Marquard Smith

Visual Studies, or the Ossification of Thought

This article interferes in the often all-too-smooth emergence of Visual Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry in the British and North American University system. It does so by drawing attention to some of the unacknowledged grey areas between ‘doing’ visual culture and what has become the ‘study’ of Visual Studies. Interested in the historical, conceptual, and morphological distinctions between ‘doing’ and ‘studying’, it confronts the implications of that difference for inter-, cross-, and in-disciplinary pedagogy, research, writing, and thought. (In so doing, it responds to W.J.T. Mitchell’s article ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’ published in the journal of visual culture, August 2002, by both welcoming Mitchell’s text as a necessary starting point for any serious effort to initiate and critically engage with studies of visual culture and Visual Studies, and draws attention to a lacuna in the argument therein.) While in general glad to see in research, writing, and teaching, an ongoing curiosity in and attention to our encounters with visual cultures that marks a sustained commitment to ways of seeing and looking and knowing as doing, as practice, this article claims that the accelerated professionalization and bureaucratization of Visual Studies is in danger of bringing about an ossification of thought.

Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability

What is it to conduct research in the second decade of the 21st century? What is the nature (or what are the modalities) of the work that we as researchers do? What is research as a praxis? And how have recent shifts in paradigms of knowledge generation and distribution – especially around the archive and the Internet, and the Internet as archival – transformed profoundly what we as researchers do, how we do it, and in fact even our very capacity to do it? In this article, I begin from the idea of research as a praxis, and from the figure of the researcher as a locus for the discovery of knowledges by way of acts of searching and gathering. In 15 theses I engage critically with challenges raised recently for the idea of ‘history’ as a form of knowledge by our own épistémè of re-search; one whose conditions and conditions of possibility are delineated by the emergence of our late capitalist global algorithmic knowledge economy, and the Internet with its distinct operations of searchability and distributability. Because this is our present moment’s épistémè of re-search, I argue that our being in thrall of the archive has dangerous future consequences: in fact it is perilous for the very idea of the future itself as a category of historical time. Concerned by this situation and thus responding forcefully to it, in offering a few grains of dissent I will ‘look with care’ at how we might navigate our way fractiously and thus productively through such a predicament.

Observance, Notes towards Decipherability:

Provoked by the terrorist-related murders in England that marked the spring and summer of 2017, I have felt compelled to write this article on the idea of observance (observe, care, follow, obey). I engage with this idea in the context of our contemporary Memory Industry – that confluence of memorialization, remembrance and commemoration culture; Memory Studies and Trauma Studies; tangible and intangible heritage; digital memory and media archaeology; and its series of facing-backwards-to-go-forwards impulses (the archival impulse, the genealogical impulse and the archaeological impulse). Through the Contemporary’s prism, I deploy observance as a rejoinder to the seeming irreconcilability between, on the one hand, the incomprehensibility of the Shoah and, on the other hand, the prevalence of its rendering in figurative and abstract memorials, literature, art and film; and by way of dark tourism, Shoah selfies and genealogy websites. I propose that, because of its assorted senses, as a grievable moment observance may be a way of negotiating (without necessarily wanting or needing to reconcile) such irreconcilability. I argue that this is possible because of how observance (observing a minute’s silence, for instance) as a (secular, vernacular) performative action somehow opens up a space of the imagination that might lead, for good and ill, to a decipherability all the more necessary in our interminable state of exception that is the Contemporary.

Numbers/Data: A Roundtable

This Roundtable on Numbers/Data began life as a live, public event on the power and influence of numbers in contemporary visual, material, immaterial, and media cultures.1 To imagine such an ambitious event, and to do it justice, the event’s programme brought together academics, industry professionals, and practitioners. Taking Steven Connor’s recently published book Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (2016) as a springboard, each contributor to the event was invited to deliver a 10-minute presentation, an opening statement to set the scene, and to raise fundamental questions to be considered in the ensuing discussion. The authors retain this structure here, along with some of the informality that live conversation affords. By way of these four presentations and the conversation between the event’s speakers and audience, the Roundtable raises a series of pressing concerns around data and big data, life tracking, digital health studies, and the quantifiable self; the quantitative and the qualitative; data forms and flows; climate change data and social media; the bleed between private and public computational infrastructures; labour, productivity, and accountability; time, money, and economies; and the contemporary intensification of surveillance, audit culture, marketization, and outcomes-based performance management. Notwithstanding data dystopia’s numerical sublime, the contributors are always looking to keep an eye out for reasons to be optimistic in their discussions around: numbers in education and numeric literacies; the materiality of numbers and numbers as artifacts; data’s flexibility and manipulability; sensors, sensor data, and everyday life; the rise of amateurism and citizen scientists; data and numbers vis-à-vis experiences, embodiment, emotions, intensities, and their affective powers; and the contributors’ absolute delight (or abject horror) at the very arbitrary nature of numbers, all of which offer hope towards more democratic, creative, imaginative, and personalized futures … Interested in the Quantified Self community? Ever wondered what role numbers played in the UK’s Referendum to leave the EU? Intrigued by the idea of an exhibition about odd and even? Curious about what folk data might be? Read on!

Politics: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell

Abstract In this wide‐ranging interview W. J. T. Mitchell discusses his commitment to politics, cultural politics, and the politics of culture. Always engaging, always stimulating, always provocative, he speaks at length about Barack Obama, the events of 11 September 2001, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Grhaib, and his time travelling, lecturing, and teaching in some of the world’s most highly charged territories: Israel, Palestine, Cuba, and China. Forever listening and learning, in this interview Mitchell displays his passion for and his dedication to intellectual life. Here, as in the rest of his work, he provides the best kind of object lesson in how reading, looking, studying, criticising, analysing, and trying to understand all raise the question, in their own unique ways, of what it means to be political, what it means to do politics.