Journal of Visual Culture

This essay/assay interrogates the mixture of image/writing that is figured forth - objectified, mediatized, lodged in the brain - as the artifact called an opinion. Opinion is the medium that provides sense for ‘good’ and ‘common’ affirmations and negations. By means of opinions, connections are made that join subject and world - the opinion of the critic that ‘knows’ or can ‘sense’ the value of things, thereby making opinions normal, safe, and easily exchangeable. We contest that entire blockage - ‘good and common sense’- by juxtaposing philosophy and art to opinion, arguing for a mode of criticism that is able to connect isolated instances of opinion with larger social frames. We argue that cultural criticism is often self-serving, and offer notions of philosophy and art that contest the solidity of opinion - philosophy and art conceived as excessive to opinion’s usual reductions.

This essay attempts to map out the main issues surrounding visual studies as an emergent academic formation, and as a theoretical concept or object of research and teaching. After a survey of some of the resistances encountered by visual studies in fields such as art history, aesthetics, and media studies, and a suggestion that visual studies is playing the role of ‘dangerous supplement’ to these fields, the essay turns to a discussion of some of the major received ideas that have seemed foundational to both negative and positive accounts of visual studies. These received ideas or myths include notions of the de-materialization of the image, and the erasure of boundaries between art and non-art, or visual and verbal media. They also include notions such as the very idea that there are such things as distinctly ‘visual media’. The political stakes of iconoclastic criticism (e.g. the overturning of ‘scopic regimes’) are also questioned, and an alternative (Nietzschean) strategy of ‘sounding the idols’ is proposed. The essay concludes with a description of pedagogical strategies in the teaching of visual culture, centered on an exercise the author calls ‘showing seeing’.

This essay began as a portion of a book project which explores the trope of the window - both architectural and metaphoric - and its relation to a framed visuality. In the book, I consider screens - the film screen, the TV screen, the computer screen - as component pieces of architecture, ‘virtual windows’ which render the wall permeable to light and ‘ventilation’ in new ways, and which dramatically change the materialities (and - perhaps more radically - the temporalities) of built space. This essay discusses how the post-war movie screens of Los Angeles negotiated the materiality and mobility of the driver and the immateriality and stasis of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect ratio of the film screen coincided with the panorama of the ‘wraparound’ windshield as well as with the horizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los Angeles.

The Holocaust has disrupted the conventional notions of seeing, of the visual domain in Western culture. Since the Enlightenment the observation of the visual world has had a privileged epistemological status: it is a precondition and guarantee for knowledge and understanding. Being an eye-witness of something implies almost automatic apprehension and comprehension of the observed situation or event. This link between seeing and comprehension, however, has been radically disrupted in the experiences of Holocaust victims. It will be argued here that it is because of this disruption that ‘to see’ and the description of visual imprints have such a central role in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. But these eye-witnesses’ testimonies concern events that cannot be processed in the same manner as those recounted in the eye-witness accounts in police reports. In Holocaust testimonies the visual functions more like the unmodified return of what happened, instead of as a mode of access to or penetration into what happened. Readings of the work of Holocaust survivors Tadeusz Borowski and Charlotte Delbo will lead to a probing of vision that does not see, as an image of a memory that cannot relate.

This article offers a hauntology of Bentham’s panopticon, reviewing its failure to create a perfect visibility and thereby creating ghosts. The visuality of ghosts is examined in a Jewish genealogy from Freud and Proust to Walter Benjamin and Anne Frank. The article concludes with a theoretical consideration of the ‘working out’ of visual culture as a non-linear but nonetheless historical process that attempts to work out the double-binds of globalization and digital culture.