Visual technology now saturates everyday life. This book presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film, drawing on the examples of Paris and New York.

Visual technology now saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual - now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy - have interpreted this condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. This book presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. A range of theorists - from Baudelaire to Merleau-Ponty, Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida - have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's Arcades. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York - two key world cities since the 19th century - the book analyses how visual technology is revolutionising the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.

Introduction. / 1. Visions of Modernity. / 2. The Disappearance of the World. / 3. Technics of Vision. / 4. Urban Optics. / Afterword: Recognizing Modernity / Notes / Bibliography