assaultive—theoretical positions in order to leave room for appreciation, to seek out and court surprise.
Yet something is clearly left over, remaining unmanageable as epistemological privilege brushes against, but does not coincide with, what we might still call “the burden of representation.” In identity, what Rodowick sees as “epistemological” or ideological privilege can look that way only if one believes that I possess or inhabit identity more than it possesses or inhabits me. If I cannot own it (and I cannot), then I must remain mindful of the “burdens” that come with the representations I nonetheless struggle to claim.
As I approached this essay’s conclusion, I came across a searing account of our current state “not of post‐racialism, but of unabashed racialism”: “Injustice on Repeat,” in a Sunday book review section of the New York Times (Alexander 2020). Michelle Alexander, who is a civil rights lawyer, a legal scholar, and the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, asserts there: “It has been an astonishing decade. Everything has changed and nothing has changed.” “White people are generally allowed to have problems,” she writes. “But people of color … are regularly viewed and treated as the problem” (6, emphasis mine). “White nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation’s problems would be solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least better controlled,” Alexander writes. “In short,” she asserts, “mass incarceration and mass deportation have less to do with crime and immigration than the ways we’ve chosen to respond to those issues when black and brown people are framed as the problem” (6–7). Identity frames us: we may need to foreground this framing in visual culture and visual studies alike, as the being–having dichotomy forces us back to embodiment.
Perhaps we can find some dynamism in this direction if we consider a turn to a symptomatic reading of the field itself. Exploring the problem of the very concept of “visual culture” in “There Are No Visual Media,” W. J. T. Mitchell (2013, 12) confronts the phrase “visual media,” indicating that “it gives the illusion of [picking out] a class of things about as coherent as ‘things you can put in the oven,’ … and thus, it tells us ‘next to nothing about’ its objects.” Preferring the term “visual culture” as “the field of study that refuses to take vision for granted, that insists on problematizing the visual process as such,” Mitchell insists that this “is not merely the hitching of an unexamined concept of ‘the visual’ onto an only slightly more reflective notion of culture—i.e. visual culture as the ‘spectacle’ wing of cultural studies” (12).
As he elaborates upon these problems of spectacle in “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” which is the last chapter of What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell asks us to see the enmeshing of social and visual and insists that we reframe our questions—along with our anxieties—just as this chapter’s ambition to “show seeing” reframes seeing itself. He argues for framing our objects in “a more nuanced and balanced approach located in the equivocation between the visual image as instrument and agency: the image as a tool for manipulation on the one hand, and as an apparently autonomous source of its own purposes and meanings on the other” (Mitchell 2005, 350). “This approach,” he suggests, “would treat visual culture and visual images as ‘go‐betweens’ in social transactions.” “As go‐betweens or ‘subaltern’ entities,” he proposes, “these images are the filters through which we recognize and of course misrecognize other people … And this means that ‘the social construction of the visual field has to be continuously replayed as the ‘visual construction of the social field,’ an invisible screen or latticework of apparently unmediated figures that makes the effects of mediated images possible” (351). He is expressing a plausible hope for reframing and re‐visioning our objects as dynamic brushes between force fields through which the visual and the social are reciprocally shaping, in ways that probably never stabilize.
These are the encounters that Darby English targets in his book How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, which is distinguished by the absence of any reassuring subtitle to qualify, specify, or stabilize the main title’s bold promise. English (2007) confronts the vexed entanglement of representations and representativeness, when it comes to something like “black art,” or “black” culture. He prefaces his nuanced case studies of four artists, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope L., with a consideration of one exemplary case of black representational space.
David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue of 2002 becomes the emblem and the template for English’s explorations of the “representational space of blackness.” This is a site‐specific work that consisted of three rooms of a gallery, unilluminated: “a cavernous darkness punch‐lit by dim cones of light [devices viewers could collect at entry], which partnered with footsteps and whispering to register the presence of other visitors … a situation from which one could not be fully separate without exiting it altogether … this space produced a dense, inscrutable social space.” As this work’s title and staging generate meanings inflected (illuminated?) by the viewer’s knowledge of the artist’s blackness and of his history, the work’s “blackness” is “falling outside and between bodies and peoples and cultures” (English 2007, 1–2).
“Concerto,” English continues, “can be seen to stage the contradictory and contested processes whereby racial blackness is conceptualized and represented, and diverse subject positions are assigned, felt, embraced, or contested in relation to it” (3). He goes on to reference a certain “viewer complicity” that produces a viewpoint on “black art” “often grounded outside of the work of art itself and beyond the profound intentions of an artist” (3). A supplementary and imposing work of enframing by identity impresses this work with assumptions, expectations, and anticipations, all attached to the spectator’s “knowledge” of the signifier of the artist’s blackness. In this process, identity becomes an awkward, ill‐fitting frame that violently shapes, cuts, and limits the space of representations—and subjects—in the visual field, always foreclosing something, always difficult to inhabit, or even to occupy. Destabilized, mixed, this racialized space is precarious—but not gone.
The problem that How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness inscribes in its elegant analysis remains that “blackness,” like “black art,” refuses to stay within boundaries. Does it come from inside or from outside? And who gets to decide this, to name it, to see it? Although many of us in visual studies can agree that race is a fiction and gender a performance dependent on fictions—we “know very well, but nonetheless”—race and gender remain stubbornly material in their effects. Everything goes on “as if.” And it is this “as if” that matters, that forms the matter of the matter of things that both are and are not material, of objects that we must continually reframe because they are both fugitive and stubbornly durable, both elusive and intractable. Problems of representation and its politics are doggedly moving targets; they resist our efforts at stable framing, and yet, in their stickiness, they cling materially to a fictional ground that never quite fully anchors them.
Returning where I started: in a late chapter of Death at 24× titled “Delaying Cinema,” Laura Mulvey revisits the overlay of spectrality she finds in digitized film. As digital technology permits us to arrest the movement of film, to fragment the original object, it also allows us to restore the traces of the celluloid medium’s indexicality, its archival functions as a document of its moment. Mulvey offers us a reading of Imitation of Life that she contends is possible only through digital technology, precisely because it lets us see what would have passed too quickly at 24×. “Of course,” she writes, “to still ‘a frozen moment’ on celluloid, on an editing table, is to redouble the effect and to trigger immediately a reflection on the cinema’s essential duality, its tension between movement and stillness.” She’ll call this effect “the ghostly presence of the still strip of film on which the illusion of movement depends” (Mulvey 2006, 155). Thus this technology restores a spectral trace, which is there but not visible: Benjamin’s “optical unconscious.”
Mulvey
