Seminar series - Visual Analysis and Interpretive Methods
Dr Norah Campbell (Trinity College Dublin)
"An Oblique Look: Derrida and Image Research"
This presentation argues that Derridean philosophy can become a practical way for thinking through images - for exploring, not explaining them; for problematising, not solutionising them. The images under investigation are ones that depict the inchoate and abstract world of "high-technology". Such images are often described as "empty", "spectacular", "special effects", but in the end meaningless. They are regarded as shallow, generic, even boring, and hence not a target of deconstruction. It is for this reason that they are so important. The genre of high-tech imagery that we will explore in this presentation is the futuristic body (the cyborg, the robot, the avatar, the posthuman). Over the past four years I have collected advertisements that imagine futuristic bodies. While much research has addressed images of bodies in the past and present, aligning them to social and political contexts, there is little research on how bodies of the future are imagined.
This talk explains why the cyborg became one of the most powerful terms in social theory in the late 20 th century. It uses Derridean theory to "look for" the image of this future body. It addresses the below themes to discuss the politics of visual meaning, and concludes that there is a shift from liberatory or repressive meanings to the concept of hymeneal meaning . This has implications for ethics and aesthetics, as well as the role of the future in the present.
• Cyborg skin and its difference from human skin
• Having cyborg sex
• Folding liminality
• The future anterior
• The Empowered/Enslaved
• The Human in the Posthuman