So I am down with Bruno Latour, who was right to say that we have never been modern and therefore we cannot have been postmodern. I want to resist these labels, because they tend to short‐circuit thinking about the visual and our understanding of it, producing a reductive “branding” of thought rather than a powerful theoretical reduction. In particular, “post‐” has never struck me as an especially useful prefix for designating any period or movement, whether the postmodern, the post‐human, the postcolonial, the post‐theoretical—or Post Toasties, for that matter. The “post‐” element is a placeholder that registers a sense of belatedness and loss; it is the kind of thing we say when we don’t have anything particularly incisive or descriptive to say about a time. That is why I have preferred a much more precise and descriptive term for our time: I describe it as the era of “biocybernetics,” a convergence of the sciences of life and computation epitomized by the icons of the double helix of DNA and the schematic model of the Turing machine or binary computer. Biocybernetics names our period, its technical possibilities and dangers, in the same kind of terms and with the same precision that Walter Benjamin employs when he invokes the mechanical or technical reproduction epitomized by the assembly line, photography, and cinema, along with mass culture, as the formative modes of production in his time, the 1920s and 1930s. The avatar of this mode of reproduction was the robot; for us, it is the cyborg (Mitchell 2005).
Of course, there would be other ways of describing the period of the 1990s, when visual culture came into existence as an academic field, uneasily located between film studies and art history. One could call it the era of neoliberalism, deregulated economies, and globalization. Biocybernetics privileges the technological. Perhaps the only place where the term “postmodernism” had any grip was October’s notorious “Visual Culture Questionnaire” of 1996, which did visual studies the favor of denouncing it as a dangerous deviation from art history. But that hardly seems foundational.
Q: As you suggest, visual culture in the present moment is inseparable from the many digital technologies and platforms that produce, circulate, and contextualize images. How do you feel the current media environment has affected the practice of visual culture 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 (