Precarious Visualities

Book excerpt: Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness. Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects. Contributors include Raymond Bellour (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universität Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Université du Québec à Montréal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Université du Québec à Montréal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Université du Québec à Montréal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Hélène Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Université de Montréal)."