionary, prophetic intelligence that knows what to look for:
When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro it & not with it. (Blake 1982, 566)
Of course we are not all visionaries like William Blake; but we all know that the hungry eye is a metaphor for the mind that seeks to see the truth and to show it to others. That is why, right alongside visual culture as a visionary, imaginative discipline or “de‐disciplining” of the eye, I teach the dazzling new optical architectures provided by researchers like Eyal Weizman, whose team at Forensic Architecture employs multilayered computer graphics to produce a counterforensics that exposes official lies and distortions of human tragedy. When Weizman “looks” at the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, what he sees and shows to the public is a layered imagery of wave and wind currents, legal jurisdictions, shipping lanes, routes of refugee crossings, and sea‐level cell‐phone videos of shipwrecks, sometimes accompanied by sound. If Blake (1982, 566) sees and hears “how the hapless soldiers sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls,” Weizman gives us eyes and ears to witness contemporary humanitarian disasters in a way that no corporeal eye could comprehend (https://www.forensic‐architecture.org). He practices visual culture as a technology of evidence production.
Seeing “through” the eye, then, has become my pedagogical and research method for the critical practice of visual culture studies. I mean seeing through in a double sense: that of seeing past or beyond what Guy Debord called the “spectacle” of illusions generated by capital, and that of seeing by means of a critique of the frameworks and templates that impose themselves on our perceptions. My most recent projects have involved questions of race and mental illness, so my DuBois lectures at Harvard in 2010 were entitled “Seeing through Race” rather than simply “Seeing Race.” And my current work is on a book entitled Seeing through Madness, which aims both to see beyond the medical framework and to deploy the concept of madness as a critical optic for understanding forms of collective folly and irrationality.
My next project will be a pedagogical and exhibition strategy entitled “Metapictures,” an outgrowth of an essay that I wrote back in the nineties. The exhibition has already taken place, at the Overseas Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) in Beijing, where we assembled over two hundred images that reflect on the nature of the image in eleven thematic “clouds”: pictures about picturing, about vision, about the multistability of images, about the relation of images to language, about their place in history as what Benjamin called “dialectical images,” and about their tendency to come alive in the phenomenon I call the “biopicture.” This exhibition employed four different display strategies, inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and by André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire: the same images were hung from the ceiling, strewn on the floor, mounted on the wall, and presented in an interactive format on a screen.
Q: Do you think there is a tension between the current institutionalization of the field of visual culture studies and the renegade, interdisciplinary, and chaotic energies that were so central to its foundation? Can or should visual culture studies still serve as a platform for critiquing traditional disciplinary institutions in the current academic climate? Given the influence visual culture studies has had on curatorial practices, museums, and other art institutions, in what ways can visual culture studies still serve as a platform for critique in these spaces?
A: I am sure there is a tension of the sort you describe,
