Drawing on art, media, and phenomenological sources, Showing Off!:
A Philosophy of Image challenges much recent thought by proposing a
fundamentally positive relationship between visuality and the
ethical. In philosophy, cultural studies and art, relationships
between visuality and the ethical are usually theorized in negative
terms, according to the dyadic logics of seeing on the one hand,
and being seen, on the other. Here, agency and power are assumed to
operate either on the side of those who see, or on the side of
those who control the means by which people and things enter into
visibility. To be seen, by contrast - when it occurs outside of
those parameters of control- is to be at a disadvantage; hence, for
instance, contemporary theorist Peggy Phelan's rejection of the
idea, central to activist practices of the 1970's and 80's, that
projects of political emancipation must be intertwined with, and
are dependent on, processes of 'making oneself visible'.
Acknowledgment of the vulnerability of visibility also underlies
the realities of life lived within increasingly pervasive systems
of imposed and self-imposed surveillance, and apparently confident
public performances of visual self display. Showing Off!: A
Philosophy of Image is written against the backdrop of these
phenomena, positions and concerns, but asks what happens to our
debates about visibility when a third term, that of 'self-showing',
is brought into play. Indeed, it proposes a fundamentally positive
relationship between visuality and the ethical, one primarily
rooted not in acts of open and non-oppressive seeing or spectating,
as might be expected, but rather in our capacity to inhabit both
the risks and the possibilities of our own visible being. In other
words, this book maintains that the proper site of generosity and
agency within any visual encounter is located not on the side of
sight, but on that of self-showing - or showing off!
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