Output details

Before the camera

In 2009, when a Visiting Professor at DePaul University Philosophy Department, Dronsfield set up and organized, together with Michael Newman, Prof of Art Writing at Goldsmiths and the Art Institute of Chicago, the inaugural ‘Art Philosophy Symposium’ between DePaul and the School of the AIC. The aim was to bring together philosophers and artists to discuss the shared concern of the relation of image to body. The symposium dealt with nearness and distance, body and voice, mediation and image, and time and memory. Dronsfield presented a paper out of which came this essay. The essay inquires into the affect upon the body and upon knowledge when the camera is brought into the university for purposes of teaching. In particular it examines the presuppositions regarding space and technology underpinning Jacques Derrida’s call for a transformation of the academy with the introduction of the camera, and asks what Derrida means by a ‘knowledge before the camera’, before the advent of the camera and produced in front of the camera. Focusing on an event where Derrida refused to accept student work submitted in the form of video, Dronsfield exposes certain prejudices in Derrida’s justification for doing so which run counter to his philosophy as a whole. The paper is part of an ongoing concern with Derrida’s work as it pertains to the visual, where Dronsfield asks why that work, so influential in philosophy and literary theory, has had relatively little impact in aesthetics and art theory. Dronsfield perceives two related problems with Derrida's work: it privileges theory over practice, and has more affinity with written discourse than with the image. In drawing these out he opens up Derrida’s writing to contemporary art practice and ongoing debates in art theory. The writing of the paper was aided by AHRC Research Leave.