Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

8 Introduction
as “disembodiment” and “cybertheory.” This was a significant departure from
art history as a critical practice before this time, which had been, as Apter
says, concerned with things like “provenance, appraisal, appropriation, [and]
authentication.” This initial disavowal of the digital by art history is one of
the raisons d’être for visual culture; in 1996, scholars trained in visual analysis
as art historians conceded that the digital is far too important to be ignored,
yet many concluded that its particular histories, intertextualities, modes of
materiality and production, technology, and ephemerality either do not exist
or do so in such a way that they exceed the range of critique of traditional
art history or criticism.
However, as it turns out, many other scholars trained in art history spoke
strongly for the relevance and influence of the digital on the field of visual
analysis. David Rodowick, a more sanguine contributor to the October questionnaire,
asserts that the effect of the digital has been to create an “audiovisual
culture” in which objects no longer have a material existence as traditionally
conceived: “The new media inspire visual studies through an implicit
philosophical confrontation. Cinema and the electronic arts are the products
of concepts that cannot be recognized by the system of aesthetics, nor
should they be.” Thus Rodowick posits a shift in the nature of representation
itself, begun by cinema and hastened by new media, which renders
many of Armstrong’s concerns with materiality, history, and production
either irrelevant or radically shifted in orientation. Rodowick, along with
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Coco Fusco, Lisa Cartright, Marita Sturken, and Stuart
Hall, helped to initiate the field of visual culture studies in the academy
through their advocacy, which was multidisciplinary in nature (Mirzoeff is
an art historian; Sturken and Cartright are media scholars; Fusco is a performance
artist, public intellectual, and gender and postcolonial theorist;
and Hall is best known as a cultural studies scholar). They have been very
successful in this task in a relatively short time, so much so that in 2004
Jonathan Sterne could challenge the perceived hegemony of visual culture
approaches to new media by asking “Is Digital Culture Visual Culture?” 11
Since 1996, the date of the questionnaire, visual culture has become a field
that has won some disciplinary recognition: it has a well-respected journal,
the Journal of Visual Culture, which publishes contributions from a wide
range of scholars and departments, and schools or programs at several major
universities. An examination of the early debates in October that initiated
the use of visual culture studies in the academy shows us that despite its origins
in art history and criticism, visual culture has always been preoccupied
with the digital. Lisa Cartright writes that media convergence, an effect of