The Commitment to Look

Abstract

This article touches on and questions the object of visual studies, word and image relations, historicity, art under visual studies and politics. Exploring in particular the place of politics in visual studies, it outlines some of the ways in which visual studies as a field of inquiry all too often plays lip-service to politics, as it does to history and, more pressingly, as it does to ethics. Resisting an uncritical demand that ethics be introduced and come to occupy central stage in visual studies, the article goes on to interrogate the complex and nuanced ways in which an ethics of vision might still, and necessarily, come to the fore. Attentive to the dangers of such a foregrounding, it nonetheless proposes how such an ethics of vision offers a blueprint for the commitment that lies at the heart of visual studies and thereby can enable the field to make a difference.