Abstract
This research takes the interdisciplinary personal experiences and fate of Lu Xun, a Chinese writer and revolutionary, as the thread, and connects them with how Western visual and medical technologies shaped his individualized way of seeing. It is found that in his act of “abandoning medicine for literature” and his “movements and writing behaviors” aimed at awakening the nation, there was a strong media substrate and an underpinning of “truth”. Different from the past, the supply of visualization technologies first made him a new “observer”, enabling him to obtain new “productivity” of truth or reality. The process in which he internalized the “visibility” of this technical way of seeing into his own visual experience led to the “creation” and utility of the subject. In his literary works after turning to literature from medicine, he often regarded the Chinese people and the nation at that time through the lens of “dissection”, which was full of strong visual “evidence”, and he attempted to restore and represent them. Printmaking, creation, and visual vanguardism, and the X - ray films left after his death became a technical image verifying “truth”. These personal aspects centered around the visual thread reveal the “ruptures” of modernity in the technicalization, especially in the history of vision. They also indicate the deep connection between specific media technologies and the individual’s body politics, biopolitics, and visual politics. Technicalized seeing can serve as a transformation between the body as the subject and the body as the object.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Media technology, Technicalized seeing, New observer, Lu Xun, Realism
