Visual Studies And Global Imagination Susan Buck-Morss

Susan Buck-Morss, 2004

Visual Studies and Global Imagination
Susan Buck-Morss

Abstract
Why is Visual Studies a hotspot of attention at this time? Whose interests are being served?
Is this inquiry merely a response to the new realities of global culture, or is it producing that
culture, and can it do so critically? Thinking globally, but from the particular, ‘local’ position of
theHistory of Art and through the medium of the visual image, a distinct aesthetics emerges,
a science of the sensible that in our time accepts the thin membrane of images as the way
globalisation is unavoidably perceived. How can theory learn from contemporary art practices
engaged in stretching that membrane, providing depth of field, slowing the tempo of
perception, and allowing images to expose aspace of common political action? What does
‘world opinion’ mean in the context of global images? What are the implications for a critical
Visual Studies that resists inequities by rubbing the global imagination against the grain? Can
Visual Studies enter a field of negotiation for the move away from European hegemony
toward the construction of a globally democratic, public sphere?

1.Introduction
Whatever the stated goals of Visual Studies, its effect is the production of new
knowledge and its first challenge is to be aware of this. According to one well-established,
critical tradition, this means questioning the conditions of its own production. Why is Visual
Studies a hotspot of interest at this time? Whose interests are being served? In analyzing the
technologies ofcultural production and reproduction, can Visual Studies affect their use? Is
this inquiry merely a response to the new realities of global culture, or is it producing that
culture, and if the latter, can it do so critically? These questions are not academic. They are
concerned unavoidably with the larger world, and with the inevitable connection between
knowledge and power that shapes that world ingeneral and fundamentally political ways.
I will be very bold. Visual Studies can provide the opportunity to engage in a
transformation of thought on a general level. Indeed, the very elusiveness of Visual Studies
gives this endeavour the epistemological resiliency necessary to confront a present
transformation in existing structures of knowledge, one that is being played out in institutionalvenues throughout the globe.

Papers of Surrealism Issue 2 summer 2004

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Susan Buck-Morss, 2004

Western scientific and cultural hegemony was the intellectual reality of the first five
hundred years of globalization, lasting from the beginning of European colonial expansion to
the end of the Soviet modernizing project. It will not remain hegemonic in the next millennium.
Our era ofglobalisation, in which communication rather than coinage is the medium of
exchange, presses technologically toward transforming the social relations of knowledge
production and dissemination. We are at a cusp. Visual Studies exists within this transitional
space as a promise and a possibility, capable of intervening decisively to promote the
democratic nature of that transformation. Nothingless is at stake for knowledge. Transdisciplinary rather than a separate discipline, Visual Studies enters a field of negotiation for
the move away from Western hegemony towards the construction of a globally democratic
public sphere.
The global transformation of culture that catches us in its midst is not automatically
progressive. The technological possibilities of the new media are embeddedin global
relations that are wildly unequal in regard to production capacities and distributive effects.
Their development is skewed by economic and military interests that have nothing to do with
culture in a global, human sense. But there are forces now in play that point to the
vulnerability of present structures of power. Images circle the globe today in de-centered
patterns that allow...