Making visible: Visual Art and Political Thought in a Global Age

Philipp Jeandrée

This paper explores the relationship between artistic forms of image production and tropes of political thinking at a time when traditional ideas of social order undergo profound conceptual transformations and require new forms of self-description. Suggesting that art practice can provide alternative approaches to world politics taking into account speculative, aesthetic and imaginary dimensions of meaning production, I will interpret the genre of the video essay as a form of visual political thinking which depicts the event of global crisis as an encounter with contingency. In reference to the political philosophy of Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière I will emphasise the political relevance of visual representation and show, by example of the work of Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, its potential to critically reflect the epistemological and ontological assumptions upon which our understanding of a globalised world is based.

«Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable.» 1

— Jacques Rancière

Introduction

Our perception of the contemporary, so called ‘globalised’2, world where the complex and

conflictive fabric of economic, cultural and social interdependency becomes increasingly

visible, is strongly influenced by an endless torrent of mediated visual images. The rising

awareness of the conflictive nature of our systems of social order such as sovereignty,

autonomy and territoriality is mostly conveyed through visual media. The experience of what

we may call ‘global crisis’, however, is not a necessarily new phenomenon but foregrounds an

experience of contingency which has penetrated almost every section of social life and can no

longer be convincingly denied or ignored. The starting point of my considerations is thus an

encounter with a world which is experienced as conflictive and contingent and where images

play an increasingly important role for the construction of social meaning. In this regard the

act of seeing and making visible, the realm of the image and the visible, becomes of ever

greater political importance. The increasing academic attention that has been drawn to the

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relationship between the visual and the political can be traced back to two important

developments in political and cultural theory that have emerged since the 1980s. The first one

is a growing interest in the imaginary and its considerable impact on social theory.3 In the

course of this paper I will elaborate further on the role the imaginary plays for modern

political theory. The interest in the imaginary has lead to the insight that imagination functions

not only as a substitute for what exceeds empirical experience but also as «the theorist’s

means for understanding a world he can never ‘know’ in an intimate way.»4 The second

development I am referring to builds on the fast progress and proliferation of communication

technologies facilitating the visual self-representation of society through popular culture, art

practice and mass media in a historically unprecedented manner. The ubiquity of visual

images has contributed to an epistemological and cognitive shift which has revealed that the

image has become an autonomous agent for the construction of social meaning.5 Both

developments are closely intertwined and have thus to be analysed as interdependent

dimensions.

The crucial questions that arise from these developments are twofold. First we have to ask

whether conventional political theory is sufficiently equipped to analyse the complex and

contingent dynamics of global processes considering the cognitive significance of the image

and whether or not extended forms of political interrogation are required; forms of thinking,

which not only build on empirical and analytical methods but which also take into account

aesthetic and speculative approaches in order to interpret global complexities. The second

question is whether at a time when visual media seem to dominate our perception of a

globalised world, a more aesthetic form of political thinking in images can take place in the

realm of artistic practice which lies outside of, but which is not entirely detached from, a

mainly text-based disciplinary configuration of political science. Being aware of the

undeniable importance of pop cultural image production for the ‘global imaginary’ such as

cinema, television, advertisements, etc., the present paper focuses on artistic practices mainly

because of their greater formal freedom and more experimental use of images. Finally, I will

ask whether artistic image strategies can potentially qualify as an extended form of political

thinking by reflecting and elucidating the aesthetic core of our understanding of the political

in general and world politics in particular.

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In search of a tentative answer, the present paper contributes to a growing academic debate

which emphasises the intellectual possibilities of aesthetic approaches to World Politics and

the theory of International Relations (IR). Roland Bleiker has pointed out that the term

‘aesthetic’, in this context, indicates a reflection on the modes of representations used to

investigate the discursive practices of the social. According to Bleiker, aesthetic approaches to

International Relations «embank on a direct political encounter, for they engage the gap that

inevitably opens up between a form of representation and the object it seeks to represent.»6

Therefore, visual-aesthetic practice can contribute to an awareness of the ‘languages’

deployed to make sense of the world and the forms through which the social is represented

emphasising the epistemological dimension of IR theory. Bleiker suggests to «judge insights

into world politics by their aesthetic qualities, that is, by their ability to project a form of truth

that is not linked to an exclusive mode of representation, a form of truth that opens up an open

place.»7 In a similar way, Vivienne Jabri problematises the modernist concept of knowledge in

IR theory and addresses the problems which accompany the «Cartesian and Kantian moments

in IR»8. In this regard the aesthetic approach to political theory is characterised by a concern

about the epistemological constraints and limitations of traditional forms of political thinking

and a critical reflection of their ontological assumptions. Following Michel Foucault, Jabri

defines the ‘Cartesian moment’ as the moment «that identifies modernity’s reification of

‘knowledge’ over the relationship of the subject, indeed the subject’s being, to truth. Such

reification is built upon a distinct modern ontology, that of the rational, unproblematic and

unproblematised subject, one that not only has possession of knowledge, but access to such

knowledge through the vehicles of science.»9 I will show in the second part of this paper that

the ‘Cartesian moment’, visually reflected in the formal construction of Renaissance

perspective, is still the dominating form of visual representation.

Aesthetic approaches to IR theory are increasing considering the visual as the politics of the

every day and particularly television and cinema have become the centre of growing

theoretical attention. Cynthia Weber has interpreted the image strategies of the every day as

forms of «global communication» claiming «that popular visual language is increasingly the

language that amateurs and experts rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacy and,

(...), that much politics is conducted through popular visual culture.»10 I follow Weber in her

demand to take visual language as «the language of contemporary popular culture» seriously

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and to consider it «vital for understanding global politics». However, I will approach visual

culture, and in particular artistic image strategies, not only as an object of study, as the «inside

of the everyday», but rather as a form of thinking in images which problematises and

questions the processes of representations through which, as Frank Ankersmit has aptly

pointed out, political reality comes into existence.11 Michael J. Shapiro has analysed films

from a Deleuzian perspective engaging in cinema’s contribution to sympathetic as well as

critical political thinking about the modern world. According to Shapiro, thinking means in

the present context «resistance to the dominant modes of representing the world, whether

those representational practices function as mere unreflective habit or as intentionally

organized, systematic observation.»12 Following Deleuze, Shapiro argues that cinema’s

critical capacity emerges from de-privileging «the directionality of centred commanding

perception» and it allows «the disorganised multiplicity that is the world to emerge.»13 If

cinema’s critical ability is to show the limitations of a «single locus of perception», visual

forms of communication can be used to address and problematise the epistemological

assumptions underlying the models and concepts of social meaning production. In the present

essay, however, I will try to go one step further. If we are to take visual forms of

communications not only serious as fields of political investigations but also as a form of

political thinking in its own right, categories are needed through which the political (or

critical) quality of a given trope of visual representation can be assessed. Or to put it

differently: What can qualify a given form of visual representation as political? Being aware

of the too general formulation of the problem at hand, I will make a tentative suggestion of

how the political can be defined in visual terms and be used as an analytical tool for further

investigations into the representations of world politics.

My research follows the question whether visual art practice can qualify as a form of political

thinking in images that is able to critically reflect the close relationship between hegemonic

forms of visuality and political science as an academic discipline and eventually use

multilayered approaches to understand the imaginary, aesthetic and speculative dimensions

which constitute the political in contemporary global developments. In a sense, this endeavour

ties in with, and can be regarded as an extension of, Claude Lefort’s project «to understand

the political dimension of modern society»14. Lefort suggests that «if we are to reinterpret the

political, we must break with scientific points of view in general and with the point of view

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that has come to dominate what are known as the political sciences (...).»15 Even though I

hesitate to follow Lefort’s ambitious task all the way, I will try to advocate the

acknowledgement and importance of visual-aesthetic forms of political thinking situated

outside text-based academic discourses. In the following I will first outline the theoretical

implications of conceptualising the political in visual terms and secondly, following Shapiro, I

will examine the problems and opportunities of artistic image production which emerge from

any attempt to resist «the dominant modes of representing the world».

The imagination of the social and the «distribution of the sensible»

The image as a medium of political representation and a mode of social imagination is a key

element of modern political thought since early modern times when social structures were no

longer perceived as a fixed model of a divine cosmological order. In this regard the thought of

Niccolò Machiavelli constitutes a turning point in the theoretical understanding of the

political in modern terms. Recognising conflict as the nature of the social and the driving

force behind all forms of political thinking, Machiavelli realised that the transformation from

a civil society into a political society is performed by processes of representation and

imagination, subsuming the populace under the unifying image of a sovereign ruler. However,

from a democratic point of view the role of the image in political thinking is no longer a

merely unifying one. In his interpretation of Machiavelli’s work, Claude Lefort points out that

Machiavelli has conceptualised for the first time the political in a modern sense that is to say

as a field of conflicting interests that can not be grounded on a theological foundation. As we

will see, the image of the sovereign (the people), which is the constant self-representation of

society to itself, becomes crucial for democratic society which is according to Lefort «a

society without a body, (...) a society which undermines the representation of an organic

totality.»16 A society which lacks an ultimate metaphysical basis is no longer identical with

itself and thus has to be constituted upon its own self-reflection. In modern democracy, where

«the locus of power becomes an empty space»17, the image of the people becomes an essential

and necessary substitute to fill an institutionalised void. From democracy’s self-understanding

as ‘deficient being’ which is in constant need of its own imagination as complementary self-

representation we can derive a strong ethical position emphasising the essential necessity of

discursive openness. The acceptance of the social as contingent and conflictive field, is not

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only the condition for the necessity of society’s symbolic self-representation but for political

thinking in general. As a mental concept of the social, which is the imaginary identity of the

body politic, the image of the people finds its correspondence in the countless variations of

material image production of the mass media, fine arts and popular culture which all share in

the symbolic formation of society. The role of the various image strategies in modern

democracy is not the display of a given authority but the constant reminder that the

negotiation of its appearance is its very essence.

The task of modern (that is secular) politics and political thinking is thus to constantly

compensate for the missing ground of the social substituting the former transcendent identity

of the body politic with the speculative certainties of the social imaginary. Cornelius

Castoriadis has suggested that the social imaginary provides the necessary answer to the

questions of collective identity and agency without which «no human world, no society, no

culture»18 would be possible. Hence the social imaginary is capable of providing an answer to

the question of collective identity which cannot be provided by empiricism or rationality

alone. Social imaginary significations are described by Castoriadis not as mere individual

imaginations but as social imaginaries for they «are a creation of the social imaginary and

amount to naught if they are not shared, partaken of by that anonymous, impersonal collective

which is what society also always is.»19 For our purposes it is important to emphasise the

discursive immanence of those significations for they do not belong to something outside of

society, neither are they given, nor immutable but a social construct made of shared ideas and

images. The social imaginary is thus a way of thinking the self-institution of society and all its

systems of order. This self-institution of society bestows an autonomous character to it by

preventing its absolute closure. The dynamic and erratic character of the social imaginary

enables a constant negotiation of society’s institution(s) and thus unfolds, according to

Castoriadis, its democratic potential. «Calling into question the institution of society, the

representation of the world and the social imaginary significations it bears is tantamount to

creating what we call democracy and philosophy.»20 Therefore I consider the concept of the

social imaginary a core concept when discussing the critical potential of political thinking in

images. The social imaginary has not only a pivotal function for the creation of the social and

thus provides not only constructive means by which social institutions are created, but it

simultaneously provides the means by which they can be questioned and challenged.

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Similar to Castoriadis, Charles Taylor defines the social imaginary as essential praxis for the

construction of the social and describes it as «something much broader and deeper than the

intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality.» For our

purpose it is vital, however, that the social imaginary is «often not expressed in theoretical

terms, but is carried in images, stories and legends.»21 The image can thus be identified as a

central mode of social self-definition, permitting us to perceive society as imagined totality

and thus to bridge in an operational manner its unfinished and processual character.

On a global scale Arjun Appadurai describes the social imagination as «social practice» which

plays a key role for all «global cultural processes». Appadurai has pointed out that «the

imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (...), and a form

of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of

possibilities.»22 Even though I am not sharing Appadurai’s overall optimistic evaluation of the

egalitarian potential of new technologies in a globalised world, I will adopt his idea of

disjunct «landscapes» - image strategies and «perspectival constructs» that characterise the

global imagination as social practice. Social imagination is thus not only a means to support

the operational concept of society but also an important tool for the creation of social meaning

and the perpetual reconstitution of society in a global age. Appadurai puts it: «The

imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key

component of the new global order.»23 If we connect the idea of social imagination to Lefort’s

concept of ‘the missing ground of the social’, the conceptual forms of the political can be

complemented with the dimension of social imagination: both concepts are not only unified in

the contemporary grounding of the social and the partial fixation of the endless possibilities of

discursive practices, but also in the provisional character and the ultimate failure of their

endeavours. Important for my argument is that global imagination, which means the visual

conception of the world and its ordering structures as totality, is able to partially bridge the

conceptual impossibility of society and that social imagination is able to open up continuously

changing fields of agency. If we acknowledge that the social imaginary opens up dimensions

of political contestation and agency we have to specify what the conditions for those forms of

agency are, or to put it differently: what are the conditions for participating in the practice of

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social imagination? A tentative answer can be found in the thought of Jacques Rancière whose

work has significantly contributed to the acknowledgement of the aesthetic nature of politics.

Famously, Rancière characterises politics as a «distribution of the sensible»24 tracing political

participation and exclusion back to individual sensual perception: «The distribution of the

sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what

they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.»25 The conflictive

nature of the social which for Lefort is the source of all political activity and the cause for a

constant rearrangement of society’s symbolic order, is thus reflected in individual sensual

perception and not least in the realm of the visual. If according to Lefort democracy has to be

understood as a political phenomenon characterised by the «institutionalisation of conflict»,

we also have to be aware of this conflict within existing forms of visuality and modes of

representation. The conflictive potential of the visual results from the attempt of ‘the police’

in the Rancièrian sense (which can take on the guise of mass media, news coverage,

commercial entertainment, etc.) to render visual perception ‘natural’ whereas the political can

be understood as an interruptive moment which distorts conventional forms of representation

and modes of visibility. If critical political thinking in images means to contest dominant

forms of representing the world, in the next step I will point at the challenges of visual forms

of contestation and interruption and will make a suggestion about how the political dimension

of visual representation can be defined.

The politics of vision:

«Scopic Regimes», «Cartesian Perspectivalism» and «the World as Picture»

In the following I will limit my interpretation of Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the

sensible to the distribution of the visible which I will refer to as the politics of vision. It is

important to state that the ‘distribution of the visible’, of what can be seen and what remains

invisible, does not only describe an ethical condition of exclusion and participation but just as

much an epistemological disposition. In order to clarify the epistemological dimension of the

politics of vision, I would like to introduce two related terms which seem to be essential in

this context. The first one is coined by semiologist and film critic Christian Metz. Metz has

addressed the way in which we visually perceive and represent our world at any given time as

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scopic regime26 referring to hegemonic forms of vision and dominant configurations of the

distribution of the visible. Important for the analysis of the impact of images on political

thought is thus to identify the dominant scopic regime(s) at a certain point of time, to disclose

their historic conditions (including the historicity of our current concepts of vision) and to

conceptualise alternative forms of perception and representation. The second term was

conceived by art historian Hal Foster who described the hegemonic scopic regime of

modernity as Cartesian perspectivalism, a combination of Cartesian rationality and

Renaissance perspective.27

I consider it useful to discuss the latter concept in some length here, since it has a significant

impact on the visual cultures of modernity and, as I will try to show, on the social sciences as

an academic discipline. The construction of perspective as one of the core features of modern

vision has notable consequences not only on how we see the world but also on how we make

sense of it: «Perspective is not important because it shows how we ‘really’ see, (...), but

because it allows us to order and control what we see.»28 The concept of a distant observer

who establishes himself as a perceptive subject in opposition to an inert and fixed object turns

the world into a picture corresponding to “a subject willed to mastery.”29 Martin Jay rightly

points out that the emergence of Cartesian perspectivalism marks a point in the history of

thought when «the natural world was transformed through the technological world view into a

‘standing reserve‘ for the surveillance and manipulation of a dominating subject.»30 In The

Age of the World Picture Martin Heidegger famously defines this «conquest of the world as

picture» as the «fundamental event of modernity».31 But what impact does the construction of

visual perspective have on modern political thinking?

Let us first clarify the political implications of Cartesian perspectivalism before we discuss its

critique and eventually look at alternative forms of vision by example of artistic strategies. In

the context of political thinking Cartesian perspectivalism is not only associated with

practices of surveillance and manipulation but also with the attempt to conceal existing

configurations of power. That means that social visibility and invisibility, social participation

and exclusion, is predominantly not represented in the context of its socio-historical

conditions but rather as an order that appears to correspond to a ‘natural’ vision. This

assumption indicates, however, that the main task for political examination regarding the use

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of images would be to reveal the workings of power underneath a surface of the visible and to

separate the regimes of visuality from the conditions of political thinking. But if we assume

an intrinsic proximity between seeing and thinking the political in contemporary times, we

have to find a different approach to this problem.

Martin Jay articulates the ambiguity of Cartesian perspectivalism regarding the political by

outlining its two main implications. The first implication is based on Heidegger’s argument

which parallels the modern transformation of the world into an image and the emergence of a

worldview (Weltbild) with the birth of the individual subject that strives to master a world of

objects. Thus the perspectivalist regime became associated «with a certain notion of an

isolated bourgeois subject, a subject that fails to recognise its corporality, its intersubjectivity,

its embeddedness in the flesh of the world.»32 This association includes a strong critique of

(positivist) science reflecting a way of thinking which depends on the illusion of an objective

distance between world and autonomous subject. However, the political implications of

Cartesian perspectivalism reach further. Martin Jay points out that there is also a certain

emancipatory moment in the modern perspectival regime which appears as multi-perspectival

view of the world in which the beholder experiences him- or herself as individual perceptive

subject. In summary it can be said, therefore, that the political implications of Cartesian

perspectivalism reach, on the one side, from the detached and self-contained individual trying

to found its own existence on a positivistic worldview, to the free floating multi-perspectival

approaches of relativism on the other. What kind of alternative modes of representation can

then be derived from the concept of Cartesian perspectivalism and how can both the closure

of positivism as well as the arbitrariness of relativism be avoided?

Cartesian perspectivalism has been much criticised during the course of the 20th century not

only on epistemological grounds for its proximity to positivist science, but also in aesthetic

terms by various avant-garde movements (since the emergence of Cubism, Constructivism,

Futurism, Dada, etc.). However, Jonathan Crary has shown that it is aesthetically almost

impossible to aesthetically overcome the concept of Cartesian perspectivalism since it

basically builds the backdrop before which avant-garde practises are possible. Crary writes:

«(...) the essential continuity of mimetic codes is a necessary condition for the affirmation of

an avant-garde breakthrough.»33 That means that every visual form of representation which

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tries to contest the «scopic regime of modernity» already accepts its normative aspiration ex

negativo - either consciously or unconsciously. Avant-garde techniques aiming at the

denigration of perspective and the contestation of its epistemological assumptions are only

noticeable against the backdrop of normalised modes of vision. That is to say that even the

challengers of perspectivalism cannot entirely escape its logic. We have thus to be aware of

the enmeshment of the still dominant regime of Cartesian perspectivalism with most

variations of visual contestation and avant-garde practice demonstrating the difficulties that

characterise the attempt to change any scopic regime. But how can the political as a distorting

or interruptive moment be defined in visual terms if we are to accept that visual avant-garde

practices are just a reaffirming gesture towards a hegemonic regime of vision? Is it really

necessary to abandon Cartesian perspectivalism altogether or can it be used in a constructive

way to offer new perspectives for contemporary political thinking?

I do not want to argue here in favour of a naive reconstitution of the perspectivalist regime but

I also pointed out the difficulties accompanying the attempt to abandon it altogether. A

possible solution could thus be found in the emancipatory character of the perspectivalist

regime. Even if Martin Jay does not elaborate further on this point I would like to make two

suggestions of how the still dominant perspectivalist regime can be used to interrogate global

phenomena in visual terms. The first suggestion is a diversification and multiplication of

existing perspectival fields of vision. In a Rancièrian sense that would mean to extent the

possibilities of what can be seen, whose voice is heard and whose story told. This can be

regarded as the democratic potential of perspectivalism’s emancipatory character. The second

possibility is the operative use of the perspectival regime under the awareness of its historical

conditions and contingent nature. This self-reflexive potential of Cartesian perspectivalism is

useful for a distanced and ordering way of political thinking but one that does not claim any

form of ‘natural’ representation as a point of reference.

My tentative suggestion here is that aesthetic practices can contribute to such an alternative

form of political thinking by problematising the processes of representation and by

acknowledging «that a political event cannot determine from what perspective and in what

context it is seen.»34 By reflecting on its modes of representation art practice can offer such an

alternative visual access to the social world and thus approaching a truth in the Heideggerian

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sense which is neither instrumental nor appropriating. But unlike Heidegger one could argue

that it is the aesthetic quality of art which offers a different epistemological truth in the

attempt to represent society to itself. Contemporary art practice and self-reflexive forms of

documentation contribute to alternative forms of political thought. They offer a form of

thinking which recognises the central role of the image for thinking the political, the forms

and structures of the symbolic order that characterise the social in modern terms. Artistic

practice as methodology for social research can offer additional dimensions of knowledge

production which add to empirical-analytical concepts dimensions of aesthetic, imaginary and

speculative approaches to the world. All these layers of knowledge are essential for an

adequate understanding of the complex interdependencies of a globalised world that exceeds

to a great extent the possibilities of empirical or quantifiable knowledge. Therefore the

political quality of contemporary image strategies is not only a matter of content but also one

of aesthetic form critically reflecting ontological assumptions and concepts of epistemology.

These image strategies lie beyond the image as appropriating tool of mastery and perspectival

relativism. Rather, their aesthetic form points at the contingent nature of the social and thus

offers a democratic multi-perspectival form of vision and an awareness of its own symbolic

disposition. Contemporary visual art reveals its political character through a form of self-

questioning about the role of the artistic or scientific observer and its impact on the

distribution of the sensible, on what can be seen and how it is depicted.

In the following, I will try to illustrate my theoretical considerations with the video essays of

Swiss artist Ursula Biemann35 interpreting her work through the lens of political theory. This

interpretation, so I hope, can show the shared theoretical and philosophical basis between so

called «post-foundational political thought»36 and the image strategies of the video essay and

help to clarify the notion of the political in a visual context. The video essay is a form of

visual art which is at the same time artistic, theoretical and political. As I will show the

strength of this genre lies in its distinct aesthetic strategy which stems from a strong

involvement in theoretical concerns and their mediation through a visual language.

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The Video Essay as Artistic Strategy or Critical Political Thinking in Images

The video essay is a type of film which is simultaneously motivated by artistic, theoretical

and political considerations and which has developed autonomous aesthetic strategies for the

visual mediation of social complexity. The video essay seems to be a promising genre for

investigating the relationship between the political and the visible because it reflects many

problems we encounter in contemporary political thought: it refers to a reality that is

constructed rather than given, it hints to the abundance of social meaning and the absence of

an ultimate ground and finally it constitutes an imaginary space which reflects a mediated

perception of the world and its social orders. In an era of global dynamics where great parts of

the social imaginary are based on a shared visual experience through the consumption of

mediated images, the video essay constitutes a form of visual political theory questioning and

analysing the thinking of a world which is perceived through a great extent through media

images. Therefore, I treat the video essay in my research as a visual method of interrogation, a

form of political thinking in images drawing attention to the use of images in the media and

the political potential of alternative (artistic) image strategies.

The origin of the literary form of the essay can be traced back to 16th century France. In her

writings on Chris Marker, Nora Alter notes that the term ‘essay’ refers to a tradition of

personal reflection and investigation prominently represented in the work of French writer

Michel de Montaigne. She writes: «To essay, within the French tradition at the time, meant ‘to

assay‘, ‘to weigh’, as well as ‘to attempt’, suggesting an open-ended, evaluative, and

speculative search.»37 In a Montaignian sense the word essay means thus a testing of ideas

and to fathom one’s own subjectivity against the backdrop of a social structure. «The

Montaignian essay was a wide-ranging form of cognitive perambulation and meditation that

reflected upon fundamental questions of life and human frailty, tensions, and overlaps

between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ and their consequences for social order and disorder.»38 The essay

constitutes a form of thinking which is at the same time aesthetic and political and derives its

critical potential from a fine-tuned interplay between form and content.

The video essay as aesthetic form emerged at the beginning of the 1980s as post-structuralist

cinematographic practice and continues the literary tradition with visual means. However, the

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video essay as an «in-between genre» (Biemann) situates itself somewhere between

documentary video and video art and falls through conventional categories of film: «For a

documentary they are seen as too experimental, self-reflexive and subjective, and for an art

video they stand out for being socially involved or explicitly political.»39 However, what

exactly constitutes the political character of the essay in its visual form has not yet been made

explicit and needs further clarification. I will use Biemann’s films to illustrate the role that

visual artistic practice plays for the imagination of the global condition and how the work of

the social imaginary has to be considered highly political in a world where the conflictive

nature of the political is so closely linked to its visibility. In this regard the work of Ursula

Biemann has to be located in the grey area between artistic practice and theoretical analysis

and thus functions as a visual form of political theory. Her films address the underbelly of

globalisation and focus on political issues regarding migration, free trade zones, virtual

communication and borders. My argument here is that the political character of Biemann’s

work does not stem exclusively from her occupation with topics which are conventionally

associated with politics such as territoriality, sovereignty or citizenship but just as much

emerge from a certain visual language as an act of making visible. To illustrate my argument, I

will now briefly discuss Biemann’s video installation Sahara Chronicle from 2006/07.

Sahara Chronicle encompasses twelve short videos documenting the present subsaharan

migration to Europe. The work is conceptualised as a video installation consisting of a dozen

of monitors and screens. The onlooker is not able to see all the films and monitors

simultaneously, since any decision in favour of one film and any focus on one aspect, implies

the inevitable invisibility and unawareness of another. The beholder is left with a confusing

complexity which purposefully reflects the topic at hand. Biemann tries to contrast

conventional media coverage of the topic ‘migration’ that aims at the reduction of complexity

rather than at its increase. The visual representations of African European migration is mainly

confined to images of people in crammed boats washed ashore on a European beach in the

Mediterranean blanking out the troublesome journey that lies behind them. Equally complex

as the odyssey migrants from subsaharan Africa have to endure are the circumstances which

forced them to leave their homeland in the first place. From the threats of civil war, to

personal aspiration, to EU fishing policies off the African coast destroying traditional fishing

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grounds of local fishermen, the reasons why people take on the burden of trans-saharan

migration are as versatile as their personal fates.

Being a visual research project Sahara Chronicle draws on footage material gathered during

three field trips to Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Niger focusing on «the modalities and

logistics»40 of the complex arrangements and connections which constitute the phenomenon

of trans-African migration. Biemann’s research interest is the examination of what she refers

to as «the politics of mobility, visibility and containment», problematising migration in a

kaleidoscopic view that creates a fractured image of current global politics. The relevant

aspect for my argument here is this interrelationship between content and form, the

phenomenon of trans-saharan migration and its aesthetic forms of visual representation. The

various stories told in Sahara Chronicle are not subsumed under one overarching narration

but presented to the viewer as collection of loosely inter-related fragments. In order to make

sense of the installation, the viewer has to read between the lines of the documentary text and

use his or her imagination to fill semantic gaps. Thus, the dominant mode of visual depiction

in Sahara Chronicle is fragmentation and disassembly. The short videos show different

aspects of the invisible migratory system of the Sahara. Video documents include the transit

migration hubs of Niger, Tuareg guides in the Libyan desert, military patrols along the

Algero-Maroccan frontier, a deportation prison in Western Sahara, the surveillance flight of

an unmanned drone over the Libyan desert and so on. Biemann’s preferred way of showing

those videos is in form of installation, whereby some videos are projected and others can be

viewed on monitors, creating a multi-perspective audiovisual environment that can be

inhabited by viewers, in much the same way that migration space is inhabited by the actors

depicted.

The highly complex subject matter of the sub-Saharan migration system is reflected in the

distinct aesthetic character of the installation which is based on non-linear, fragmented and

associative forms of narration drawing on many different sources of knowledge and

perception. In particular the constant play of distance and proximity characterises the

multilayered narrative of Biemann’s work that intertwines visual, textual and audial

components into a complex fabric of social imagination. In this regard her video essay does

not primarily aim at documenting any kind of given ‘global reality’ but rather at the self-

15

conscious organisation of complexities pointing at the incomprehensible abundance of

possibilities of social meaning. It is this form of self-reflexivity, constantly reconsidering the

act of image-making and the desire to produce meaning, that enables the film to approach the

contingent and intangible processes of social and cultural transitions.

With my interpretation of Biemann’s installation I want to tie in with the work of art critic

T. J. Demos and his analysis of artistic documentary strategies dealing with the experiences of

modern globalisation. In his article Moving Images of Globalization he discusses the critical

potential and «political significance» of modes of documentation and the possibilities of

contestation for the «moving image». Demos asks: «Moreover, how might the moving image

today critically engage globalisation - inflecting its meanings, contesting its objectionable

formulations, advancing its positive potential - from within an artistic context, laying claim to

an ambition often discounted by those skeptical of art’s effectiveness and relevance to

collective struggle and political opposition?»41 I consider this question crucial and hope to

find a tentative answer in the concept of discourse theory which can help to reveal the

«political significance» of the moving image not only regarding its content but just as much in

its aesthetic form. The artistic context is understood here as a realm of visual freedom and

creativity which is not restricted to the formal limits of mass media and thus capable of

developing more reflexive forms of representation and eventually alternative forms of visual

thinking. The image strategies of the mass media convey quite often a positivistic necessity of

social order against which artistic images can pitch the visuality of contingency. It is this

aesthetic potential to point at the contingent nature of the social, so I will argue, that

characterises the political significance of the moving image.

The theoretical examination of the video essay in order to articulate a political language of the

visual and to reveal the political qualities of image strategies can be conducted from various

starting points. T. J. Demos refers in his compelling analysis to the thought of Jacques

Rancière and his concept of «the politics of aesthetics» as already discussed in the first part of

this paper. Demos uses Rancière to approach a possible answer to the question of how «the

political stakes» can be defined which are «at the heart» of the aesthetic construction of video

essayistic modes of documentation. I think, however, that the explanation of the «distribution

of the sensible» does not go far enough and for a clearer understanding of the political stakes

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of image strategies we have to go back to the initial post-foundational distinction between

politics and the political.

Rancière too makes the distinction between la police and la politique: la police stands for the

organisation of power, the distribution of the sensible and the creation of consensus; la

politique on the other side is the emancipatory element, the disturbance or interruption that

points at the contingent nature of the police order. That means the simple act of making

visible is a mere act of the police, of shifting the potentialities of experiences from one group

to another, but it is the mode of visibility which can demonstrate the contingency of all forms

of social order and its provisional character. It is the mode of visibility which indicates an

epistemological paradigm shift. La politique as political moment in image strategies and

therefore as indicator of social contingency functions through aesthetic form, such as

montage, collage, split screen, multi-perspectivity, etc. The aesthetic moment of the political

demands a rearrangement of the social order, a new distribution of the sensible. It is a form of

dissensus pointing at the endless possibilities of empirical experiences on the ontic level of

the social and at the same time at the absent ground on the ontological level. Visual art

practice can thus help the onlooker to draw attention to the aesthetic dimension of political

thinking and its intimate relationship with visual perception and modes of vision. In this task

lies the ethical potential of artistic practice as an aesthetic form of political thinking as I will

briefly point out in the following conclusion.

Conclusion

In the course of this paper I have shown that contemporary artistic practice in general and the

genre of the video essay in particular can be understood as a form of political thinking in

images. The strength of aesthetic image strategies is to problematise the depiction of social

phenomena and to challenge not only established forms of visual perception and

representation but also the epistemological assumptions on which they are based. Thus the

video essay is a genre which critically reflects the interrelationship between seeing and

thinking social realities. Biemann’s mode of investigating current geopolitics offers a visual

account of political thinking which does not attempt to apply any kind positivistic or scientific

approach to the analysis and interpretation of the social. Her work shows that visual art

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practice can elucidate society’s need for self-representation and the necessity for negotiating

its symbolic self-description. In this regard, art’s aesthetic and political strength emerges from

its ability to question hegemonic forms of vision. This inevitable necessity for a perpetual

process of social self-description makes clear that the concept of ‘society’ cannot be founded

on any ground outside its own discursive practices. Aesthetic modes of representation and

depiction (e.g. in the form of montage and collage) can point to the contingent ground of the

social; it is this acknowledgement of the general discursive openness of society’s self-

representation where its democratic and ethical potential can be located. However, this does

not simply mean that visual art can pose ‘alternatives’ to conventional political discourses

from ‘outside’ its system. Rather, the discursive dispositions in which political thinking takes

place have to be redefined through the acknowledgement that the relationship between the

visual and the intellectual, the way in which we visually perceive, depict and think of the

world, are inextricably intertwined. Artistic approaches offer thus important extensions to the

methodological toolbox of the social sciences pointing out that the complexities and

uncertainties of global developments require additional forms of knowledge production.

Artistic practices such as video essays have developed forms of political thinking that do

justice to the aesthetic, speculative and imaginary dimensions without which it seems

impossible to make sense of the current dynamics of global geopolitics.

The political and ultimately ethical significance of artistic visual representation does not only

result from rendering visible «those typically excluded from globalisation’s imaginary» but

also from the mode of representation itself. Avoiding to regress to a merely formalistic

argument, I have argued that it is the aesthetic form of representation which can contribute to

a democratic understanding of vision pointing beyond conventional forms of symbolic

signification and hinting at the challenges of conceptualising the social under the conditions

of globalisation. The self-reflexive contestation of Cartesian perspectivalism and the

recognition of the viewers’ enmeshment with his or her environment generates a notion of

solidarity on the part of the beholder who does not perceive himself as a distant observer but

as embedded in the «flesh of the world». This interdependence between the seer and the seen

shows that the global imaginary is a delicate fabric which to a great extent depends on shared

perception, common expectations and collective practice. Artistic image strategies critically

reflect conventional forms of shared visual perceptions (e.g. popular cultures, mass media,

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etc.) and elucidate the necessity to arrange epistemological complexities into tangible

patterns. Simultaneously, they demonstrate the interdependency between the image and the

beholder by reflecting his or her position within any given socio-historical environment. The

contradictions and difficulties of global dynamics do not just appear as remote events on a

screen but are closely linked to the actions of the beholder and the political arrangements he

or she is part of. The political dimension of political thinking in images emerges from the

acceptance of social contingency and the structural insight that the processes of society’s self-

description can not ultimately be accomplished. However, the attempt to establish artistic

image strategies as a form of political thinking is not an attempt to conflate the terms visual

political theory, aesthetics and political philosophy. Rather, aesthetic practices can contribute

to a way of thinking which problematises its own modes of representation and

epistemological premises and thus to reveal the strategies that are deployed to make

phenomena appear natural or universal. Aesthetic approaches to world politics can be

considered as a method drawing attention to the normative framework behind every form of

representation thus extending and intensifying our understanding of the political.

19

Notes

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1 Rancière, Jacques: ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, in: Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, London; New York 2010, p. 37. 2 It shall suffice here to use a textbook definition of the term ‘globalisation’: «A historical process involving a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents.» See: Anthony McGrew: Globalization and global politics, in: John Baylis, Steve Smith, Patricia Owens (eds.): The Globalizations of World Politics. An Introduction to international relations, 5th ed., Oxford, 2011, p. 19. However, the main focus of this paper is the way how these processes of transformation are visually represented and perceived and how the political dimension of these modes of representation and image making can be defined. 3 In contemporary political thought we encounter the central role of the image and the imaginary in various forms: from Cornelius Castoriadisʼ social imaginaries, Arjun Appadurai’s global imaginaries, Benedict Andersonʼs imagined communities, Claude Lefortʼs emphasis on the symbolic dimension of the social (the mise en sens and mise en scène which gives society its form) to Jacques Rancièreʼs concept of the distribution of the sensible which links the possibility of political participation to the ability of sensual perception.4 Wolin, Sheldon S.: Politics and Vision. Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expandededition, Princeton University Press 2004, p. 19.5 A discussion of the political importance of the image has to depart from the conceptualisation of the so called pictorial (Mitchell) or iconic (Boehm) turn (ikonische Wendung) which was proclaimed in the humanities almost twenty years ago emphasising, in response to Rorty’s linguistic turn in the 1970s, the constitutive role images play in the process of creating social meaning. According to Mitchell and Boehm, the image has taken over from language as the main structuring agent of social realities and constitutes now the predominant signification system for social meaning. Even if one hesitates to subscribe to this argument, one has to acknowledge the increasing importance and influence of the visual on the way we perceive, imagine, structure and think of the world. See: Mitchell, William J. T.: Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago 1994, pp. 11 - 34; Gottfried Boehm introduces the concept of the iconic turn (ikonische Wendung) in his seminal essay ‘The return of images’ (‘Die Wiederkehr der Bilder’), in: Gottfried Boehm (ed.): Was ist ein Bild?, Munich 1994, pp. 11 - 38, p. 13. 6 Bleiker, Roland: Aesthetics and World Politics, Basingstoke/New York, 2009, p. 21.7 ibid., p. 47. 8 Jabri, Vivienne: Shock and Awe. Power and Resistance of Art, Millenium - Journal of International Studies, 34, pp. 819-839, p. 828. 9 ibid., p. 826.10 Weber, Cynthia: Popular visual language as global communication: the remediation of United Airlines Flight 93, Review of International Studies, 34, 2008, pp. 137-153, p. 137. 11 For an elaborate discussion of the political implications between mimetic and aesthetic forms of representation see: Frank R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics. Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value, Stanford, CA, 1996. 12 Shapiro, Michael J.: Cinematic Geopolitics, London/New York 2009, p. 5. 13 ibid.14 Flynn, Bernard: The Philosophy of Claude Lefort. Interpreting the Political, Northwestern University Press 2005, p. 6. 15 Lefort, Claude: ‘The Question of Democracy’, in: Democracy and Political Theory, University of Minnesota Press 1988, p. 10.16 Lefort, Claude: ‘The Question of Democracy’, in: Democracy and Political Theory, University of Minnesota Press 1988, p.18.17 ibid., p.17.18 Castoriadis, Cornelius: The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge 1987, p. 146. 19 Castoriadis, Cornelius: Imaginary Significations, in: Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Varnay (eds.): Cornelius Castoriadis. A Society Adrift. Interviews and Debates, 1974 - 1997, New York 2010, p. 48. 20 ibid., p. 60. 21 Taylor, Charles: Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 23. 22 Appadurai, Arjun: Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press 1996, p. 31. 23 ibid.

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24 «Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to sp eak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.» Rancière, Jacques: The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum 2006, p. 13.25 ibid., p. 12. 26 Even though Metz is using the term «scopic regime» in a cinematographic context it can be fruitfully transferred to the realm of the political. See: Metz, Christian: The Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 61.27 For Hal Foster, Cartesian perspectivalism, or what he defines as the «dominant, even totally hegemonic, visual model of the modern era» is characterised by «Renaissance notions of perspective in the visual arts and Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality in philosophy.» Foster, Hal (ed.): Vision and Visuality, Seattle 1988, p. 4. 28 Mirzoeff, Nicholas: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd ed., Routledge 2009, p. 29. 29 Foster, Hal, p. xiv30 Jay, Martin: ‘The scopic regime of modernity’, in: Hal Foster (ed.): Vision and Visuality, Seattle 1988, p. 10.31 Heidegger writes: «From now on the word ‘picture’ means: the collective image of representing production [das Gebild des vorstellenden Herstellens]. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines.» Heidegger, Martin: ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in: The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, New York 1977, p. 71. A similar critique of perspectivalism can be found in: Erwin Panofsky: Perspective as Symbolic Form, London, 1997. 32 Foster, Hal (ed.): Vision and Visuality, Seattle 1988. See Martin Jay’s contribution in the discussion with Hal Foster, Jacqueline Rose and Norman Bryson, p. 24. 33 Crary, Jonathan: Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century, MIT Press, 1992, p. 434 Bleiker 2009 (as note 6), p. 21. 35 Similar conceptions of video essayistic forms of political thinking which try to interpret global dynamics through artistic and speculative approaches can be found in the work of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, Steve McQueen, The Otholith Group and Hito Steyerl. 36 See: Marchart, Oliver: Post-foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh University Press 2007.37 Alter, Nora: Chris Marker, Chicago 2006, p. 18. 38 ibid.39 Biemann, Ursula: The Video Essay in the Digital Age, in: Ursula Biemann (ed.): Stuff it - the video essay in the digital age, Vienna; New York 2003, pp. 8 - 11, p. 11. 40 See: Ursula Biemann: Sahara Chronicle, DVD, 78 min., 2006-2009, (www.geobodies.org).41 Demos, T. J.: ‘Moving Images of Globalization’, in: Grey Room, 37, Fall 2009, MIT Press 2009, pp. 6 - 29, p. 10.