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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

critical theory + the camera « Previous | |Next »
August 13, 2009

Scott McQuire in Visions of modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, says that critical theory has rarely treated the camera adequate to the complexity of the questions it raises:

Despite the early example of those such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, analysis has frequently suffered by hastily assembling an overly unified concept of 'the image' , or buy arbitrarily isolating the domains of photography, cinema,television in order to define 'proper' objects of study. Cutting across these categories is the silent paralysis caused by the split between analysis of cultural-aesthetic formations on the one hand and scientific-industrial applications on the other. The fact that camera technologies have been an integral part of the process of industrialization has been much neglected in social theory as the camera's dependence on a whole network of industrial practices and production techniques has been excluded from art history. This concatenation of absences skews our perceptions of history , and limits out ability to respond to changes in the present.

Remaining blind to the exclusions promoted by rigid disciplinary boundaries risks allowing the camera to ground its own history as the uninterrupted history of technological progress.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:11 AM |