Media and Visual Subjectivity: Senses and Mediation

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to understand the formation of media subjectivity in the intermediary domains of visual media practices in India. The article emphasises to examine the historical formation of visual subjectivity while conceptualising forms of various visual-media practices such as painting, photography, cinema, and new media, to argue that the formation of visual media subjectivity is entrenched to the sensorial aspects of the individual and society. Further, it is being argued here that the formation of the visual subjectivity is often mediated by the realms of ‘sensorial continuity and break’ created though our own direct or indirect interactions with various forms of media technologies and their mechanisms of deliverances. Here, the idea of ‘continuity’ points out the way visual subject enunciates their subject position in tune with the secular the narrative structure of modernity, and ‘break,’ on the other hand, indicates an inevitable narrative break proposed by the forms of new media visuality. The paper, therefore, explores the phenomenological existence of the visual subject, in a larger context of technology, media, and sensorial perception, and then points out that the visual subjectivities are constitutive of discursively defined and technologically enhanced entities. They emerge out of a composite site of various practices, involved in technology, media, society, and culture.