Waiting and Seeing

Abstract

This article argues for a Visual Culture of the endless elision of the object and the discourse in their own and each other’s anachronism as historical, on the one hand, and projections of the contemporary subject, on the other. It suggests that we are better to lose ourselves in our involuntary histories than to master them by methodological virtuosity and that we should wait for an enlightenment that will never come rather than engage ourselves in tactical teleologies, all the while writing into the now that waiting is. It criticizes the narrowly canonical basis of Visual Culture, of what wishes to be a discipline at the point of philosophical transformation.