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April 9, 2010
In The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture Graham MacPhee says that the penetration of visual culture by technology — from the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century, through film and video to the
new digital information technologies — has come to be understood as one of the central features of Western modernity.
Visual technologies permeate the main forms of mass-mediated popular culture, and have played a crucial role in the development of modern mass societies and the subsequent emergence of what might be described — however problematically — as a new global cultural space. Equally, their proliferation has also had a powerful influence on modes of representation and meaning that do not appear to be directly dependent on technology, as is perhaps most evident in the case of modernism and postmodernism in literature and the visual arts. The complex changes associated with these developments have demanded new paradigms of cultural, social and political explanation, and as such they have increasingly come to be seen as undermining the most basic assumptions of modern philosophy and critical thought.The far-reaching nature of this impact, and the perception of its cumulative power over an extended period, has contributed powerfully to the sense of a radical historical discontinuity between our own social, cultural and political situation and those which preceded it.
MacPhee adds that for a number of theorists — perhaps most prominently Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Frederic Jameson — the technological organization of vision and the visible defines the fundamental character of our contemporary condition.
What unites the different positions developed by these writers is the view that the perceptual parameters of the modern subject become redundant within the technological image-space of post-war, Western culture, which is therefore understood as marking the collapse of the broader conceptual frameworks developed by modern thought. Rather than confirming the unity and spontaneity of the modern subject, the new condition of technological appearance is seen either to mark the failure of such a subject to assimilate this new sensory world, or as final proof of this subject's propensity to violence and domination.
From this perspective, what defines our contemporary condition is precisely the inapplicability of modern paradigms of representation, meaning, action and politics, paradigms that are understood as irretrievably bound up with the model of an isolated and self-sufficient perceiving consciousness.
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