Editorial Introduction All the essays in this part of the collection consider the relationships between aspects of visual culture, particularly those shaped by recording and communicating technologies, as well as those with specifically aesthetic dimensions, and their wider social and politi- cal setting. Also, in this context, the essays by Roth and Gardiner cast light on works by two writers who, they maintain, should be better known to visual culture studies: respectively Vilém Flusser and Henri Lefebvre. Roy Boyne explores a tradition of public spectacle that has persisted throughout the modem period. Both Futurism and Situationism contributed not only to the theory of spectacle but also its practice, or in some respects its ‘counter-practice’. Here the power of spectacle is discussed in relation to two aesthetic ideas: the sublime and aura, Follow- ing Walter Benjamin, these need to be considered in the light of changes in the tech- nology of image reproduction and distribution. More concretely, Boyne considers the cinematic spectacle, architecture and large public artworks. ‘The Futurist Filippo Marinetti famously celebrated the naturally spectacular public phenomena of industrial modernity. Marinetti seems to suggest that the role of avant- garde art was to prepare in the public mind a positive, exciting image of the creative de- struction integral o unending modernization. Both Left and Right eventually came to exploit the idea that spectacle could create mass enthusiasm for their policies, and from the twentieth century onwards, ‘bureaucracy and spectacle zigzag alongside each other as two dominant abiding features of the Western world’. Situationism and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle have been very influential as diagnoses of contemporary visual culture and the devising of critical, oppositional strate~ gies. Up-dating Marx’ early theory of alienation, Debord argued that modern life is no longer lived ‘directly’, but through representations, often fragmentary images that are brought together by those who wield representational power, usually through the mass media and entertainment industries, into ‘pseudoworlds’. Any resistance to this power282 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE must include everyday acts of disruption of these ‘regimes of representation’, the trans- gression in particular situations of habitual, passive or normal ways of visualizing, speak- ing and thinking. Techniques and practices like psychogeography and the dérive (aimless urban wandering or “drifting’) deliberately repudiated instrumental mobility, seeking out the emancipatory potential of chance encounters and unpremeditated discoveries. With détournemont the Situationist sought unexpected connections and novel experiences. This de-familiarizing process was felt to be most applicable to the work of the cinema, Repudiating a rationalized revolutionary strategy led and executed by a centralized party in favour of spontaneity and disruptive cultural tactics, Situationism is often seen as reaching a kind of consummation in the student movements of 1968. Arguably, Debord's critical theory of the spectacle failed politically, perhaps because it was insuf- ficiently spectacular. Boyne argues that spectacle is a compound of the natural, the human and the tech- nological. Not only Futurism, but also other important forms of modernism displayed enthusiasm for technology and the modernization process embodied in the energy of collective spectacles. Walter Benjamin famously argued the mechanical reproduction of images led to a loss of a sense of the ‘distance’ and ‘singularity’ of ‘aura’ and auratic ex- perience. Instead of ‘sacred’ art modernity and mass society has ‘profane’ visual culeure. Benjamin, like Martin Heidegger, saw behind the elimination of aura a desire for ‘close- ness’, Works of art in particular, cut loose from ritual and place, became free to circu- late, leading to a proliferation of hybrid forms on the one side and the elaboration and amplification of their commercial and political possibilities on the other. Boyne reviews Miriam Hansen's recent analysis, which suggests that Benjamin's conception of aura was much more complex and useful than is usually assumed. Boyne summarizes the history of the idea of the sublime, concentrating on Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. Turning to David Nye’s political econ- omy of the modern sublime, he draws attention to the development of the United States’ railway system in the nineteenth century as a staged, spectacular demonstration of the technological sublime and nationhood. Similar celebratory presentations of the constructed worlds of bridges, dams and skyscrapers persisted throughout the first half of the twentieth century. ‘The modern sublime that is inextricably connected with technological information and image systems brings with it a suggestion of ‘surrender’ to the new, or of ‘terror’ be- fore something of overwhelming power. Viewed on screen, it is domesticated, and so, as Burke observed, able to be enjoyed and consumed. ‘Turning to cinematic spectacle, Boyne summarizes recent research into the history not only of cinema technology but also of the skills of viewing and interpretation needed by the cinema audience. Focusing on a series of ‘blockbuster’ films, he discusses the total marketing of cinematic spectacle, suggesting the pertinence of Debord's thesis that these are ‘irresistible’, ultimately reassuring moments of commodified pleasure. For some commentators, the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 inaugurated the ‘terror spectacle’. Boyne discusses responses to an exhibition curated by Paul Virilio which takes up the themes of man-made disaster and the modern visual media, linkingEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 283 technology, speed and spectacle. He also notes Rebecca Adelman’s remark that ‘zero vis- ibility’ scems to be the preferred response to spectacular terror. Turning finally to public art and architecture, Boyne discusses spectacle in relation to aesthetics, functionality and in particular the ‘liberal democratization’ of urban space. As case studies of different modes of ‘interactivity’—in design, conception ot response—he cites the Viaduc de Millau in Southern France, the sculptural D-tower in the Dutch city of Doetinchem, Antony Gormley’s ‘fourth plinth’ project in Trafalgar Square, London, and the BMW car plane building in Leipzig designed by Zaha Hadid. He suggests that interactive spectacle may well be one of the dominant functions of new architecture and large-scale public art. In conclusion, Boyne takes up the theme of spectacular public art, exemplified by the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London and the Grand Palais in Paris. Such works seek to activate an experience of spectacle and scale, memory and allusion in the fabric of the building itself, bur also raise difficule questions about the means and purpose of such events. For Lisa Cartwright, feminism as a theoretical perspective has been one of the most it has developed and expanded over the past forty years. Among its leading themes have been its ‘critique of dis of mastery and universal value’, its “emphasis on embodied experience’, and its interest in ‘subjugated and situated forms of knowledge, experience and pleasure as legitimate important contributors to the study of visual culture 3 courses and important areas of focus’. Feminists have also emphasized the gaze, meaning by this identity and supposed social attributes, and the organization of things, spaces and social relations through practices, ys of seeing. Cartwright reviews the place of feminism in the institutional development of visual acts of looking which contribute to determining someone's which include w: culture studies during the 1980s and 1990s, initially in departments of fine art, art his- tory and film, but eventually embracing anthropology, history and sociology. Debates continue as to the subject matter of field of visual studies, as well as theory and method, and the place of feminism in this field. Cartwright suggests that feminist theory's ap- propriation and use of psychoanalytic, Marxist and semiotic ideas has made a unique contribution to the development of visual culture studies. Cartwright charts the evolution of notions of ideology in feminist approaches to vi- sual studies, from a concentration on ‘negative’ stereotypes to an analysis of structural features of representations that shape reception and audience appropriation. She notes how Mary Kelly’s artworks brought psychoanalytical ideas into conceptualism, while the theorist Jacqueline Rose pioneered a theory of vision applying to the gendered politics of everyday life. In the context of art history, feminism is often linked to the ‘cultural curn’ and the ‘new art history’, both of which gave pron factors. In the 1970s Linda Nochlin made the point that it was not enough to promote a ence to political, institutional and economic few women artists to the canon of critical esteem but that what was required was a much more radical critique of the very notion of ‘great art’ and the institutions that sustained this male-dominated canon. ‘The only truly radical solution to the ‘structural absence of284 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE women’ was a fundamental revision of what counted as art and its history. Slightly la Griselda Pollock analysed the symboli tions for women’s aesthetic practice. Cartwright also discusses the sociological contribu- tions of Janet Wolff and the semiotic and poststructuralist approaches of Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal. Cartwright returns to the influence exerted by the idea of the ‘feminine gaze’, in which ‘being looked at’ is contrasted with a supposedly male position of active looking, ind institutional structures forming the condi- as well as to critiques and modifications of the original formulation, many of which are being published in Camera Obscura. In the collection How Do J Look? feminist theory and politics were applied to pornography, provoking a controversy about the ‘perceived prudery’ of older feminist attitudes, with wider repercussion in the conduct and themat- ics of visual culture studies. In the area of art practice, feminism has also influential, for example man’s gently ironical photographs of herself in scenes from various Hollywood gentes, Catherine Opie’s portraits of les use of familiar iconography, graphic techniques and sometimes sardonic captions, and indy Sher- ins influenced by Lacanian notions, Barbara Kruger’ the Guerilla Girls’ performance interventions empha social context, More recently, Kimiko Yoshida has used photography for critical comment on the emerging global visual culture, while other artists have given a combination of theory and pra a stronger presence in visual culture studies. Anne Friedberg and Lis into new media studies, analysing the role of the screen, mobile phone and the Internet. ‘The works of others, like Vivian Sobchack, have raised interest in embodied experience in visual culture studies, while Donna Haraway has compared cross-media forms with ice Scholars Nakamura have extended feminist approaches fluid identity construction. Other women artists and theorists have explored connec- tions between feminism, technology and science studies, sexuality and visual culture. Finally, Cartwright cites useful overviews of visual culture studies that emphasize the continuing role of feminism in advancing research in this field. Nancy Roth explores the contribution of the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) to the study of visual culture. She is particularly interested in Flusser's ideas about the relationship between images or, more broadly, the visual, in a culture ‘over- powered by written language’. Like the media historian and theorist Marshall McLuhan, Flusser speculates about the transition from a ‘linear’ writing culture to a visual one, a new universe of ‘technical images’. Flusser is distinctive, however, in his grasp of the con- nection between new visual media and pictorial or historical consciousness. Roth initially reviews Flusser’s understanding of the conflicted relationship between image and text. Two key events in this history are the invention of writing in the third millennium sce and the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. He sees writing as linear, serious and directed towards a goal, characteristics that eventually come to structure a distinctive form of human consciousness. By the eighteenth century writing had pushed images to the margins of Western culture, Yet because of its growth in volume and complexity literate consciousness was faced with a growing crisis: dealing ind with ‘unbearable’ demands of written texts, a failure to convey information clearEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 285 quickly, and thus to serve human needs. The eagerness with which photography—the first ‘post-historic’ meditum—was seized upon demonstrates the severity of this impasse ‘The proliferation of technical images means that the linear character of consciousness is replaced by simultaneity and a kind of permanent stasis, Uprooted from Europe by the Nazis, Flusser settled in Brazil, becoming a university professor in the 1960s. Loss of his first cultural home, however, helped free him from prejudices and assumptions, enabling fresh thinking about the emerging new media of representation and communication. Although valuing profoundly the heritage of writ- ing, Flusser raised the question as to whether writing had a future, Ac the centre of his theory of communication, still unfinished at his death in 1991, were the concepts of discourse and dialectic. Discourse is a set of ‘formal ideals and history’, typically stored in print, Dialogue is open, exploratory and ephemeral, and a source of new information. In principle cultures should be woven from both modes, but Flusser feared that in much of the modern world discourse would be the dominant force. Giving Martin Buber’s ideas a secular and existential twist, Flusser believed that dialogue establishes and maintains an identity within a life worth living, and his hopes and anxiety for new media were that ‘a profound change in the medium of communi cation inevitably means a profound change in the potential for dialogue, for making meaningful creative contact with another human being’, For Flusser speech and writ- ing were fundamentally acoustic, but new media were ushering in a radically new visual consciousness. In order not to lose the cultural heritage stored in writing, Flusser called for ‘envisioners’, those capable of translating between word and image. Flusser was an admirer of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose method of phenomenological ‘reduction’ or epoché he adapted and applied in a series of essays with ‘gesture’ in the title. Gestures are ‘movements of the body or rool’ that have no causal significance, but which do encode intentions. In painting for example Flusser wants to emphasize the organic wholeness of gesture, a kind of dynamic unity between canvas, materials, tools and painter, However, Flusser suggests that in photography, the phe- nomenon visibly impresses itself on a surface, almost along the lines laid down by em- piricist philosophy, Roth explains how Flusser proceeded to analyse the photographic gesture phenomenologically. Photography enjoys a fundamental place in Flusser’s culture of technical images, as a basic form of ‘apparatus. All technical images are mediated by apparatus of some kind, which entails an abstraction of consciousness from an immediate or purely sen- sory engagement with the life-world (Lebenswelt). The apparatus of technical images deals with particles too small to be perceived normally, selects and orders them through a programme, transfers them to a surface, and stores them for as long as necessary. From the first, photography displayed these characteristics. This is a very different idea of photography from conventional ideas of ‘index’ or ‘trace’. Like the more sophisticated technology that followed it, photography has always been a way of constructing im- ages, ‘fictions’ or ‘projections’, out of particles devoid of intrinsic meaning, This insight is difficult to grasp, argues Flusser, because of the predominance of assumptions that characterize a literate culture still oriented to a world in need of representation. Flusser286 AESTH ICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE highlighted the key difference between those who understand how new technologies work to construct images, sounds and so on, and mere users who, as a consequence, cleave to the older idea of mimesis or representation. The wider cultural danger here is not only a failure to interact creatively with technology, but also the ways in which con- victions about representation buttress discourse and impede dialogue. Finally, Roch urns to Flusser’s approach to visual art. Somewhat impatient with in- stitutional aspects of art, he continually emphasized the importance of creative activity with techi al images, which follows from the overriding importance of communica- tion, or what Roth calls ‘real, creative contact or dialogue’. At the root of dialogue is an exchange between memories, within the memory of the individual, between those of different individuals or between people and ‘artificial memory’ of some kind, where this may go as far as demanding of an apparatus unprecedented uses and results, a practice of ‘einbilden’, which Roth translates as ‘imagine’ or ‘envision’. At this point, traditional distincti ns between creative artists and scientists dominated by methodological and cognitive values become less useful, damaging even. Flusser’s call is for a culture of ‘en- visioners’, restlessly dissatisfied with known codes and communicative habits, but con- vinced that ‘surprise, invention, creative human dialogue can and should flourish in the new universe of technical images’. ‘The phenomenology of Husserl and his students (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in particular) have also been extremely influential upon the work of the unortho- dox French Marxist Henri Lefebvre. During the past decade the influence of Lefebvre on the study of culture has grown considerably. However, Michael Gardiner argues that his ideas about vision have still ro receive the attention they merit, Gardiner sets out 0 show that while critical of some aspects of modern visual culture, in particular what he calls ‘abstract space’, Lefebvre is not simply hostile to so-called ocularcentrism, His more complex, nuanced position involved rethinking ‘decorporealized’ ideas of vision and the development of alternatives in which a prelinguistic, multisensory engagement with the world was prominent. Gardiner begins by discussing Lefebvre’s criticism of Surrealism for being fixated on disruptive but static and decontextualized images that belong to the ‘abstract space’ of ge value rather than the concrete space of lived experience, use value and ‘dialec- This notion of a reductive and destructive relation to space and the natural modality of vision is critical, is one of the recurrent themes of excha tical reason’, world, to which a cert much of Lefebvre's work. Lefebvre contrasts modern space with premodern or ‘absolute’ space, for him a natu- ral landscape established primarily by the symbolic mobility of the human body. This kinaesthetic space is experienced and understood by being ‘lived’ rather than appropri- ated abstractly and intellectually. Eventually the growing power of urban centres saw the growth of a more quantitative, homogenous space, measurable and readable, Abstract space is d aracterized by hierarchical proscription, control and quantitative changes, the elimination of qualitative differences, and ultimately the ‘commodified space’ that has been globalized by neocapitalism. What makes all this possible, Lefebvre argues, is ultimately ‘language’ as a means to distance ourselves from embodied life. Yet LefebvreEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 287 insists that all such linguistic codes and ideologies necessarily still operate in particular ical and local circumstances. Gardiner outlines three key factors in Lefebvre’s account of the emergence of ab- stract space—the geometric, the visual and the phallic—and the possible origins of a kind of abstracting gaze in Ren sance perspective. He notes connections between Lefebvre's critique of modern space and criticisms developed earlier by Nietzsche and Heidegger. In setting out his utopian alternative, Lefebvre concentrates on the democratic po- tential inherent in modern urban life. It is important to understand the history and contemporary working of abstract space in order to overcome it, Yet abstract space is nor as controlled and organized as it may appear, but rather uneven, folded, discontinu- ous, features that appear to and through the lived body in its actions, In fact, the reality of space is the body and its movements and gestures, the life of the prodigal, energetic crotic body, a ‘practico-sensory totality’. Ina style that influenced Situationism, Lefebvre advocates a ‘revolt of the body’, rooted in the ‘cryptic opacity’ of a corporeality capable of resisting the mapping and codification of analytic, linguistic reason. Gardiner notes Lefebvre’s phenomenological insistence on multisensory perception, in particular the virtual elimination from modern public life of an extended range of olfactory experiences. However, hearing—the primary sense of the premodern era—is central to Lefebvre’ argument, and he develops a detailed phenomenology of hearing in the context of embodied everyday life. Lefebvre’s ultimate goal is to restore the senses, including vision, to their proper interplay, richness and creative potential, to create a philosophy of the concrete that can resist the dominance of abstract seeing. In conclusion, Gardiner suggests that Lefebvre did not think that vision was intrinsi- cally abstract and hegemonic; however, its modern deformation could be overcome by restoring its relationship with the other senses. ‘This led Lefebvre to advocate forms of art not set apart from, but in intimate contact with, everyday, natural embodied life, and capable of affirming the spontaneity and creativity of mundane experience. ‘The study of visual culture cannot evade questions about its own values and politics Ian Heywood suggests that the topic of Cubist collage raises immediate and unavoid- able questions about the politics of experimental art and, necessarily, about the critical and ethical standpoint of visual culture studies. ‘The context of Cubist collage in France in the early years of the twentieth century is the process of modernization, widely theorized by historians, philosophers and social and cultural theorists. Heywood notes a shift in ideas about what culture consists in, as well as its relationship to other social, economic and political forces. He reviews a grow- ing emphasis on the autonomous or prior structuring force of culture, and the impact of ideas of textuality, emphasizing the indeterminacy of interpretation Heywood next discusses the values and politics of the quasi-discipline of visual cul- ture studies in the context of its history and Bill Readings’s polemical analysis of hu- manities in the late-modern university, He agrees with Readings that a demand for ‘participation’ for those classes and groups largely excluded from national life was at the core of carly Bri h cultural studies.288 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE In the USA there was a related, although less class dominated, demand for partici- pation and inclusivity, which, however understandable, led eventually a lack of clarity about the object of study and incoherence of critical and political values on the one hand, and an ultimately timid assertion of ‘political pieties’ on the other. ‘The strengths of Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology of culture offset for many the weaknesses of cultural studies. However, Readings argues that Bourdicu’s ideas are now critically limited, crucially because national cultures aligned to national economics and politics have been replaced by the global circulation of capital, leaving behind an empty, impotent centre. This new situation makes questionable some of the founding assump- tions of visual culture studies. Universities, as institutions that have to adapt co new cir- cumstances, can no longer sce themselves as places for the articulation and criticism of national cultures. In the new millennium, with neither an authentic legitimating role nor any defined object, culture is ‘over’, yet ironically ic is at just this point that cultural studies comes into being, typically seeking an uneasy accommodation between a tradi- tion of ‘criticism’ and a sociological ot historical account of the complicity of all high culture, including critique—an impasse that we have come to call postmodernism. While the Cubist collages made by Braque and Picasso between 1912 and 1914 are not overtly or conventionally political, they do seem to be pictures of modern life, or perhaps works in which an emerging vernacular visual culture meets highly self-aware, experimental, ambitious art prepared to take dramatic risks. Informed by the recent work of Christine Poggi, Heywood outlines some of Cubist collage’s formal and substantive innovations, initi vices within the work, and then the use of tromp Veil chair caning printed on oil cloth in Picasso's famous Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). He suggests that the collages do not reject the ideal of perceivable pictorial coherence but reassert it with new feroc- lly the use of frames and framing de- ity, embracing and arranging ‘profane’ materials and surfaces to suggest the work's self structuring, lending the work an aura of independence or authenticity. T. J. Clark observes that Cubism shares a basic conviction of modernism: that truth to the world in painting depends on truth to what painting consists of, What is peculiar about it is its determination not ro abandon ot even tone down cither demand. It fol- lows that if the painting is to enter fully embodied life it must be rid of its merely ‘ob- jective’ characteristics. Self-structuring in the context of ‘rough’ materials and ‘brutal’ techniques does not turn the collage into a ‘subject’, but it does suggest a certain awk- ward, assertive autonomy among other mobilized visual objects of vernacular modernity. Heywood turns to Cubism’s relations with newspapers, wallpaper and Symbolist po- etics, He outlines the arrival of cheap newspapers and paper wall decoration during the nineteenth century, and some of the critical conclusions that have been drawn from the ways Cubism takes up and manipulates materials and devices drawn from this new vi sual and literate culture, Negative assessments, sometimes inspired by Bourdieu, need to be reexamined in light of a more plausible account of the politics of Cubist practice Although Patricia Leighten’s account of the political and aesthetic radicalism of Picasso’ carly years contains much of interest, Heywood suggests that it oversimplifies Cubism’sEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 289 formal challenge, and in particular its practical criticism of aspects of existing painting practice. The underlying, unavoidable question is that of the work’s real subject matter. Returning to images and theories of modernity and modernization, Heywood high- lights not only the familiar theme of rapid and sometimes violently disruptive social change, but also ongoing bottom-up efforts to reestablish orderly, reliable, legitimate forms of life, the possibility of an everyday life worth living. In this larger cultural con- text, Cubism may be seen as a highly paradoxical selfmodernization, fused with an en- ergetic, stressful re-embedding of painting practice.