Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin-Vision and Visuality

Abstract

This is the second of two volumes of essays that arose from the international symposium, Adventures of Dialogue: Bakhtin and Benjamin, staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. Where the first volume, and Bakhtin-New Approaches, New Contexts, focused on a wide range of topics that might reveal new perspectives on two of modernity's greatest literary and philosophical figures, this volume focuses more specifically on vision and visuality, but, as with the first volume, in the spirit of internationalizing or transnationalizing Benjamin and Bakhtin. For both Benjamin and Bakhtin, vision and visuality are related to the importance of space as a feature of modernity, and a new relativizing (in modes of perceiving simultaneity) of space and time. With time as inevitable progress-time as a single arrowing line, unbroken, continuous, homogeneous--being increasingly questioned in modernist art, literature, and cultural theory, space became an urgent problem for reflection and attempts at illumination. Just as time was becoming heterotemporality, so was space becoming heteroscopia. Historically, space had assumed a brutal assertiveness in the huge territories acquired in European colonizing, as in Africa in the late nineteenth