Autumn 1999
Volume 26, Number 1

Among the inherited oppositions that continue to impose limits on reflection about vision and visual culture today, that which opposes the human to the technical is perhaps the most visibly widespread and invisibly pernicious. Indeed, in the current climate of accelerated technological innovation, "a new consciousness of the sense of technical objects" may be necessary if we are to be fully receptive to and engage critically with the new forms and singularities of contemporary visual experience. This new "sense"--which we can postulate as at once already active and necessarily still developing--is perhaps best approached in relation to the kinds of perceptions it makes possible and that I would like to group within the general concept of machinic vision. Machinic vision, as I shall use the term, presupposes not only an environment of interacting machines and human-machine systems but a field of decoded perceptions that, whether or not produced by or issuing from these machines, assume their full intelligibility only in relation to them.

John Johnston, professor of English and comparative literature at Emory University, is the author of Carnival of Repetitions: Postmodernist Theory in the Fiction of Willam Gaddis (1990) and Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of High Technology (1998). He has also translated works by numerous authors, including Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler, and Jean Baudrillard.