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After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmodernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was growing more ‘liquid’ and ‘lighter’ than before. This essay explores the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize Bauman’s insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the ‘Mercurian’ culture of diasporic Jewish life.

HOW EUROPEANS TAUGHT AMERICAN POLITICIANS TO LEARN TO LOVE THEIR LIES

The recent explosion of interest in visual culture has often been premised on the assumption that distinct scopic regimes or visual practices are relative to the cultures out of which they emerge. Any naturalist hope of locating transcendental visual experience prior to its cultural coding is thus taken to be in vain. This article takes issue with this premise, not by returning to a discredited naturalism, but rather by putting pressure on the culture concept itself. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Bruno Latour, David McDougall and Régis Debray, it argues that visual experience presents a challenge to the belief that it is ‘culture all the way down’. Although it does not claim that arguments for relativism can be entirely refuted, it does conclude that an exploration of visuality shows that grounding them in the alleged incommensurability of cultures is unpersuasive.