Afterwards, Monique Tschofen

The expression “we’re all in this together” became a sort of mantra during the COVID pandemic. Six years later, at a historic moment when AI is systematically eroding the epistemic and social trust on which shared public life depends, it is clear that we need to continually reinvent both the “we” and the “together.” Public scholarship can help do this. Critical and theoretical thinking and making, especially when they grow out of communities capable of sustained attention, are examples of what Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter call “worlding” — a concept that foregrounds attentiveness to materiality and context as the very ground of collective meaning-making:

Worlding is informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur. It is above all an embodied and enacted process….

The essays in this volume grew out of twelve weeks of worlding in a graduate seminar — of thinking, together, about the materiality of the world we see around us. The authors have responded more specifically to an invitation to look at seeing more closely, and to see ourselves looking in ways that matter.

In the background is a provocative set of ideas about sight. Martin Jay, in Downcast Eyes, reminded us that throughout history there have been radically different understandings of the world, the subject, and the way that seeing mediates the two — understandings in which the very act of looking was conceived as participation rather than detachment. The ancient Greek theory of extramission offers a particularly useful provocation here.

David Lindberg in Theories of Vision presents extramission this way:

For Plato, the coalescence of visual rays and daylight produced an effective optical medium between the observer and the observed, a sympathetic chain linking the visible object and the soul of the observer.  For Aristotle too, even though he discounted the emission of rays from the eyes, said that the medium linking the two offers a connecting link. (99, emphasis added)

What reads today as a surprising intimacy — a soul tethered by light to the things it sees — was for the Greeks embedded in the term theoria itself, after Thea, the goddess of sight. These ideas helpfully describe forms of connectivity that render porous the subject-object divide that modernity hardened into common sense.

What the essays here show, together, is that looking at the world closely brings us closer to that world and each other in it; visual culture is not merely the study of images as external objects, but a practice of relational seeing in which observer and observed are mutually constituted. The essays gathered here enact this claim across a range of objects, methods, and stakes, demonstrating that the negotiation of proximity, affect, and meaning is never only aesthetic, but binds perception to the ethical and material conditions of the world itself. To look carefully, these essays insist, is already to be implicated.

Works Cited