Inside/Outside: Ways of Seeing the World

Contemporary culture is, media commentators, educators and cultural theorists inform us, visual culture; and this brings to the fore a particular problem of knowledge: how do we see and know what it is we see? According to the art historian Jonathan Crary, contemporary visuality is undergoing a transformation ‘… more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective’ (Crary 1990, 3). Crary argues that this process must be understood as an imbrication of technologies, techniques, subject positions and discursive orders; and he provides a comprehensive list of the specic developments he sees as simultaneously constitutive and characteristic of this new visual regime:

This technological shift is thus associated with an abstraction of vision from human beings and its relocation to the technological plane. This is not to suggest that vision has ever been unmediated; people’s capacity to see and perceive has always been framed by norms, conventions and rules, and dependent on cultural contexts and on training. But something more is at stake now: the imbrication of new technologies, techniques and discursive orders has brought about not just a ‘problem of vision’ (Crary 1990, 3) but also the problem of the observer. With

the abstraction of vision from the body, it may be that the body itself is losing its integrity in ways not previously considered. With the combined subjectication of vision, and problematizing of the viewer, it is possible that the subjects themselves could disappear behind the networks of digital information.