This presentation considers the necessity for visual rights in the era of image war and mass media spectacle. It situates that claim in a genealogy of the right to look created by the invention of the other. This inventing is done by those in minority--the legal status of not having majoritarian status that applied at various times to the enslaved, women, children, Jews, the colonized, the insane and other minors--rather than the familiar master/slave paradigm. The contemporary is understood as that living together with others that has shaped the experience of the modern since the Anglophone term "contemporary" was coined in the 17th century. Following the work of Jacques Rancière, visual rights are conceived as a supplement to the text-based rights tradition but one that, far from making a politics impossible, is a necessary precondition of politics as opposed to the totalizing vision of the police. Against this police view, I propose the general strike, conceived by Sorel, Luxemburg and Benjamin as a "general image," a momentary glimpse of the contemporary, knowable only for that instant. The general strike as an arrangement of images dreams the future that is to come, in what was to become Benjamin’s later theory of the dream image. I close with a consideration of recent strikes by high-school age young people in France, Chile and the United States as the general strike.
File Last Updated:
December 1, 2006
Feedback, questions or accessibility issues: visualculture@education.wisc.edu
Copyright 2006
Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin-Madison