Leanne Gilbertson and Elizabeth Kalbfleisch Doubters. . . tend to be more interested in what they have found than in what they have lost. These figures are not howling in the abyss of the night; they’re out there measuring the stars.1 The essays in this issue of InVisible Culture come out of a conference hosted by the graduate program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in the spring of 2003. The conference, Casting Doubt, invited responses from across North America, and in fact, saw its theme interpreted more widely than we could have imagined. The papers revisited doubtful situations, explored how doubt has been visualized, and reflected upon how we might re-theorize doubt in the current cultural climate. The essays which appear here not only testify to the conference’s success, but more importantly, to the significance of doubt as a subject worthy of sustained inquiry, as a mode of analysis, and as a keystone of visual studies. Doubt’s inherency to visual studies suggests that intellectual work founded on doubt, on uncertainty and skepticism, …

Peter Hobbs Part I: The Lacanian Mirror Machine This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear.1 The subject is an apparatus. This apparatus is something lacunary. . . . In the phantasy, the subject is frequently unperceived, but he is always there, whether in the dream or any of the more or less developed forms of day-dreaming. The subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy.2 Propped up on pillows, the baby is held by a gaze that causes him jubilation. “He is six months, perhaps a year old. He is a girl or a boy, no difference.”3 His mother is holding up a toy or a shiny object, or the photographer has not brought a flash but is using fixed lights and this attracts the child’s attention. Perhaps the child is smiling in response to his mother’s smile. He smiles at his mother and to himself as he recognizes …

Rachel Leah Thompson “An Unseen Iron Grasp” In March 1848, in Hydesville, New York, the two young Fox sisters began to communicate with the spirits. They would later move with their family to Rochester where they would begin the occult communications with the deceased that originate the American Spiritualist movement.1 Initially, the spirits simply announced their presence through mysterious rapping sounds (later revealed to be produced by the cracking of the girls’ toe joints against the floor), which seemed to shower down from the eaves; soon, the spirits began to answer complex questions through an alphabetic – or as one observer noted, “typtological” – code utilizing between one and twenty-six raps.2 Although no pen and paper were used, the so-called “Rochester Rappings,” may perhaps be cited as the first incidence of automatic writing.3 As the Spiritualist movement swept across the nation, mediums developed mechanical means of receiving spiritual messages, including the planchette, oijai board, and more complex devices such as the psychorbrette and Pytho Thought Reader; just as the term automatic implies, such devices sutured human and machine, …

Corey Keller Late into the evening of 8 November 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, a physics professor at the University of Würzburg, made a discovery that would revolutionize science almost overnight. While conducting experiments with cathode rays in his laboratory, he remarked a peculiar glow with highly unusual properties emanating from a nearby fluorescent screen, the source of which he could not identify. The rays were not refractable like visible light, nor could they be magnetically deflected as cathode rays could. Most remarkable, however, was their capacity to penetrate a variety of opaque substances: wood, paper, rubber, and most astonishingly, human flesh. The rays not only passed through these materials, but they made marks on photographic plates placed behind them, leaving a shadowy picture of the interior of the original object. Unable to pinpoint the rays’ physical makeup, Röntgen called them X-rays.1 News of Röntgen’s discovery spread quickly across Europe and the United States. The theme that resounded throughout these reports was the X-rays’ capacity to make visible what was imperceptible to the naked eye. A 16 January 1896 …

Elizabeth Mangini When friends show us the snapshot of a child or grandchild carried in their wallet, we usually don’t ask them to produce the actual person as proof. In fact, the whole point of having that picture is that it may serve as a surrogate for the absent loved one. To this extent, we trust photography. Our trust in photography’s ability to show us things as they “are” is what we call its transparency, since we see “through” the material of the photograph, the chemical emulsion on paper, to recognize that thing or person we know. It is the profound way we perceive a photograph to re-present something as it existed: the sense that the photograph is pointing to an object and saying: “that has been.”1 If we trust in photography’s transparency, in its ability to show us things as they really are, or were, why are most of us pretty certain that the photographs on the cover of the National Enquirer aren’t the real deal? Why do we trust some photographs, yet consciously suspend our …

Carolina Gabriela Jauregui “The worst returns to laughter”                                                                                                                              Shakespeare, King Lear We all have an appetite for seeing, an appétit de l’oeuil as Lacan explains it: it is through our eyes that we ingest the Other, the world.1 And in this sense, what better way to introduce a film on anthropophagy, Ruggero Deodato’s 1979 film, Cannibal Holocaust, than through the different ways it has been seen.2 It seems mankind has forever been obsessed with the need to understand the world through the eyes, with the need for visual evidence. From Thomas the Apostle, to Othello’s “ocular proof,” to our television “reality shows,” as the saying goes: “Seeing is believing.” We have redefined ourselves as Homo Videns: breathers, consumers, dependants, …

Jennifer Gabrys War. The possibility at last exists that war may be defeated on the linguistic plane. If war is an extreme metaphor, we may defeat it by devising metaphors that are even more extreme. –J. G. Ballard, “Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century”1 Leaflets were first deployed as a tactical weapon of war by the Germans during World War I to announce their imminent descent upon Paris [Fig. 1]. From that time forward, paper has rained from the skies during nearly every war (including the Cold War) to persuade the enemy to abandon its position [Fig. 2].2 More recently, a storm of text inundated landscapes in Iraq, where millions of leaflets were routinely dropped by the United States military both prior to and during the war to demoralize soldiers and civilian workers. According to the Guardian, one leaflet warns Iraqis that by repairing damaged communication infrastructure: “‘you are risking your life,’” because “‘the cables are tools used to suppress the Iraqi people by Saddam and his regime, they are targeted for destruction.’”3[Fig. 3] The leaflets, …