A key concern for Jay, in Scopic Regimes of Modernity (1988) and notably in Downcast Eyes (1993) is “ocularcentrism”, a tendency towards visual metaphors, models, concepts and priorities within cultural, scientific, political and religious discourse. In his interview with Marquard Smith, Jay says it was while working on a history of Western Marxism (1984) that …
Author Archives: praxis
Thomas Ruff jpegs and “jpeg”
Discussing his book Jpegs (2009), the German photographer and artist, Thomas Ruff explains that while downloading images from the Internet he noticed the pixellated quality. “It created quite a painterly, impressionistic structure, and rendered parts of what was often an ugly image very beautiful. I looked into it, and found the Jpeg file-compression software was …
Lingering scopic regimes
Christian Metz is usually credited with the first using the concept “scopic regime”. Of course the term “scopic” has a different genealogy, taking in Lacan’s “scopic field” and the split between the eye and the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1986: 67-78}, through feminist film theory (Mulvey 2009) and on to Slavoj …
Tweets for the week :: 2011-01-30
The Internationale Daily is out! ▸ Top stories today by @rodgers_scott # Suddenly your favourite philosopher becomes a journalist and a live human. # #TowerHamlets celebrity cash outrage: http://wp.me/pV43B-fh /via @gamesmonitor and I live there! Sigh! # Thing of the day 29.01.11 http://flic.kr/p/9dYCKR # The Internationale Daily is out! ▸ Top stories today by @juspar …
Thing of the day
It started with a Kinder Egg. A present from my son for a hard-working proto-academic slaving over a keyboard. Inside, a pink poodle carrying what looks like a very frothy cappuccino and talking on her mobile phone (got to be a she, pink, bow in the hair… I’ve read semiotics). A thing. Even stripping aside …
Draft: A fragmentary literature review
My research, emerging from the dialectical practice-research methodology outlined in Chapter XX, is focused on ‘chasing protocol’, understanding jpeg, as an active force in the creation of a particular distributed scopic regime. This concern arises from the the ‘failure’ of my imag(in)ing experiments to hold onto protocol. That failure to pin down jpeg, to unfold …