Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Despite a residual popular temptation to see the "posts" of cultural analysis as signs of temporal closure, the logic of global visual media is strengthening, not weakening, metaphors of visibility which remain intact from the Enlightenment. Here I describe a stand-off between post-Enlightenment critiques (as in some sectors of Cultural Studies) and a narrow power base which is defined by producing light and managing the very conditions of visibility. For the world's most powerful state, still strongly bound to its original Enlightenment foundations, intervention into other states' sovereignty is increasingly justified by evidence from spy planes (rather than from, for example, support from international organizations such as the United Nations). At the delivery end, the view from the nose of a missile of a target rushing into close-up and then turning to white noise, is now familiar to everyone with access to major western TV channels, and has entered into the everyday vocabulary of art practice [1]. While they have trouble picking out the occasional aircraft, for us they are dinner-time viewing. Here I suggest that visual placement has grown from Enlightenment origins to become a "universal" prior principle in social stratification, and that this cannot easily be opposed using a traditional model of volition -- one person willfully oppressing another -- but that, arising from the best intentions of Enlightenment ideas of representation, it is also, paradoxically, untouchable by action because it is too democratic.
Repository Citation
Gardiner, Michael. "Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology and the Political Economy of Vision." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss1/4
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