Steyerl, Hito - The Wretched of the Screen Kopi

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Hito SteyerlThe Wretched of the Screen

e-flux journal



Contents

5 Preface

9 Introduction

12 In Free Fall: A Thought Experimenton Vertical Perspective

31 In Defense of the Poor Image

46 A Thing Like You and Me

60 Is a Museum a Factory?

77 The Articulation of Protest

92 Politics of Art: Contemporary Art andthe Transition to Post-Democracy

102 Art as Occupation: Claims for anAutonomy of Life

121 Freedom from Everything: Freelancersand Mercenaries

138 Missing People: Entanglement,Superposition, and Exhumation as Sitesof Indeterminacy

160 The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawalfrom Representation

176 Cut! Reproduction and Recombination



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Preface

Written over the course of the past few years on avariety of topics, the essays gathered in this bookcan be said to revolve around a remarkably potentpolitics of the image that Hito Steyerl has steadilyadvanced in her work and writing. This is mostclear in her landmark essay “In Defense of the PoorImage,” and extends to “The Spam of the Earth:

Withdrawal from Representation,” an essay onimage-value as defined not by resolution and con-tent, but by velocity, intensity, and speed. If realityand consciousness are not only reflected but alsoproduced by images and screens, then Steyerl dis-covers a rich trove of information in the formal shiftsand aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism.It is a way of coming to terms with capitalism’simmaterial and abstract flows by identifying a clearsupport structure beneath it, and releasing a kindof magical immediacy from its material. The digitalimage is not as ephemeral as one might think,because just as a photograph is lodged in paper,the digital image is lodged in a circulatory systemof desire and exchange, which itself relies on a veryspecific economic regime.

For Steyerl, to look frankly at the forms pro-duced by this regime is crucially not to also acceptits techniques of exploitation. Rather, it is to resist acertain temptation to reflect nostalgically on a timewhen things were simpler, better. Her epic “In FreeFall” should make such nostalgia impossible: lookingback to the single-point linear perspective devel-oped primarily in the Renaissance, and accepteduntil today as an objective representation of empiri-cal space, Steyerl shows this to be a total fictionproduced by a Western worldview centered on the

individual subject. The single point, it would seem,



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is not the vanishing point, but the spectator. Thisblows open an entire metaphysics surrounding thepicture plane as a highly unstable space of projec-tion; what emerges is the idea that the poor imageswe see on the internet are not new innovations, butpart of a centuries-long history of sculpting spaceand human consciousness using ideology maskedas objective reality.

Abandoning the safety and certainty provided

by centralized optics fast-forwards us to the pres-ent, where a condition of groundlessness begins todescribe a moment when politics and representa-tion, exploitation and affect, twist around each otherin unforeseen ways, bursting apart at their seams,coming back together, and bursting apart again. Isthis the space that contemporary art inhabits? Inessays such as “Politics of Art: Contemporary Artand the Transition to Post-Democracy” and “Is aMuseum a Factory?,” Steyerl zooms in on the art sys-tem as a vast mine of labor extraction that surviveson the passionate commitment of brilliant women,stressed-out freelancers, and unpaid interns. Are themany abandoned factories that have been turnedinto cultural spaces not the most conspicuous evi-dence that contemporary art serves to absorb theleftover ideological energy of history’s failed politicalprojects? Are they not the new mines for an emer-gent global class of soft labor?

In Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even ifthe hopes and desires for coherent collective politi-cal projects have been displaced onto images andscreens, it is precisely here that we must look franklyat the technology that seals in these aspirations.By undoing the lock, we might encounter the sheerpleasure of movement, of vertiginous uncontrollableflight through the wreckage of postcolonial and

modernist discourses, from their failed promises

and totalizing claims to their unanticipated open-ings. Suddenly, sites of structural and literal violenceare swallowed up in indeterminacy—made availablefor diversion, ready to be cracked open and repro-grammed with playfulness and mischief, affect andcommitment, enchantment and fun.

When we first discussed starting an art journal in 2008, Steyerl’s writing served as a crucialsource of inspiration, and it is fair to say that the

format and approach of e-flux journal would not bethe same without her.

—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

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T h e W r e t c h e d o f t h e S c r e e n

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Introduction

“In a few hundred thousand years extraterrestrialforms of intelligence may incredulously sift throughour wireless communications,” writes Hito Steyerl inher essay “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal fromRepresentation.”

It’s true: in a few hundred thousand yearssomeone from another galaxy may look with pity

upon the agony of our time on this planet takenhostage by the dogma of capitalism. In trying tounderstand what happened and why, this extra-terrestrial intelligence will be astonished by ourincredible mixture of technological refinement andextreme moral stupidity. This book will help theextraterrestrial to find some meaning, or at leastsome explanations.

In 1977, human history reached a turningpoint. Heroes died, or, more accurately, they disap-peared. They were not killed by the foes of heroism,but were transferred to another dimension, dis-solved, transformed into ghosts. The human race,misled by burlesque heroes made of deceptiveelectromagnetic substances, lost faith in the realityof life, and started believing only in the infiniteproliferation of images.

It was the year when heroes faded, transmi-grating from the world of physical life and historicalpassion into the world of simulation and nervousstimulation. The year 1977 was a watershed: from theage of human evolution the world shifted to the ageof de-evolution, or de-civilization. What had beenbuilt through labor and social solidarity began to bedissipated by a rapid and predatory process of de-realization. The material legacy of the modern con-flictive alliance between the industrious bourgeois

and industrial workers—in public education, health



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care, transportation, and welfare—was sacrificedto the religious dogma of a god called “the markets.”

In the second decade of the twenty-firstcentury, the post-bourgeois dilapidation took thefinal form of a financial black hole. A drainage pumpstarted to swallow and destroy the product of twohundred years of industriousness and collectiveintelligence, transforming the concrete reality ofsocial civilization into abstractions—figures,

algorithms, mathematical ferocity, and accumula-tion of nothing.The seductive force of simulation transformed

physical forms into vanishing images, submittedvisual art to viral spreading, and subjected languageto the fake regime of advertising. At the end of thisprocess, real life disappeared into the black holeof financial accumulation. What is not totally clearat the moment is this: What happened to subjectiv-ity, to sensibility and the ability to imagine, to createand to invent? Will the extraterrestrials find thatthe humans were, in the end, still able to come out ofthe black hole, to invest their energy in a new creativepassion, in a new form of solidarity and mutuality?

This is the question Hito Steyerl’s book asks,while also trying to say something about the pos-sibilities to come, to show some traces of a possiblefuture.

History has been replaced by the endlessflowing recombination of fragmentary images.Political awareness and political strategy have beenreplaced by the random recombination of franticprecarious activity. And yet, a new form of intel-lectual research is emerging, and artists are lookingfor a common ground from which to understandthese changes. As the philosopher who foresaw thedestruction of the future said: “But where danger

threatens / That which saves from it also grows.”1

It was in the 1990s, the decade of crazyacceleration when the black hole began to form,that Net culture and recombinant imaginationemerged from the ashes of visual art reduced toimaginary spam, and intermingled with mediaactivism. In the swirl of de-realization a new formof solidarity started to emerge.

Hito Steyerl’s essays in this book are a sort ofreconnaissance mission, a cartography in the mak-

ing of the wasteland of the frozen imagination, butalso a cartography of the emerging new sensibility.From this cartography we will know where to moveforward to discover a new form of activity that musttake the place of art, of politics and of therapy, andthat must mix these three different forms into a pro-cess of reactivating sensibility, so that humankindmay become capable of recognizing itself again.

Will we succeed in this discovery? Will we beable to find the way out from the present darknessand confusion of dogma and falseness? Will we beable to escape the black hole?

At the moment, it is impossible to say—wedon’t know if there is hope beyond the black hole,if there will be a future after the future. We mustask the extraterrestrial forms of intelligence who,looking down to Earth, will detect the signs of ourbecoming lost, and possibly also the signs of ournew life after capitalism.

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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1Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos,”

in Selected Poems and Fragments,ed. Jeremy Adler, trans. MichaelHamburger (London: Penguin Books,

1998), 231.



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In Free Fall: A Thought Experimenton Vertical Perspective

Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.Many contemporary philosophers have

pointed out that the present moment is distin-guished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume any stable ground on which tobase metaphysical claims or foundational politicalmyths. At best, we are faced with temporary,contingent, and partial attempts at grounding. Butif there is no stable ground available for our social

lives and philosophical aspirations, the conse-quence must be a permanent, or at least intermit-tent state of free fall for subjects and objects alike.But why don’t we notice?

Paradoxically, while you are falling, you willprobably feel as if you are floating—or not evenmoving at all. Falling is relational—if there is noth-ing to fall toward, you may not even be aware thatyou’re falling. If there is no ground, gravity mightbe low and you’ll feel weightless. Objects will staysuspended if you let go of them. Whole societiesaround you may be falling just as you are. And it mayactually feel like perfect stasis—as if history andtime have ended and you can’t even remember thattime ever moved forward.

As you are falling, your sense of orientationmay start to play additional tricks on you. The hori-zon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and youmay lose any sense of above and below, of beforeand after, of yourself and your boundaries. Pilotshave even reported that free fall can trigger a feel-ing of confusion between the self and the aircraft.While falling, people may sense themselves asbeing things, while things may sense that they arepeople. Traditional modes of seeing and feelingare shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted.Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types

of visuality arise. H

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This disorientation is partly due to the lossof a stable horizon. And with the loss of horizon alsocomes the departure of a stable paradigm of orien-tation, which has situated concepts of subject andobject, of time and space, throughout modernity. Infalling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around,and superimpose.

A Brief History of the Horizon

Our sense of spatial and temporal orientationhas changed dramatically in recent years, promptedby new technologies of surveillance, tracking, andtargeting. One of the symptoms of this transfor-mation is the growing importance of aerial views:overviews, Google Map views, satellite views. We aregrowing increasingly accustomed to what used to becalled a God’s-eye view. On the other hand, we alsonotice the decreasing importance of a paradigmof visuality that long dominated our vision: linearperspective. Its stable and single point of view isbeing supplemented (and often replaced) by mul-tiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distortedflight lines, and divergent vanishing points. Howcould these changes be related to the phenomenaof groundlessness and permanent fall?

First, let’s take a step back and consider thecrucial role of the horizon in all of this. Our tradi-tional sense of orientation—and, with it, modernconcepts of time and space—are based on a stableline: the horizon line. Its stability hinges on the sta-bility of an observer, who is thought to be locatedon a ground of sorts, a shoreline, a boat—a groundthat can be imagined as stable, even if in fact it isnot. The horizon line was an extremely importantelement in navigation. It defined the limits of com-munication and understanding. Beyond the horizon,

there was only muteness and silence. Within it,

things could be made visible. But it could also beused for determining one’s own location and relationto one’s surroundings, destinations, or ambitions.

Early navigation consisted of gestures andbodily poses relating to the horizon. “In early days,[Arab navigators] used one or two fingers width, athumb and little finger on an outstretched arm, oran arrow held at arm’s length to sight the horizonat the lower end and Polaris at the upper.”2 The

angle between the horizon and the Pole star gaveinformation about the altitude of one’s position. Thismeasurement method was known as sighting theobject, shooting the object, or taking a sight. In thisway, one’s own location could be at least roughlydetermined.

Instruments like the astrolabe, quadrant,and sextant refined this way of gaining orientationby using the horizon and the stars. One of the mainobstacles with this technology was the fact that theground on which sailors stood was never stable inthe first place. The stable horizon mostly remaineda projection, until artificial horizons were eventuallyinvented in order to create the illusion of stability.The use of the horizon to calculate position gaveseafarers a sense of orientation, thus also enablingcolonialism and the spread of a capitalist globalmarket, but also became an important tool for theconstruction of the optical paradigms that cameto define modernity, the most important paradigmbeing that of so-called linear perspective.

As early as 1028, Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (965–1040), also known as Alhazen, wrotea book of visual theory, Kitab al-Manazir . After 1200,it became available in Europe and spawned numer-ous experiments in visual production between thethirteenth and fifteenth centuries, which culminated

in the development of linear perspective. H

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I n F r e e F a l l : A T h

o u g h t E x p e r i m e n t o n V e r t i c a l P e r s p e c t i v e



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Hans Vredeman De Vries, Perspective 39, 1605, copperplate engraving.

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In Duccio’s Last Supper (1308–11), severalvanishing points are still evident. The perspectivesin this space do not coalesce into a horizon line, nordo they all intersect in one single vanishing point.But in Miracle of the Desecrated Host (Scene I) (1465–69), painted by Paolo Uccello, who was one ofthe most ardent experimenters in the developmentof linear perspective, the perspective is aligned toculminate in one single vanishing point, located on a

virtual horizon defined by the eye line.Linear perspective is based on several deci-sive negations. First, the curvature of the earthis typically disregarded. The horizon is conceivedas an abstract flat line upon which the points onany horizontal plane converge. Additionally, asErwin Panofsky argued, the construction of linearperspective declares the view of a one-eyed andimmobile spectator as a norm—and this view isitself assumed to be natural, scientific, and objec-tive. Thus, linear perspective is based on an abstrac-tion, and does not correspond to any subjectiveperception.3 Instead, it computes a mathematical,flattened, infinite, continuous, and homogenousspace, and declares it to be reality. Linear perspec-tive creates the illusion of a quasi-natural view tothe “outside,” as if the image plane was a windowopening onto the “real” world. This is also the literalmeaning of the Latin perspectiva: to see through.

This space defined by linear perspective iscalculable, navigable, and predictable. It allowsthe calculation of future risk, which can be antici-pated, and, therefore, managed. As a consequence,linear perspective not only transforms space, butalso introduces the notion of a linear time, whichallows mathematical prediction and, with it, linearprogress. This is the second, temporal meaning

of perspective: a view onto a calculable future. As

Walter Benjamin argued, time can become justas homogenous and empty as space.4 And for allthese calculations to operate, we must necessarilyassume an observer standing on a stable groundlooking out toward a vanishing point on a flat, andactually quite artificial, horizon.

But linear perspective also performs anambivalent operation concerning the viewer. As thewhole paradigm converges in one of the viewer’s

eyes, the viewer becomes central to the worldviewestablished by it. The viewer is mirrored in the van-ishing point, and thus constructed by it. The vanish-ing point gives the observer a body and a position.But on the other hand, the spectator’s importanceis also undermined by the assumption that visionfollows scientific laws. While empowering the sub-

ject by placing it at the center of vision, linearperspective also undermines the viewer’s individu-ality by subjecting it to supposedly objective lawsof representation.

Needless to say, this reinvention of the subject, time, and space was an additional tool kit forenabling Western dominance, and the dominance ofits concepts—as well as for redefining standardsof representation, time, and space. All of these com-ponents are evident in Uccello’s six-panel painting,Miracle of the Desecrated Host. In the first panel, awoman sells a Host to a Jewish merchant, who inthe second panel tries to “desecrate” it. For this, theJewish merchant ends up at the stakes. Along withhis wife and two small children, he is tied to a pillaron which parallels converge as if it were a targetmark. The date of these panels shortly prefigures theexpulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492,also the year of Christopher Columbus’s expeditionto the West Indies.5 In these paintings, linear per-

spective becomes a matrix for racial and religious H

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propaganda, and related atrocities. This so-calledscientific worldview helped set standards for mark-ing people as other, thus legitimizing their conquestor the domination over them.

On the other hand, linear perspective alsocarries the seeds of its own downfall. Its scientificallure and objectivist attitude established a univer-sal claim for representation, a link to veracity thatundermined particularistic worldviews, even if half-

heartedly and belatedly. It thus became a hostageto the truth it had so confidently proclaimed. And adeep suspicion was planted alongside its claims forveracity from its inception.

The Downfall of Linear PerspectiveBut the situation now is somewhat different.

We seem to be in a state of transition toward one orseveral other visual paradigms. Linear perspectivehas been supplemented by other types of vision tothe point where we may have to conclude that itsstatus as the dominant visual paradigm is changing.

This transition was already apparent in thenineteenth century in the field of painting. One workin particular expresses the circumstances of thistransformation: The Slave Ship (1840), by J. M. W.Turner. The scene in the painting represents a realincident: when the captain of a slave ship discov-ered that his insurance only covered slaves lost atsea, and not those dying or ill on board, he orderedall dying and sick slaves to be thrown overboard.Turner’s painting captures the moment where theslaves are beginning to go under.

In this painting, the horizon line, if distin-guishable at all, is tilted, curved, and troubled.The observer has lost his stable position. Thereare no parallels that could converge at a single

vanishing point. The sun, which is at the center of

the composition, is multiplied in reflections. Theobserver is upset, displaced, beside himself at thesight of the slaves, who are not only sinking but havealso had their bodies reduced to fragments—theirlimbs devoured by sharks, mere shapes below thewater’s surface. At the sight of the effects of colo-nialism and slavery, linear perspective—the centralviewpoint, the position of mastery, control, and sub-

jecthood—is abandoned and starts tumbling and

tilting, taking with it the idea of space and time assystematic constructions. The idea of a calculableand predictable future shows a murderous sidethrough an insurance that prevents economic lossby inspiring cold-blooded murder. Space dissolvesinto mayhem on the unstable and treacherous sur-face of an unpredictable sea.

Turner experimented with moving perspec-tives early on. Legend has it that he had himself tiedto the mast of a ship crossing from Dover to Calais,explicitly to watch the horizon change. In 1843 or1844, he stuck his head out of the window of a mov-ing train for exactly nine minutes, the result of whichwas a painting called Rain, Steam, and Speed—TheGreat Western Railway (1844). In it, linear perspec-tive dissolves into the background. There is noresolution, no vanishing point, and no clear viewto any past or future. Again, more interesting is theperspective of the spectator himself, who seems tobe dangling in the air on the outer side of the railsof a railroad bridge. There is no clear ground underhis assumed position. He might be suspended in themist, floating over an absent ground.

In both of Turner’s paintings, the horizon isblurred, tilted, and yet not necessarily denied. Thepaintings do not negate its existence altogether, butrender it inaccessible to the viewer’s perception.

The question of horizon starts to float, so to speak. H

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aerial views are fully exploited by staging vertigi-nous flights into abysses. One could almost say that3-D and the construction of imaginary verticalworlds (prefigured in the logic of computer games)are essential to each other. 3-D also intensifieshierarchies of material required to access this newvisuality. As Thomas Elsaesser has argued, a hard-ware environment integrating military, surveillance,and entertainment applications produces new

markets for hardware and software.6 In a fascinating text, Eyal Weizman analyzesverticality in political architecture, describingthe spatial turn of sovereignty and surveillance interms of a vertical 3-D sovereignty.7 He argues thatgeopolitical power was once distributed on a planarmap-like surface on which boundaries were drawnand defended. But at present, the distribution ofpower—he cites the Israeli occupation in Palestineas his example, but there could be many others—has increasingly come to occupy a vertical dimen-sion. Vertical sovereignty splits space into stackedhorizontal layers, separating not only airspace fromground, but also splitting ground from underground,and airspace into various layers. Different strata ofcommunity are divided from each other on a y-axis,multiplying sites of conflict and violence. As AchilleMbembe contends,

Occupation of the skies therefore acquires acritical importance, since most of the policingis done from the air. Various other technologiesare mobilized to this effect: sensors aboardunmanned air vehicles (UAVs), aerial recon-naissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes,assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satel-lite, techniques of “hologrammatization.”8

Perspectives assume mobile points of view andcommunication is disabled even within one commonhorizon. One could say that the downward motionof the sinking slaves affects the point of view of thepainter, who tears it away from a position of certi-tude, and subjects it to gravity and motion and thepull of a bottomless sea.

Acceleration

With the twentieth century, the further dis-mantling of linear perspective in a variety of areasbegan to take hold. Cinema supplements photog-raphy with the articulation of different temporalperspectives. Montage becomes a perfect devicefor destabilizing the observer’s perspective andbreaking down linear time. Painting abandons rep-resentation to a large extent and demolishes linearperspective in cubism, collage, and different typesof abstraction. Time and space are reimaginedthrough quantum physics and the theory of relativ-ity, while perception is reorganized by warfare,advertisement, and the conveyor belt. With theinvention of aviation, opportunities for falling, nose-diving, and crashing increase. With it—and espe-cially with the conquest of outer space—comes thedevelopment of new perspectives and techniquesof orientation, found especially in an increasingnumber of aerial views of all kinds. While all thesedevelopments can be described as typical charac-teristics of modernity, the past few years has seenvisual culture saturated by military and entertain-ment images’ views from above.

Aircraft expand the horizon of communicationand act as aerial cameras providing backgroundsfor aerial map views. Drones survey, track, and kill.But the entertainment industry is busy as well.

Especially in 3-D cinema, the new characteristics of H

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Space debris or junk (such as rocket stages, defunct satellites, and explosion andcollision fragments) orbiting the earth.

Free FallBut how to link this obsessive policing, divi-

sion, and representation of ground to the philosoph-ical assumption that in contemporary societiesthere is no ground to speak of? How do these aerialrepresentations—in which grounding effectivelyconstitutes a privileged subject—link to the hypoth-esis that we currently inhabit a condition of free fall?

The answer is simple: many of the aerial views,

3-D nose-dives, Google Maps, and surveillancepanoramas do not actually portray a stable ground.Instead, they create a supposition that it exists inthe first place. Retroactively, this virtual groundcreates a perspective of overview and surveillancefor a distanced, superior spectator safely floatingup in the air. Just as linear perspective establishedan imaginary stable observer and horizon, so doesthe perspective from above establish an imaginaryfloating observer and an imaginary stable ground.

This establishes a new visual normality—anew subjectivity safely folded into surveillance tech-nology and screen-based distraction.9 One mightconclude that this is in fact a radicalization—thoughnot an overcoming—of the paradigm of linear per-spective. In it, the former distinction between objectand subject is exacerbated and turned into the one-way gaze of superiors onto inferiors, a looking downfrom high to low. Additionally, the displacement ofperspective creates a disembodied and remote-controlled gaze, outsourced to machines and otherobjects.10 Gazes already became decisively mobileand mechanized with the invention of photography,but new technologies have enabled the detachedobservant gaze to become ever more inclusive andall-knowing to the point of becoming massivelyintrusive—as militaristic as it is pornographic, as

intense as extensive, both micro- and macroscopic.11

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The Politics of VerticalityThe view from above is a perfect metonymy

for a more general verticalization of class rela-tions in the context of an intensified class warfrom above—seen through the lenses and on thescreens of military, entertainment, and informationindustries.12 It is a proxy perspective that projectsdelusions of stability, safety, and extreme masteryonto a backdrop of expanded 3-D sovereignty. But

if the new views from above recreate societies asfree-falling urban abysses and splintered terrains ofoccupation, surveilled aerially and policed biopoliti-cally, they may also—as linear perspective did—carry the seeds of their own demise within them.

As linear perspective began to tumble downwith the sinking bodies of slaves thrown into theocean, for many people today the simulated groundsof aerial imagery provide an illusionary tool of orien-tation in a condition in which the horizons have, infact, been shattered. Time is out of joint and we nolonger know whether we are objects or subjects aswe spiral down in an imperceptible free fall.13

But if we accept the multiplication and de-linearization of horizons and perspectives, the newtools of vision may also serve to express, and evenalter, the contemporary conditions of disruption anddisorientation. Recent 3-D animation technologiesincorporate multiple perspectives, which are delib-erately manipulated to create multifocal and non-linear imagery.14 Cinematic space is twisted in anyway imaginable, organized around heterogeneous,curved, and collaged perspectives. The tyranny ofthe photographic lens, cursed by the promise of itsindexical relation to reality, has given way to hyper-real representations—not of space as it is, but ofspace as we can make it—for better or worse. There

is no need for expensive renderings; a simple green-

screen collage yields impossible cubist perspec-tives and implausible concatenations of times andspaces alike.

Finally, cinema has caught up with the repre-sentational freedoms of painting and structural andexperimental film. As it merges with graphic-designpractices, drawing, and collage, cinema has gainedindependence from the prescribed focal dimensionsthat have normalized and limited the realm of its

vision. While it could be argued that montage wasthe first step toward a liberation from cinematiclinear perspective—and was for this reason ambiva-lent for most of its existence—only now can new anddifferent sorts of spatial vision be created. Similarthings can be said about multiscreen projections,which create a dynamic viewing space, dispersingperspective and possible points of view. The vieweris no longer unified by such a gaze, but is ratherdissociated and overwhelmed, drafted into the pro-duction of content. None of these projection spacessuppose a single unified horizon. Rather, many callfor a multiple spectator, who must be created andrecreated by ever-new articulations of the crowd.15

In many of these new visualities, what seemedlike a helpless tumble into an abyss actually turnsout to be a new representational freedom. Andperhaps this helps us get over the last assumptionimplicit in this thought experiment: the idea thatwe need a ground in the first place. In his discus-sion of the vertiginous, Theodor W. Adorno scoffs atphilosophy’s obsession with earth and origin, with aphilosophy of belonging that obviously comes pack-aged within the most violent fear of the groundlessand bottomless. For him, the vertiginous is notabout the panicked loss of a ground imagined to bea safe haven of being:



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A cognition that is to bear fruit will throw itselfto the objects à fond perdu [without hope]. Thevertigo which this causes is an index veri; theshock of inclusiveness, the negative as which itcannot help appearing in the frame-covered,never-changing realm, is true for untruth only.16

A fall toward objects without reservation, embrac-ing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any

original stability and sparks the sudden shock ofthe open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deter-ritorializing, and always already unknown. Fallingmeans ruin and demise as well as love and abandon,passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe.Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condi-tion that turns people into things and vice versa.17 Ittakes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy,embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality.

Finally, the perspective of free fall teaches usto consider a social and political dreamscape of radi-calized class war from above, one that throws jaw-dropping social inequalities into sharp focus. Butfalling does not only mean falling apart, it can alsomean a new certainty falling into place. Grapplingwith crumbling futures that propel us backward ontoan agonizing present, we may realize that the placewe are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor isit stable. It promises no community, but a shiftingformation.

1Examples of so-called anti- and

post-foundational philosophy are givenin the preface to Oliver Marchart’sintroductory volume Post-FoundationalPolitical Thought: Political Differencein Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 1997), 1–10. Briefly speaking,such thought, as proffered by thephilosophers under discussion, rejectsthe idea of a given and stable meta-physical ground and revolves aroundHeideggerian metaphors of abyssand ground, as well as the absence of

ground. Ernesto Laclau describes theexperience of contingency and ground-lessness as a possible experience offreedom.

2Peter Ifland, “The History of

the Sextant” (lecture, University ofCoimbra, Portugal, October 3, 2000);see http://www.mat.uc.pt/~helios/Mestre/Novemb00/H61iflan.htm.

3See Erwin Panofsky, “Die

Perspektive als symbolische Form,”in Erwin Panofsky: Deutschsprachige

Aufsätze II,ed. Wolfgang Kemp etal. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998),664–758.

4

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on thePhilosophy of History,” in Illuminations,trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: SchockenBooks, 1969), 261. See htt p://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.

5See Etienne Balibar and Immanuel

Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso,1991).

6The following quote by Elsaesser

can be seen as blueprint for this paper,whose inspiration derives from aninformal conversation with the author:“This means that stereoscopic imagesand the 3-D movie are part of the newparadigm, which is turning our informa-tion society into a control society and

our visual culture into a surveillance

culture. The movie industry, civilsociety, and the military sector are allunited in this surveillance paradigm,which, as part of a historic process,seeks to replace ‘monocular vision,’ theway of seeing that has defined Westernthought and action for the last 500years. It is this means of seeing thatgave rise to a wide range of innovationslike panel painting, colonial seafaring,and Cartesian philosophy, as well asthe whole concept of projecting ideas,risks, chances, and courses of actioninto the future. Flight simulators andother types of military technology are

part of a new effort to introduce 3-Das the standard means of percep-tion—but the development goes evenfurther to include surveillance. Thisencompasses an entire catalog ofmovements and behaviors, all of whichare intrinsically connected to the moni-toring, steering, and observation ofongoing processes, and which delegateor outsource what was once referredto as introspection, self-awareness,and personal responsibility.” ThomasElsaesser, “The Dimension of Depthand Objects Rushing Towards Us. Or:The Tail that Wags the Dog. A Discourseon Digital 3-D Cinema,” http://www.filmmakersfestival.com/en/magazine/ausgabe-12010/the-dimension-of-depth/the-dimesion-of-depth-and-objects-rushing-towards-us.html.

7See Eyal Weizman, “ThePolitics of Verticality,” http://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp.

8Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,”

trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 29, http://www. jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/Mbembe.pdf.

9Dieter Roelstraete and Jennifer

Allen both describe this new normalityfrom different perspectives in very goodtexts. See Dieter Roelstraete, “(JenaRevisited) Ten Tentative Tenets,” e-flux

journal, no. 16 (May 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/137; and JenniferAllen, “That Eye, The Sky,” frieze, no. 132(June–August 2010) , http://www.frieze.

com/issue/article/that_eye_the_sky/.



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10See Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit:

Satellites and the Televisual(Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

11In fact, the perspective of the float-

ing camera belongs to a dead man.Most recently, a dehumanization (orpost-humanization) of the gaze is per-haps nowhere as literally allegorized asin the film Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé,2010), where, for most of the film, a dis-embodied point of view endlessly driftsover Tokyo. This gaze penetrates any

space, moving without constraint andwith unrestricted mobility, looking for abody in which to biologically reproduceitself and reincarnate. The point of viewin Enter the Void is reminiscent of thegaze of a drone. But instead of bringingdeath, it is looking to recreate its ownlife. To this end, the protagonist basi-cally wants to hijack a fetus. But thefilm is also very picky about this proce-dure: mixed race fetuses get abortedin favor of white ones. There are moreissues that link the movie to reaction-ary breeding ideologies. Floating andbiopolitical policing are mixed into acomputer-animated obsession withsuperior bodies, remote control, anddigital aerial vision. The floating gazeof the dead man thus literally echoesAchille Mbembe’s powerful descriptionof necropower: necropower regulates

life through the perspective of death.Could these tropes allegorized in asingle (and frankly, god-awful) moviebe expanded into a more generalanalysis of disembodied hoveringpoint of views? Do the aerial views,drone perspectives, and 3-D dives intoabysses stand in for the gazes of “deadwhite males,” a worldview that lost itsvitality, yet persists as an undead butpowerful tool to police the world andcontrol its own reproduction?

12Paraphrasing Elsaesser’s

notion of the “military-surveillance-entertainment complex.” See http://www.edit-frankfurt.de/en/magazine/ausgabe-12010/the-dimension-of-depth/the-dimesion-of-depth-and-objects-rushing-towards-us.html.

13Assuming there is no ground, even

those on the bottom of hierarchieskeep falling.

14These techniques are described in

Maneesh Agrawala, Denis Zorin, andTamara Munzner, “Artistic Multiprojec-tion Rendering,” in Proceedings of theEurographics Workshop on RenderingTechniques 2000, ed. Bernard Perocheand Holly E. Rusgmaier (London:Springer-Verlag, 2000), 125–36; PatrickColeman and Karan Singh, “Ryan:

Rendering Your Animation NonlinearlyProjected,” in NPAR ’04: Proceedingsof the 3rd International Symposiumon Non-photorealistic Animation andRendering (New York: ACM Press, 2004),129–56; Andrew Glassner, “Digital Cub-ism, part 2,” IEEE Computer Graphicsand Applications 25, no. 4 (July 2004):84–95; Karan Singh, “A Fresh Perspec-tive,” in Peroche et al., Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop, 17–24;Nisha Sudarsanam, Cindy Grimm, andKaran Singh, “Interactive Manipulationof Projections with a Curved Perspec-tive,” Computer Graphics Forum 24(2005): 105–8; and Yonggao Yang, Jim X.Chen, and Mohsen Beheshti, “Nonlin-ear Perspective Projections and MagicLenses: 3-D View Deformation,” IEEE Computer Graphics Applications 25,no. 1 (January/February 2005): 76–84.

15See Hito Steyerl, “Is a Museum a

Factory?”e-flux journal, no. 7 (June2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/71; and on page 60 in this book.

16Theodor W. Adorno, Negative

Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (NewYork: Continuum, 1972), 43.

17Taking the cue from Gil Leung’s

reflection, “After before now: Noteson In Free Fall,” August 8, 2010, http://www.picture-this.org.uk/library/essays1/2010/after-before-now-notes-on-in-free-fall.

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In Defense of the Poor Image



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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality isbad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates,it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview,a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant imagedistributed for free, squeezed through slow digitalconnections, compressed, reproduced, ripped,remixed, as well as copied and pasted into otherchannels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a

JPEG, a lumpen proletariat in the class society ofappearances, ranked and valued according to itsresolution. The poor image has been uploaded,downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited.It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibitionvalue into cult value, films into clips, contemplationinto distraction. The image is liberated from thevaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digi-tal uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance.The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is avisual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generationbastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubi-ous. Its file names are deliberately misspelled. Itoften defies patrimony, national culture, or indeedcopyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index,or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocksthe promises of digital technology. Not only is itoften degraded to the point of being just a hurriedblur, one even doubts whether it could be called animage at all. Only digital technology could producesuch a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretchedof the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production,the trash that washes up on the digital economies’shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, trans-ferrals, and displacement of images—their accel-

eration and circulation within the vicious cycles of

audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are draggedaround the globe as commodities or their effigies,as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or deaththreats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistanceor stultification. Poor images show the rare, theobvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we canstill manage to decipher it.

Low Resolutions

In one of Woody Allen’s films the main char-acter is out of focus.1 It’s not a technical problembut some sort of disease that has befallen him: hisimage is consistently blurred. Since Allen’s char-acter is an actor, this becomes a major problem: heis unable to find work. His lack of definition turnsinto a material problem. Focus is identified as aclass position, a position of ease and privilege, whilebeing out of focus lowers one’s value as an image.The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, isnot only based on sharpness, but also and primarilyon resolution. Just look at any electronics store andthis system, described by Harun Farocki in a notable2007 interview, becomes immediately apparent.2 In the class society of images, cinema takes on therole of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-endproducts are marketed in an upscale environment.More affordable derivatives of the same imagescirculate as DVDs, on broadcast television, or online,as poor images.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks morebrilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic,more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is morerich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats areincreasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes andesthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guaranteeof pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film

as the sole medium of visual importance resounded H

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throughout discourses on cinema, almost regard-less of their ideological inflection. It never matteredthat these high-end economies of film productionwere (and still are) firmly anchored in systems ofnational culture, capitalist studio production, thecult of mostly male genius, and the original version,and thus are often conservative in their verystructure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lackamounted to castration of the author. The cult of

film gauge dominated even independent film pro-duction. The rich image established its own set ofhierarchies, with new technologies offering moreand more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

Resurrection (as Poor Images)But insisting on rich images also had more

serious consequences. A speaker at a recent confer-ence on the film essay refused to show clips from apiece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper filmprojection was available. Although there was at thespeaker’s disposal a perfectly standard DVD playerand video projector, the audience was left to imaginewhat those images might have looked like.

In this case the invisibility of the image wasmore or less voluntary and based on aestheticpremises. But it has a much more general equiva-lent based on the consequences of neoliberalpolicies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neo-liberal restructuring of media production beganslowly obscuring noncommercial imagery, to thepoint where experimental and essayistic cinemabecame almost invisible. As it became prohibitivelyexpensive to keep these works circulating in cin-emas, so were they also deemed too marginal to bebroadcast on television. Thus they slowly disap-peared not just from cinemas, but from the public

sphere as well. Video essays and experimental H

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Public ceremony organized by the mayor of Puebla, Mexico, to destroy pirated DVDsin circulation.



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films remained for the most part unseen save forsome rare screenings in metropolitan film muse-ums or film clubs, projected in their original resolu-tion before disappearing again into the darknessof the archive.

This development was of course connectedto the neoliberal radicalization of the concept ofculture as commodity, to the commercializationof cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the

marginalization of independent filmmaking. It wasalso connected to the restructuring of global mediaindustries and the establishment of monopoliesover the audiovisual in certain countries or territo-ries. In this way, resistant or nonconformist visualmatter disappeared from the surface into an under-ground of alternative archives and collections, keptalive only by a network of committed organizationsand individuals, who would circulate bootleggedVHS copies among themselves. Sources for thesewere extremely rare—tapes moved from hand tohand, depending on word of mouth, within circlesof friends and colleagues. With the possibilityto stream video online, this condition started todramatically change. An increasing number of rarematerials reappeared on publicly accessible plat-forms, some of them carefully curated (UbuWeb)and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).

At present, there are at least twenty torrentsof Chris Marker’s film essays available online. If youwant a retrospective, you can have it. But the econ-omy of poor images is about more than just down-loads: you can keep the files, watch them again, evenreedit or improve them if you think it necessary. Andthe results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgot-ten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2Pplatforms. Clandestine cellphone videos smuggled

out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of

Chris Marker’s virtual home as found in Second Life, May 29, 2009.

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artists’ viewing copies are bartered.3 Many works ofavant-garde, essayistic, and noncommercial cinemahave been resurrected as poor images. Whether theylike it or not.

Privatization and PiracyThat rare prints of militant, experimental,

and classical works of cinema as well as video artreappear as poor images is significant on another

level. Their situation reveals much more than thecontent or appearance of the images themselves: italso reveals the conditions of their marginalization,the constellation of social forces leading to theironline circulation as poor images.4 Poor images arepoor because they are not assigned any value withinthe class society of images—their status as illicit ordegraded grants them exemption from its criteria.Their lack of resolution attests to their appropria-tion and displacement.5

Obviously, this condition is not only connectedto the neoliberal restructuring of media productionand digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of nation-states, their cultures, and their archives. While somenation-states are dismantled or fall apart, new cul-tures and traditions are invented and new historiescreated. This obviously also affects film archives—in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is leftwithout its supporting framework of national culture.As I once observed in the case of a film museum inSarajevo, the national archive can find its next life inthe form of a video-rental store.6 Pirate copies seepout of such archives through disorganized privatiza-tion. On the other hand, even the British Library sellsoff its contents online at astronomical prices.

As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images

circulate partly in the void left by state cinema

organizations who find it too difficult to operateas a 16/35 mm archive or to maintain any kind ofdistribution infrastructure in the contemporary era.7 From this perspective, the poor image reveals thedecline and degradation of the film essay, or indeedany experimental and noncommercial cinema,which in many places was made possible becausethe production of culture was considered a task ofthe state. Privatization of media production gradu-

ally grew more important than state-controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the otherhand, the rampant privatization of intellectual con-tent, along with online marketing and commodifica-tion, also enables piracy and appropriation; it givesrise to the circulation of poor images.

Imperfect CinemaThe emergence of poor images reminds

one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, “For anImperfect Cinema,” by Juan García Espinosa,written in Cuba in the late 1960s.8 Espinosa arguesfor an imperfect cinema because, in his words,“perfect cinema—technically and artistically mas-terful—is almost always reactionary cinema.” Theimperfect cinema is one that strives to overcomethe divisions of labor within class society. It mergesart with life and science, blurring the distinctionbetween consumer and producer, audience andauthor. It insists upon its own imperfection, ispopular but not consumerist, committed withoutbecoming bureaucratic.

In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects onthe promises of new media. He clearly predicts thatthe development of video technology will jeopardizethe elitist position of traditional filmmakers andenable some sort of mass film production: an art

of the people. Like the economy of poor images, H

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imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctionsbetween author and audience and merges life andart. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compro-mised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

In some way, the economy of poor imagescorresponds to the description of imperfectcinema, while the description of perfect cinemarepresents rather the concept of cinema as a flag-ship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect

cinema is also much more ambivalent and affectivethan Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand,the economy of poor images, with its immediatepossibility of worldwide distribution and its ethicsof remix and appropriation, enables the partici-pation of a much larger group of producers thanever before. But this does not mean that theseopportunities are only used for progressive ends.Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make theirway through digital connections as well. Digitalcommunication has also become one of the mostcontested markets—a zone that has long beensubjected to an ongoing original accumulation andto massive (and, to a certain extent, successful)attempts at privatization.

The networks in which poor images circulatethus constitute both a platform for a fragile newcommon interest and a battleground for com-mercial and national agendas. They contain experi-mental and artistic material, but also incredibleamounts of porn and paranoia. While the territoryof poor images allows access to excluded imagery,it is also permeated by the most advanced com-modification techniques. While it enables the users’active participation in the creation and distributionof content, it also drafts them into production.Users become the editors, critics, translators, and

(co)-authors of poor images.

Poor images are thus popular images—imagesthat can be made and seen by the many. Theyexpress all the contradictions of the contemporarycrowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire forautonomy and creation, its inability to focus or makeup its mind, its constant readiness for transgressionand simultaneous submission.9 Altogether, poorimages present a snapshot of the affective conditionof the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as

well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distrac-tion. The condition of the images speaks not onlyof countless transfers and reformattings, but alsoof the countless people who cared enough aboutthem to convert them over and over again, to addsubtitles, reedit, or upload them.

In this light, perhaps one has to redefine thevalue of the image, or, more precisely, to create anew perspective for it. Apart from resolution andexchange value, one might imagine another formof value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread.Poor images are poor because they are heavilycompressed and travel quickly. They lose matterand gain speed. But they also express a condition ofdematerialization, shared not only with the legacyof Conceptual art but above all with contemporarymodes of semiotic production.10 Capital’s semioticturn, as described by Félix Guattari,11 plays in favorof the creation and dissemination of compressedand flexible data packages that can be integratedinto ever-newer combinations and sequences.12

This flattening-out of visual content—theconcept-in-becoming of the images—positionsthem within a general informational turn, withineconomies of knowledge that tear images and theircaptions out of context into the swirl of permanentcapitalist deterritorialization.13 The history of

Conceptual art describes this dematerialization H

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of the art object first as a resistant move againstthe fetish value of visibility. Then, however, thedematerialized art object turns out to be perfectlyadapted to the semioticization of capital, and thusto the conceptual turn of capitalism.14 In a way, thepoor image is subject to a similar tension. On theone hand, it operates against the fetish value ofhigh resolution. On the other hand, this is preciselywhy it also ends up being perfectly integrated into

an information capitalism thriving on compressedattention spans, on impression rather than immer-sion, on intensity rather than contemplation, onpreviews rather than screenings.

Comrade, what is your visual bond today?But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal

happens. The circulation of poor images creates acircuit, which fulfills the original ambitions ofmilitant and (some) essayistic and experimentalcinema—to create an alternative economy ofimages, an imperfect cinema existing inside as wellas beyond and under commercial media streams.In the age of file sharing, even marginalized contentcirculates again and reconnects dispersed world-wide audiences.

The poor image thus constructs anonymousglobal networks just as it creates a shared history.It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translationor mistranslation, and creates new publics anddebates. By losing its visual substance it recoverssome of its political punch and creates a new auraaround it. This aura is no longer based on the per-manence of the “original,” but on the transience ofthe copy. It is no longer anchored within a classicalpublic sphere mediated and supported by the frameof the nation-state or corporation, but floats on

the surface of temporary and dubious data pools.15

By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it ispropelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitchedtogether by the desires of dispersed spectators.

The circulation of poor images thus creates“visual bonds,” as Dziga Vertov once called them.16 This visual bond was, according to Vertov, supposedto link the workers of the world with each other.17 He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamiclanguage that could not only inform or entertain,

but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dreamhas come true, if mostly under the rule of a globalinformation capitalism whose audiences are linkedalmost in a physical sense by mutual excitement,affective attunement, and anxiety.

But there is also the circulation and produc-tion of poor images based on cellphone cameras,home computers, and unconventional forms ofdistribution. Its optical connections—collectiveediting, file sharing, or grassroots distributioncircuits—reveal erratic and coincidental linksbetween producers everywhere, which simultane-ously constitute dispersed audiences.

The circulation of poor images feeds intoboth capitalist media assembly lines and alterna-tive audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot ofconfusion and stupefaction, it also possibly createsdisruptive movements of thought and affect. Thecirculation of poor images thus initiates anotherchapter in the historical genealogy of nonconform-ist information circuits: Vertov’s visual bonds, theinternationalist workers’ pedagogies that PeterWeiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance,the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism,of nonaligned filmmaking and thinking. The poorimage—ambivalent as its status may be—thustakes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied

pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground H

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video magazines and other nonconformist materi-als, which aesthetically often used poor materials.Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historicalideas associated with these circuits, among othersVertov’s idea of the visual bond.

Imagine somebody from the past with a beretasking you, “Comrade, what is your visual bondtoday?”

You might answer: it is this link to the present.

Now!The poor image embodies the afterlife of

many former masterpieces of cinema and video art.It has been expelled from the sheltered paradisethat cinema seems to have once been.18 After beingkicked out of the protected and often protectionistarena of national culture, discarded from commer-cial circulation, these works have become travelersin a digital no-man’s-land, constantly shifting theirresolution and format, speed and media, sometimeseven losing names and credits along the way.

Now many of these works are back—as poorimages, I admit. One could of course argue that thisis not the real thing, but then—please, anybody—show me this real thing.

The poor image is no longer about the realthing—the originary original. Instead, it is about itsown real conditions of existence: about swarmcirculation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexibletemporalities. It is about defiance and appropria-tion just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality.

1See Woody Allen, dir., Decon-

structing Harry , 1997.

2See “Wer Gemälde wirklich sehen

will, geht ja schließlich auch insMuseum,” conversation betweenHarun Farocki and Alexander Horwath,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,June 14, 2007.

3Sven Lütticken’s excellent text

“Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of

Moving Images,”e-flux journal, no. 8(May 2009), drew my attention to thisaspect of poor images. See http://e-flux.com/journal/view/75.

4Thanks to Kodwo Eshun for point-

ing this out.

5Of course in some cases images

with low resolution also appear inmainstream media environments(mainly news), where they are associ-ated with urgency, immediacy, andcatastrophe—and are extremely valu-able. See Hito Steyerl, “DocumentaryUncertainty,” A Prior 15 (2007).

6See Hito Steyerl, “Politics of the

Archive: Translations in Film,” trans-versal (March 2008), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/steyerl/en.

7From correspondence with the

author via e-mail.

8Julio García Espinosa, “For an

Imperfect Cinema,” trans. JulianneBurton, Jump Cut, no. 20 (1979): 24–26.

9See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of

the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans.Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito,and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles:Semiotext(e),2004).

10See Alex Alberro, Conceptual

Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

11Félix Guattari, “Capital as the

Integral of Power Formations,” in SoftSubversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1996), 202.

12All these developments are dis-

cussed in detail in an excellent textby Simon Sheikh, “Objects of Study

or Commodification of Knowledge?Remarks on Artistic Research,” Art &Research 2, no. 2 (Spring 2009), http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/sheikh.html.

13See also Alan Sekula, “Reading

an Archive: Photography betweenLabour and Capital,” in Visual Culture:The Reader , ed. Stuart Hall andJessica Evans (London: Routledge1999), 181–92.

14See Alberro, Conceptual Art and the

Politics of Publicity .

15The Pirate Bay even seems to have

tried acquiring the extraterritorial oil

platform of Sealand in order to installits servers there. See Jan Libbenga,“The Pirate Bay plans to buy Sealand,”The Register , January 12, 2007, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/12/pirate_bay_buys_island.

16Dziga Vertov, “Kinopravda and

Radiopravda,” in Kino-Eye: The Writingsof Dziga Vertov , ed. Annette Michelson,trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995),52.

17Ibid.

18At least from the perspective of

nostalgic delusion.

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A Thing Like You and Me

Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?He got an ice pick, that made his ears burn.

Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?Whatever happened to the heroes?

Whatever happened to all the heroes?All the Shakespearoes?

They watched their Rome burn.

Whatever happened to the heroes?No more heroes anymore.—The Stranglers, 1977

1.In 1977, the short decade of the New Left

violently comes to an end. Militant groups such asthe Red Army Faction (RAF) have descended intopolitical sectarianism. Gratuitous violence, machoposing, pithy slogans, and an embarrassing cult ofpersonality have come to dominate the scene. Yetit is not 1977 that sees the myth of the leftist herocome crumbling down. The figure has on the contraryalready lost all credibility, beyond rehabilitation—even if this will only become clear much later.

In 1977, the punk band The Stranglers deliversa crystal clear analysis of the situation by statingthe obvious: heroism is over. Trotsky, Lenin, andShakespeare are dead. In 1977, as leftists flock tothe funerals of RAF members Andreas Baader,Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan Carl Raspe, The Stranglers’album cover delivers its own giant wreath of redcarnations and declares: NO MORE HEROES. Anymore.

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2.But, also in 1977, David Bowie releases his

single “Heroes.” He sings about a new brand ofhero, just in time for the neoliberal revolution. Thehero is dead—long live the hero! Yet Bowie’s herois no longer a subject, but an object: a thing, animage, a splendid fetish—a commodity soaked withdesire, resurrected from beyond the squalor of itsown demise.

Just look at a 1977 video of the song to seewhy: the clip shows Bowie singing to himself fromthree simultaneous angles, with layering techniquestripling his image; not only has Bowie’s hero beencloned, he has above all become an image that canbe reproduced, multiplied, and copied, a riff thattravels effortlessly through commercials for almostanything, a fetish that packages Bowie’s glamorousand unfazed post-gender look as product.1 Bowie’shero is no longer a larger-than-life human being car-rying out exemplary and sensational exploits, andhe is not even an icon, but a shiny product endowedwith post-human beauty: an image and nothing butan image.2

This hero’s immortality no longer originates inthe strength to survive all possible ordeals, but fromits ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated.Destruction will alter its form and appearance, yetits substance will be untouched. The immortality ofthe thing is its finitude, not its eternity.

3.What happens to identification at this point?

Who can we identify with? Of course, identificationis always with an image. But ask anybody whetherthey’d actually like to be a JPEG file. And this is pre-cisely my point: if identification is to go anywhere,

it has to be with this material aspect of the image,

Ad for David Bowie’s record Ziggy Stardust Manifests to All as published in the pressaround 1972.

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with the image as thing, not as representation. Andthen it perhaps ceases to be identification, andinstead becomes participation.3 I will come back tothis point later.

But first of all: why should anybody want tobecome this thing—an object—in the first place?Elisabeth Lebovici once made this clear to me in abrilliant remark.4 Traditionally, emancipatory prac-tice has been tied to a desire to become a subject.

Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subjectof history, of representation, or of politics. To becomea subject carried with it the promise of autonomy,sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to bean object was bad. But, as we all know, being asubject can be tricky. The subject is always alreadysubjected. Though the position of the subject sug-gests a degree of control, its reality is rather one ofbeing subjected to power relations. Nevertheless,generations of feminists—including myself—havestrived to get rid of patriarchal objectification inorder to become subjects. The feminist movement,until quite recently (and for a number of reasons),worked toward claiming autonomy and fullsubjecthood.

But as the struggle to become a subjectbecame mired in its own contradictions, a differentpossibility emerged. How about siding with theobject for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be athing? An object without a subject? A thing amongother things? “A thing that feels,” as Mario Perniolaseductively phrased it:

To give oneself as a thing that feels and to takea thing that feels is the new experience thatasserts itself today on contemporary feeling, aradical and extreme experience that has its cor-

nerstone in the encounter between philosophy

and sexuality. [...] It would seem that thingsand the senses are no longer in conflict withone another but have struck an alliance thanksto which the most detached abstraction andthe most unrestrained excitement are almostinseparable and are often indistinguishable.5

A desire to become this thing—in this case animage—is the upshot of the struggle over represen-

tation. Senses and things, abstraction and excite-ment, speculation and power, desire and matteractually converge within images.

The struggle over representation, however,was based on a sharp split between these levels:here thing—there image. Here I—there it. Heresubject—there object. The senses here—dumbmatter over there. Slightly paranoid assumptionsconcerning authenticity came into the equationas well. Did the public image—of women or othergroups, for example—actually correspond to real-ity? Was it stereotyped? Misrepresented? Thus onegot tangled in a whole web of presuppositions, themost problematic of which being, of course, thatan authentic image exists in the first place. A cam-paign was thus unleashed to find a more accurateform of representation, but without questioningits own, quite realist, paradigm.

But what if the truth is neither in the repre-sented nor in the representation? What if the truth isin its material configuration? What if the medium isreally a massage? Or actually—in its corporate mediaversion—a barrage of commodified intensities?

To participate in an image—rather than merelyidentify with it—could perhaps abolish this relation.This would mean participating in the material of theimage as well as in the desires and forces it accu-

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is not some ideological misconception, but a thingsimultaneously couched in affect and availability, afetish made of crystals and electricity, animated byour wishes and fears—a perfect embodiment of itsown conditions of existence? As such, the image is—to use yet another phrase of Walter Benjamin’s—without expression.6 It doesn’t represent reality. It isa fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like anyother—a thing like you and me.

This shift in perspective has far-reachingconsequences. There might still be an internal andinaccessible trauma that constitutes subjectivity.But trauma is also the contemporary opium ofthe masses—an apparently private property thatsimultaneously invites and resists foreclosure. Andthe economy of this trauma constitutes the remnantof the independent subject. But then if we are toacknowledge that subjectivity is no longer a privi-leged site for emancipation, we might as well justface it and get on with it.

On the other hand, the increased appeal ofbecoming a thing doesn’t necessarily mean that wehave reached the age of unlimited positivity, whoseprophets—if we are to believe them—extol an agein which desire flows freely, negativity and historyare a thing of the past, and vital drives happilysplash all over the place.

No, the negativity of the thing can be dis-cerned by its bruises, which mark the site of his-tory’s impact. As Eyal Weizman and Tom Keenanremark in a fascinating conversation on forensicsand the fetish, objects increasingly take on therole of witnesses in court cases concerned withhuman-rights violations.7 The bruises of things aredeciphered, and then subjected to interpretation.Things are made to speak—often by subjecting

them to additional violence. The field of forensics

can be understood as the torture of objects, whichare expected to tell all, just as when humans areinterrogated. Things often have to be destroyed,dissolved in acid, cut apart, or dismantled in orderto tell their full story. To affirm the thing also meansparticipating in its collision with history.

Because a thing is usually not a shiny newBoeing taking off on its virgin flight. Rather, it mightbe its wreck, painstakingly pieced together from

scrap inside a hangar after its unexpected nosediveinto catastrophe. A thing is the ruin of a house inGaza. A film reel lost or destroyed in civil war. Afemale body tied up with ropes, fixed in obscenepositions. Things condense power and violence.Just as a thing accumulates productive forces anddesires, so does it also accumulate destructionand decay.

So then how about a specific thing called“image”? It is a complete mystification to thinkof the digital image as a shiny immortal clone ofitself. On the contrary, not even the digital image isoutside history. It bears the bruises of its crasheswith politics and violence. It is nothing like, say, acarbon copy of Trotsky brought back to life throughdigital manipulation (though of course it couldshow him); rather, the material articulation of theimage is like a clone of Trotsky walking aroundwith an ice pick in his head. The bruises of imagesare its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its ripsand transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart,subjected to interrogation and probing. They arestolen, cropped, edited, and re-appropriated. Theyare bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated.Reviled and revered. To participate in the imagemeans to take part in all of this.

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Chuck Welch, Art Strike Mantra, 1991, cassette tape. A mail-art edition developed forthe protest “Art Strike 1990–93.”

4.Our things in our hands must be equals,comrades.—Aleksandr Rodchenko8

So, what’s the point of becoming a thing or animage? Why should one accept alienation, bruises,and objectification?

In writing about the Surrealists, Walter

Benjamin emphasizes the liberating force withinthings.9 In the commodity fetish, material drivesintersect with affect and desire, and Benjaminfantasizes about igniting these compressedforces, to awaken “the slumbering collective fromthe dream-filled sleep of capitalist production”to tap into these forces.10 He also thinks thatthings could speak to one another through theseforces.11 Benjamin’s idea of participation—apartly subversive take on early twentieth-centuryprimitivism—claims that it is possible to join inthis symphony of matter. For him, modest and evenabject objects are hieroglyphs in whose dark prismsocial relations lay congealed and in fragments.They are understood as nodes, in which the ten-sions of a historical moment materialize in a flashof awareness or twist grotesquely into the com-modity fetish. In this perspective, a thing is never

just an object, but a fossil in which a constellationof forces are petrified. Things are never just inertobjects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but con-sist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all beingconstantly exchanged. While this opinion borderson magical thought, according to which things areinvested with supernatural powers, it is also a clas-sical materialist take. Because the commodity, too,is understood not as a simple object, but a conden-

sation of social forces.12

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From a slightly different perspective, mem-bers of the Soviet avant-garde also tried to developalternative relations to things. In his text “EverydayLife and the Culture of the Thing,” Boris Arvatovclaims that the object should be liberated from theenslavement of its status as capitalist commodity.13 Things should no longer remain passive, uncreative,and dead, but should be free to participate activelyin the transformation of everyday reality.14

“By imagining an object that is differentlyanimated from the commodity fetish[...] Arvatovattempts to return a kind of social agency to thefetish.”15 In a similar vein, Aleksandr Rodchenko callson things to become comrades and equals. Byreleasing the energy stored in them, things becomecoworkers, potentially friends, even lovers.16 Whereimages are concerned, this potential agency hasalready been explored to some extent.17 To participatein the image as thing means to participate in itspotential agency—an agency that is not necessarilybeneficial, as it can be used for every imaginablepurpose. It is vigorous and sometimes even viral.And it will never be full and glorious, as images arebruised and damaged, just as everything else withinhistory. History, as Benjamin told us, is a pile ofrubble. Only we are not staring at it any longer fromthe point of view of Benjamin’s shell-shocked angel.We are not the angel. We are the rubble. We are thispile of scrap.

5.The revolution is my boyfriend!—Bruce LaBruce, Raspberry Reich

We have unexpectedly arrived at quite aninteresting idea of the object and objectivity.

Activating the thing means perhaps to create an

objective—not as a fact, but as the task of unfreez-ing the forces congealed within the trash of history.Objectivity thus becomes a lens, one that recreatesus as things mutually acting upon one another.From this “objective” perspective, the idea ofemancipation opens up somewhat differently. BruceLaBruce’s queer porn film Raspberry Reich showsus how by presenting a completely different view on1977. In it, the former heroes of the RAF have been

reincarnated as gay porn actors who enjoy beingeach other’s playthings. They masturbate on pix-elated photocopied wall-size images of Baader andChe. But the point is not to be found in the gaynessor pornness of the film, and certainly not in its so-called “transgressivity.” The point is that the actorsdo not identify with heroes, but rip their images.They become bruised images: sixth-generation cop-ies of dodgy leftist pinups. This bunch looks muchworse than Bowie, but is much more desirable for it.Because they love the pixel, not the hero. The hero isdead. Long live the thing.

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1I tried unsuccessfully to find

production details for Bowie’svideo. I am referring to this 1977version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJmZHRIzhY.

Elsewhere, I have come across anote concerning the 1979 video forMichael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘TilYou Get Enough,” which uses similarlayering techniques to show a tripledMichael Jackson. This technology isconsidered new at this point and isexplicitly mentioned in reviews. Apartfrom that, any psychoanalytic reading

of Bowie’s video would have a ballsuperimposing its specific take onpost-gender narcissism onto the East–West divide (the Berlin Wall indicatedby pantomime!). But this is not myintention here.

2David Riff pointed out the connec-

tion to Andy Warhol’s work, especiallyin Bowie’s song “Andy Warhol” (“AndyWarhol looks a scream / Hang him onmy wall / Andy Warhol, Silver Screen /Can’t tell them apart at all”), and intro-duced this amazing quote to me: “Todesire fame—not the glory of the herobut the glamour of the star—with theintensity and awareness Warhol did,is to desire to be nothing, nothing ofthe human, the interior, the profound. Itis to want to be nothing but image, sur-

face, a bit of light on a screen, a mirrorfor the fantasies and a magnet for thedesires of others—a thing of absolutenarcissism. And to desire to outlivethese desires there as a thing not tobe consumed.” Thierry de Duve, “AndyWarhol, or The Machine Perfected,”trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 48(Spring 1989): 4.

3The concept of participation is

explained in detail in ChristopherBracken, “The Language of Things:Walter Benjamin’s Primitive Thought,”Semiotica, no. 138 (February 2002):321–49. “Participation, which is the‘absence of relation,’ merges thesubject of knowledge, which is notnecessarily a human being, with theobject known.” Ibid., 327. Bracken goeson to quote Benjamin directly: “In the

medium of reflection, moreover, the

thing and the knowing being mergeinto each other . Both are only relativeunities of reflection. Thus, there isin fact no knowledge of an object bya subject. Every instance of knowingis an immanent connection in theabsolute, or, if one prefers, in thesubject. The term ‘object’ designatesnot a relation within knowledge but anabsence of relation.” Walter Benjamin,“The Concept of Criticism,” in SelectedWritings, ed. Marcus Bullock andMichael W. Jennings, trans. HowardEiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,1996), 1:146, emphasis added, quoted

in Bracken, “Language of Things,”327–28. Accordingly, participating inan image is not the same as being rep-resented by it. The image is the thingin which senses merge with matter.Things are not being represented by itbut participate in it.

4This comment was based on her

interpretation of Leo Bersani and UlysseDutoit’s propositions in Forms of Being:Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: British Film Institute, 2004), inwhich both authors investigate the roleof the inanimate in cinema. Anothergreat proposition by which to thinkthrough this issue was made by CarstenJuhl, who suggested Mario Perniola’sThe Sex Appeal of the Inorganic.

5Mario Perniola, The Sex Appealof the Inorganic, trans. MassimoVerdicchio (New York: Continuum,2004), 1.

6According to Benjamin, the expres-

sionless is a critical violence that“completes the work, by shattering itinto a thing of shards, into a fragmentof the true world.” Benjamin, SelectedWritings, 1:340.

7According to Weizman, their idea is

based on putting forensics back in theframe of rhetoric (where it originatedin Roman times) meaning “in front ofthe forum,” and implying the speech ofobjects in professional or legal courts.When evidence is given the capacity to

speak, objects are treated as “material

witnesses”; they also therefore pos-sess the capacity to lie.

8Quoted in Christina Kiaer,

“Rodchenko in Paris,” October 75(Winter 1996): 3.

9See Bracken, “The Language of

Things,” 346ff.

10Ibid., 347.

11Walter Benjamin, “On Language

as Such and the Languages of Man,” inSelected Writings, 1:69.

12The last paragraph is taken from:

Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Things,”translate (June 2006), http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0606/steyerl/en.

13See Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life

and the Culture of the Thing (Towardthe Formulation of the Question),”trans. Christina Kiaer, October 81(Summer 1997): 119–28.

14Ibid., 110.

15Ibid., 111.

16Lars Laumann’s touching and

amazing video Berlinmuren (2008),about a Swedish lady who married theBerlin Wall, makes a strong and veryconvincing case for object-love. Thelover would not just love the BerlinWall while it was functional but wouldcontinue to love it long after it hadcome down, after history had impactedviolently on the object she desired. Shewould love it through its destructionand agony. She also claimed that herlove was not directed to the things theWall represented, but to its materialform and reality.

17See, for example, Maurizio

Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media ,”trans. Aileen Derieg, republicart(May2003), http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/lazzarato01_en.htm;or Steyerl, “The Language of Things”:“To engage in the language of things inthe realm of the documentary form isnot equivalent to using realist forms inrepresenting them. It is not about rep-resentation at all, but about actualisingwhatever the things have to say in thepresent. And to do so is not a matter ofrealism, but rather of relationalism—it

is a matter of presencing and thustransforming the social, historical andalso material relations, which deter-mine things.”

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Is a Museum a Factory?

The film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of theFurnaces, 1968), a Third Cinema manifesto againstneocolonialism, has a brilliant installation speci-fication.1 A banner was to be hung at every screen-ing with text reading: “Every spectator is either acoward or a traitor.”2 It was intended to break downthe distinctions between filmmaker and audience,author and producer, and thus create a sphere ofpolitical action. And where was this film shown? In

factories, of course.Now, political films are no longer shown infactories.3 They are shown in the museum, orthe gallery—the art space. That is, in any sort ofwhite cube.4

How did this happen? First of all, the tradi-tional Fordist factory is, for the most part, gone.5 It’sbeen emptied out, machines packed up and shippedoff to China. Former workers have been retrainedfor further retraining, or become software program-mers and started working from home. Secondly, thecinema has been transformed almost as dramati-cally as the factory. It’s been multiplexed, digitized,and sequelized, as well as rapidly commercializedas neoliberalism became hegemonic in its reach andinfluence. Before cinema’s recent demise, politicalfilms sought refuge elsewhere. Their return to cin-ematic space is rather recent, and the cinema wasnever the space for formally more experimentalworks. Now, political and experimental films alikeare shown in black boxes set within white cubes—in fortresses, bunkers, docks, and former churches.The sound is almost always awful.

But terrible projections and dismal installa-tion notwithstanding, these works catalyze surpris-ing desire. Crowds of people can be seen bendingand crouching in order to catch glimpses of political

cinema and video art. Is this audience sick of media H

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monopolies? Are they trying to find answers to theobvious crisis of everything? And why should they belooking for these answers in art spaces?

Afraid of the Real?The conservative response to the exodus of

political films (or video installations) to the museumis to assume that they are thus losing relevance.It deplores their internment in the bourgeois ivory

tower of high culture. The works are thought to beisolated inside this elitist cordon sanitaire—sani-tized, sequestered, cut off from “reality.” Indeed,Jean-Luc Godard reportedly said that video installa-tion artists shouldn’t be “afraid of reality,” assumingof course that they in fact were.6

Where is reality then? Out there, beyond thewhite cube and its display technologies? Howabout inverting this claim, somewhat polemically,to assert that the white cube is in fact the Real:the blank horror and emptiness of the bourgeoisinterior.

On the other hand—and in a much moreoptimistic vein—there is no need to have recourseto Lacan in order to contest Godard’s accusation.This is because the displacement from factory tomuseum never took place. In reality, political filmsare very often screened in the exact same placeas they always were: in former factories, which aretoday, more often than not, museums. A gallery, anart space, a white cube with abysmal sound isola-tion. Which will certainly show political films. Butwhich also has become a hotbed of contemporaryproduction. Of images, jargon, lifestyles, and values.Of exhibition value, speculation value, and cult value.Of entertainment plus gravitas. Or of aura minusdistance. A flagship store of Cultural Industries,

staffed by eager interns who work for free.

A factory, so to speak, but a different one.It is still a space for production, still a space ofexploitation and even of political screenings. It isa space of physical meeting and sometimes evencommon discussion. At the same time, it haschanged almost beyond recognition. So what sortof factory is this?

Productive Turn

The typical setup of the museum-as-factorylooks like this. Before: an industrial workplace.Now: people spending their leisure time in frontof TV monitors. Before: people working in thesefactories. Now: people working at home in front ofcomputer monitors.

Andy Warhol’s Factory served as model forthe new museum in its productive turn towardbeing a “social factory.”7 By now, descriptions of thesocial factory abound.8 It exceeds its traditionalboundaries and spills over into almost everythingelse. It pervades bedrooms and dreams alike, aswell as perception, affection, and attention. Ittransforms everything it touches into culture, ifnot art. It is an a-factory, which produces affect aseffect. It integrates intimacy, eccentricity, and otherformally unofficial forms of creation. Private andpublic spheres get entangled in a blurred zone ofhyperproduction.

In the museum-as-factory, somethingcontinues to be produced. Installation, planning,carpentry, viewing, discussing, maintenance,betting on rising values, and networking alternatein cycles. An art space is a factory, which issimultaneously a supermarket—a casino and aplace of worship whose reproductive work isperformed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video

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In this economy, even spectators are trans-formed into workers. As Jonathan Beller argues,cinema and its derivatives (television, Internet,and so on) are factories, in which spectators work.Now, “to look is to labor.”9 Cinema, which integratedthe logic of Taylorist production and the conveyorbelt, now spreads the factory wherever it travels.But this type of production is much more intensivethan the industrial one. The senses are drafted

into production, the media capitalize upon the aes-thetic faculties and imaginary practices of viewers.10 In that sense, any space that integrates cinemaand its successors has now become a factory, andthis obviously includes the museum. While in thehistory of political filmmaking the factory becamea cinema, cinema now turns museum spaces backinto factories.

Workers Leaving the FactoryIt is quite curious that the first films ever

made by Louis Lumière show workers leaving thefactory. At the beginning of cinema, workers leavethe industrial workplace. The invention of cinemathus symbolically marks the start of the exodus ofworkers from industrial modes of production. Buteven if they leave the factory building, it doesn’tmean that they have left labor behind. Rather, theytake it along with them and disperse it into everysector of life.

A brilliant installation by Harun Farockimakes clear where the workers leaving the factoryare headed. Farocki collected and installed differentcinematic versions of Workers Leaving the Factory ,from the original silent version(s) by Lumière tocontemporary surveillance footage.11 Workers arestreaming out of factories on several monitors

simultaneously: from different eras and in different H

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3-D rendition of Office for Metropolitan Archtecture’s design for the Riga

Contemporary Art Museum, built on the grounds of a former factory, 2006.



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cinematic styles.12 But where are these workersstreaming to? Into the art space, where the work isinstalled.

Not only is Farocki’s Workers Leaving theFactory , on the level of content, a wonderfularchaeology of the (non)representation of labor;on the level of form it points to the spilling overof the factory into the art space. Workers who leftthe factory have ended up inside another one:

the museum.It might even be the same factory. Becausethe former Lumière factory, whose gates are por-trayed in the original Workers Leaving The LumièreFactory is today just that: a museum of cinema.13 In 1995, the ruin of the former factory was declareda historical monument and developed into a siteof culture. The Lumière factory, which used toproduce photographic film, is today a cinema witha reception space to be rented by companies: “alocation loaded with history and emotion for yourbrunches, cocktails and dinners.”14 The workerswho left the factory in 1895 have today been recap-tured on the screen of the cinema within the samespace. They only left the factory to reemerge as aspectacle inside it.

As workers exit the factory, the space theyenter is one of cinema and cultural industry, produc-ing emotion and attention. How do its spectatorslook inside this new factory?

Cinema and FactoryAt this point, a decisive difference emerges

between classical cinema and the museum. Whilethe classical space of cinema resembles the spaceof the industrial factory, the museum correspondsto the dispersed space of the social factory. Both

cinema and Fordist factory are organized as H

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locations of confinement, arrest, and temporalcontrol. Imagine: Workers leaving the factory.Spectators leaving the cinema—a similar mass,disciplined and controlled in time, assembled andreleased at regular intervals. As the traditionalfactory arrests its workers, the cinema arrests thespectator. Both are disciplinary spaces and spacesof confinement.15

But now imagine: Workers leaving the factory.

Spectators trickling out of the museum (or evenqueuing to get in). An entirely different constellationof time and space. This second crowd is not a mass,but a multitude.16 The museum doesn’t organize acoherent crowd of people. People are dispersedin time and space—a silent crowd, immersedand atomized, struggling between passivity andoverstimulation.

This spatial transformation is reflected by theformat of many newer cinematic works. Whereastraditional cinematic works are single-channel,focusing the gaze and organizing time, many of thenewer works explode into space. While the tradi-tional cinema setup works from a single centralperspective, multiscreen projections create amultifocal space. While cinema is a mass medium,multiscreen installations address a multitudespread out in space, connected only by distraction,separation, and difference.17

The difference between mass and multitudearises on the line between confinement and dis-persion, between homogeneity and multiplicity,between cinema space and museum installationspace. This is a very important distinction, becauseit will also affect the question of the museum aspublic space.



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Public SpaceIt is obvious that the space of the factory

is traditionally more or less invisible in public. Itsvisibility is policed, and surveillance produces aone-way gaze. Paradoxically, a museum is not sodifferent. In a lucid 1972 interview Godard pointedout that, because filming is prohibited in factories,museums, and airports, effectively 80 percent ofproductive activity in France is rendered invisible:

“The exploiter doesn’t show the exploitation to theexploited.”18 This still applies today, if for differentreasons. Museums prohibit filming or charge exor-bitant shooting fees.19 Just as the work performedin the factory cannot be shown outside it, most ofthe works on display in a museum cannot be shownoutside its walls. A paradoxical situation arises:a museum predicated on producing and marketingvisibility can itself not be shown—the labor per-formed there is just as publicly invisible as that ofany sausage factory.

This extreme control over visibility sitsrather uncomfortably alongside the perception ofthe museum as a public space. What does thisinvisibility then say about the contemporarymuseum as a public space? And how does the inclu-sion of cinematic works complicate this picture?

The current discussion of cinema and themuseum as public sphere is an animated one.Thomas Elsaesser, for example, asks whethercinema in the museum might constitute the lastremaining bourgeois public sphere.20 JürgenHabermas outlined the conditions in this arena inwhich people speak in turn and others respond, allparticipating together in the same rational, equal,and transparent discourse surrounding publicmatters.21 In actuality, the contemporary museum

is more like a cacophony—installations blare H

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Visitors entering the museum. Edo-Tokyo Museum, 2003.

Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, 2006, video still.



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simultaneously while nobody listens. To make mat-ters worse, the time-based mode of many cinematicinstallation works precludes a truly shared discoursearound them; if works are too long, spectators willsimply desert them. What would be seen as an act ofbetrayal in a cinema—leaving the projection whileit lasts—becomes standard behavior in any spatialinstallation situation. In the installation space ofthe museum, spectators indeed become traitors—

traitors of cinematic duration itself. In circulatingthrough the space, spectators are actively montag-ing, zapping, combining fragments—effectivelyco-curating the show. Rationally conversing aboutshared impressions then becomes next to impos-sible. A bourgeois public sphere? Instead of its idealmanifestation, the contemporary museum ratherrepresents its unfulfilled reality.

Sovereign SubjectsIn his choice of words, Elsaesser also

addresses a less democratic dimension of thisspace. By, as he dramatically phrases it, arrestingcinema—suspending it, suspending its license,or even holding it under a suspended sentence—cinema is preserved at its own expense when itis taken into “protective custody.”22 Protectivecustody is no simple arrest. It refers to a state ofexception or (at least) a temporal suspension oflegality that allows the suspension of the law itself.This state of exception is also addressed in BorisGroys’ essay “Politics of Installation.”23 Harkingback to Carl Schmitt, Groys assigns the role of sov-ereign to the artist who—in a state of exception—violently establishes his own law by “arresting” aspace in the form of an installation. The artist thenassumes a role as sovereign founder of the exhibi-

tion’s public sphere.

At first glance, this repeats the old myth ofartist as crazy genius, or more precisely, as petty-bourgeois dictator. But the point is: if this workswell as an artistic mode of production, it becomesstandard practice in any social factory. So then,how about the idea that inside the museum, almosteverybody tries to behave like a sovereign (or petty-bourgeois dictator)? After all, the multitude insidemuseums is composed of competing sovereigns:

curators, spectators, artists, critics.Let’s have a closer look at the spectator-as-sovereign. In judging an exhibition, many attemptto assume the compromised sovereignty of thetraditional bourgeois subject, who aims to (re)-master the show, to tame the unruly multiplicity ofits meanings, to pronounce a verdict, and to assignvalue. But, unfortunately, cinematic duration makesthis subject position unavailable. It reduces allparties involved to the role of workers—unable togain an overview of the whole process of production.Many—primarily critics—are thus frustrated byarchival shows and their abundance of cinematictime. Remember the vitriolic attacks on the lengthof films and video in documenta 11? To multiplycinematic duration means to blow apart the vantagepoint of sovereign judgment. It also makes it impos-sible to reconfigure yourself as its subject. Cinemain the museum renders overview, review, and surveyimpossible. Partial impressions dominate the pic-ture. The true labor of spectatorship can no longerbe ignored by casting oneself as master of judg-ment. Under these circumstances, a transparent,informed, inclusive discourse becomes difficult, ifnot impossible.

The question of cinema makes clear that themuseum is not a public sphere, but rather places

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public, so to speak. Instead of filling this space, itconserves its absence. But it also simultaneouslydisplays its potential and the desire for somethingto be realized in its place.

As a multitude, the public operates underthe condition of partial invisibility, incompleteaccess, fragmented realities—of commodificationwithin clandestinity. Transparency, overview, andthe sovereign gaze cloud over to become opaque.

Cinema itself explodes into multiplicity—intospatially dispersed multiscreen arrangements thatcannot be contained by a single point of view. Thefull picture, so to speak, remains unavailable. Thereis always something missing—people miss partsof the screening, the sound doesn’t work, the screenitself or any vantage point from which it could beseen are missing.

RuptureWithout notice, the question of political

cinema has been inverted. What began as a discus-sion of political cinema in the museum has turnedinto a question of cinematic politics in a factory.Traditionally, political cinema was meant to edu-cate—it was an instrumental effort at “representa-tion” in order to achieve its effects in “reality.” It wasmeasured in terms of efficiency, of revolutionaryrevelation, of gains in consciousness, or as potentialtriggers of action.

Today, cinematic politics are post-repre-sentational. They do not educate the crowd, butproduce it. They articulate the crowd in space andin time. They submerge it in partial invisibility andthen orchestrate their dispersion, movement, andreconfiguration. They organize the crowd withoutpreaching to it. They replace the gaze of the bour-

geois sovereign spectator of the white cube with the

incomplete, obscured, fractured, and overwhelmedvision of the spectator-as-laborer.

But there is one aspect that goes well beyondthis. What else is missing from these cinematicinstallations?24 Let’s return to the liminal case ofdocumenta 11, which was said to contain morecinematic material than could be seen by a singleperson in the 100 days that the exhibition was opento the public. No single spectator could even claim

to have even seen everything, much less to haveexhausted the meanings in this volume of work. Itis obvious what is missing from this arrangement:since no single spectator can possibly make senseof such a volume of work, it calls for a multiplicityof spectators. In fact, the exhibition could only beseen by a multiplicity of gazes and points of view,which then supplements the impressions of others.Only if the night guards and various spectatorsworked together in shifts could the cinematic mate-rial of documenta 11 be viewed. But in order tounderstand what (and how) they are watching, theymust meet to make sense of it. This shared activ-ity is completely different from that of spectatorsnarcissistically gazing at themselves and eachother inside exhibitions—it does not simply ignorethe artwork (or treat it as mere pretext), but takesit to another level.

Cinema inside the museum thus calls for amultiple gaze, which is no longer collective, butcommon, which is incomplete, but in process, whichis distracted and singular, but can be edited intovarious sequences and combinations. This gaze isno longer the gaze of the individual sovereign mas-ter, nor, more precisely, of the self-deluded sover-eign (even if “just for one day,” as David Bowie sang).It isn’t even a product of common labor, but focuses

its point of rupture on the paradigm of productivity. H

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The museum-as-factory and its cinematic politicsinterpellate this missing, multiple subject. But bydisplaying its absence and its lack, they simultane-ously activate a desire for this subject.

Cinematic PoliticsBut does this now mean that all cinematic

works have become political? Or, rather, is there stillany difference between different forms of cinematic

politics? The answer is simple. Any conventionalcinematic work will try to reproduce the existingsetup: a projection of a public, which is not publicafter all, and in which participation and exploitationbecome indistinguishable. But a political cinematicarticulation might try to come up with somethingcompletely different.

What else is desperately missing from themuseum-as-factory? An exit. If the factory iseverywhere, then there is no longer a gate by whichto leave it—there is no way to escape relentlessproductivity. Political cinema could then becomethe screen through which people could leave themuseum-as-social-factory. But on which screencould this exit take place? On the one that is cur-rently missing, of course.

1Grupo Cine Liberación (Fernando

E. Solanas, Octavio Getino), dir., La horade los hornos, Argentina, 1968. Thework is one of the most important filmsof Third Cinema.

2A quote from Frantz Fanon’s The

Wretched of the Earth (1963). The filmwas of course banned and had to beshown clandestinely.

3Or videos or video/film installa-

tions. To properly make the distinctions(which exist and are important) wouldrequire another text.

4I am aware of the problem of treat-

ing all these spaces as similar.

5At least in Western countries.

6The context of Godard’s comment

is a conversation—a monologue,apparently—with young installationartists, whom he reprimands for theiruse of what he calls technologicaldispositifs in exhibitions. See “Debriefde conversations avec Jean-LucGodard,”Sans casser des briques (blog), March 10, 2009, http://bbjt.

wordpress.com/2009/03/10/debrief-de-conversations-avec-jean-luc-godard/ (blog discontinued).

7See Brian Holmes, “Warhol in

the Rising Sun: Art, Subcultures andSemiotic Production,” 16 Beaver

ARTicles, August 8, 2004, http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001177.php.

8Sabeth Buchmann quotes Hardt

and Negri: “The ‘social factory’ is a formof production which touches on andpenetrates every sphere and aspect ofpublic and private life, of knowledgeproduction and communication.”“From Systems-Oriented Art to Biopo-litical Art Practice,” in Media Mutandis:

A NODE.London Reader , ed. Marina

Vishmidt (London: NODE.London, 2006).

9Jonathan L. Beller, “Kino-I, Kino-

World,” in The Visual Culture Reader , ed.Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge,2002), 61.

10Ibid., 67.

11For a great essay about this work

see Harun Farocki, “Workers Leavingthe Factory,” in Nachdruck/Imprint:Texte/Writings, trans. Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim (New York: Lukas & Sternberg,

2001), reprinted on the Senses of Cinema Web site, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/21/farocki_workers.html.

12My description refers to the

Generali Foundation show‚“Kino wienoch nie” (2005). See http://foundation.generali.at/index.php?id=429.

13“Aujourd’hui le décor du premier

film est sauvé et abrite une salle decinéma de 270 fauteuils. Là où sortirentles ouvriers et les ouvrières de l’usine,les spectateurs vont au cinéma, sur lelieu de son invention,” Institut Lumière,“Le Hanger du Premier-Film,” http://www.institut-lumiere.org/francais/hangar/hangaraccueil.html.

14“La partie Hangar, spacieux hall

de réception chargé d’histoire etd’émotion pour tous vos déjeuners,cocktail, dîners. [Formule assise 250personnes ou formule debout jusqu’à300 personnes],” Institut Lumière,“Nos espaces de location,” http://www.institut-lumiere.org/francais/location/location.html.

15There is however one interesting

difference between cinema and factory:in the rebuilt scenery of the Lumièremuseum, the opening of the formergate is now blocked by a transparentglass pane to indicate the framing ofthe early film. Leaving spectators haveto go around this obstacle, and leavethrough the former location of the gate

itself, which no longer exists. Thus, H

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The Articulation of Protest

the current situation is like a negativeof the former one: people are blockedby the former opening, which has nowturned into a glass screen; they have toexit through the former walls of the fac-tory, which have now partly vanished.See photographs at ibid.

16For a more sober description of the

generally quite idealized condition ofmultitude, see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. IsabellaBertoletti, James Cascaito, and AndreaCasson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),

2004).

17As do multiple single screen

arrangements.

18“Godard on Tout va bien (1972),”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnx7mxjm1k0.

19“Photography, filming, or audio

recording within paying exhibitionsor ticketed events and screenings isnot permitted at any time.” See “Tategallery rules,” http://www.tate.org.uk/about/who-we-are/policies-and-procedures/gallery-rules. However,filming there is welcomed on a com-mercial basis, with location fees

starting at £200 an hour. See “Locationfilming and photography,” http://www.tate.org.uk/about/media/filming/.Policy at the Centre Pompidou is moreconfusing: “You may film or photographworks from permanent collections(which you will find on levels 4 and5 and in the Atelier Brancusi) foryour own personal use. You may not,however, photograph or film works thathave a red dot, and you may not usea flash or stand.” See “FAQ: 7. Photo/Video,” http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Communication.nsf/0/3590D3A7D1BDB820C125707C004512D4?OpenDocument&L=2.

20Thomas Elsaesser, “The Cinema in

the Museum: Our Last Bourgeois PublicSphere?“ (paper presented at theInternational Film Studies Conference,

“Perspectives on the Public Sphere:

Cinematic Configurations of ‘I’ and‘We,’” Berlin, Germany, April 23–25,2009).

21See Jürgen Habermas, The

Structural Transformation of the PublicSphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. ThomasBurger with the assistance of FrederickLawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1991).

22Elsaesser, “Cinema in the

Museum.”

23Boris Groys, “Politics of

Installation,” e-flux journal, no. 2(January 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/31.

24A good example would be

Democracies (2009) by Arturmijewski,an unsynchronized, multiscreeninstallation with trillions of possibilitiesof screen-content combinations.

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Every articulation is a montage of various ele-ments—voices, images, colors, passions, or dog-mas—in time and space. The significance of thearticulated moments depends on this. They onlymake sense within this articulation and dependingon their position. So how is protest articulated?What does it articulate and what articulates it?

The articulation of protest has two levels. Onone level, the articulation entails finding a language

for protest, the vocalization, the verbalization, orthe visualization of political protest. On anotherlevel, however, the articulation also shapes thestructure or internal organization of protest move-ments. In other words, there are two different kindsof concatenations: one is at the level of symbols, theother at the level of political forces. The dynamicof desire and refusal, attraction and repulsion, thecontradiction and the convergence of different ele-ments unfolds on both levels. In relation to protest,the question of articulation concerns the organiza-tion of its expression—but also the expression of itsorganization.

Naturally, protest movements are articulatedon many levels: on the level of their programs,demands, self-obligations, manifestos, and actions.This also involves montage—in the form of inclu-sions and exclusions based on subject matter,priorities, and blind spots. In addition, though,protest movements are articulated as concatena-tions or conjunctions of different interest groups,NGOs, political parties, associations, individuals,or groups. Alliances, coalitions, factions, feuds, oreven indifference are articulated in this structure.There is also a form of montage at the political—combinations of interests, organized in a grammarof the political that reinvents itself again and again.

At this level, articulation designates the form of H

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the internal organization of protest movements. Bywhat rules is this montage organized?

And what does this mean for articulationsthat are critical of globalization—both at the levelof the organization of their expression and at thelevel of the expression of their organization? How areglobal conjunctions represented? How are differentprotest movements mediated through one another?Are they placed next to one another—in other words,

simply added together—or are they related to oneanother in some other way? What is the image ofa protest movement? Is it the sum of the “talkingheads” from the individual groups added together? Isit pictures of confrontations and marches? Is it newforms of depiction? Is it the reflection of a protestmovement’s forms? Or the invention of new relationsbetween individual elements of political linkages?With these thoughts about articulation, I refer to avery specific field of theory, namely the theory ofmontage or film cuts. This is also because the rela-tionship between art and politics is usually treatedin the field of political theory, and art often appearsas its ornament. What happens, though, if we con-versely relate a form of artistic production, namelythe theory of montage, to the field of politics? Inother words, how is the political field edited, andwhat kinds of political significance could be derivedfrom this form of articulation?

Chains of ProductionI would like to discuss these issues on the

basis of two film segments, and to address theirimplicit or explicit political thinking based on theform of their articulation. The films will be com-pared from a very specific perspective: both containa sequence in which the conditions of their own

articulation are addressed. Both of these sequences



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present the chains of production and productionprocedures through which these films were made.And on the basis of the self-reflexive discussion oftheir manner of producing political significance, thecreation of chains and montages of aesthetic formsand political demands, I would like to explain thepolitical implications of forms of montage.

The first segment is from the film Showdownin Seattle, produced in 1999 by the Seattle Inde-

pendent Media Center and broadcast by Deep DishTelevision. The second segment is from a film byJean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville from1975 entitled Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere).Both deal with transnational and internationalcircumstances of political articulation. Showdownin Seattle documents the protests against the WTOnegotiations in Seattle and the internal articulationof these protests as a heterogeneous combination ofdiverse interests. The theme of Ici et ailleurs, on theother hand, is the fluctuations of French solidaritywith Palestine, particularly in the 1970s, and a radi-cal critique of the poses, stagings, and counterpro-ductive linkages of emancipation in general. The twofilms are not really comparable on the surface—thefirst is a quickly produced utilitarian document thatfunctions in the register of counter-information,while Ici et ailleurs captures a long and even embar-rassing process of reflection. The latter film does notplace information in the foreground, but rather ana-lyzes its organization and staging. My comparison ofthe films is therefore not to be read as a statementon the films per se, but rather illuminates only oneparticular aspect of them, namely their self-reflec-tion on their own forms of articulation.

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Showdown in Seattle

The film Showdown in Seattle is an impas-sioned document of the protests revolving aroundthe WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999.1 The days ofprotest and their events are edited in chronologicalorder. At the same time, the developments on thestreet are grounded with background informationabout the work of the WTO. Numerous short state-ments are given by a multitude of speakers from

diverse political groups, especially unions, butalso indigenous groups and farmers’ organizations.The film (which consists of five half-hour parts) isextraordinarily stirring and employs the style ofconventional reportage. Along with this, it demon-strates a specific notion of filmic space-time, whichcould be described in Walter Benjamin’s terms as“homogenous” and “empty,” organized by chrono-logical sequences and uniform spaces.

Toward the end of the two-and-a-half-hourfilm there is a segment in which the viewer is takenon a tour through the production site of the film,the studio setup in Seattle. What is seen there isimpressive. The entire film was shot and edited overthe course of the five-day protests. A half-hour pro-gram was broadcast every evening. This requires aconsiderable logistical effort. Accordingly, the inter-nal organization of the Indymedia office is not verydifferent from a commercial TV studio. We see howfootage from countless video cameras comes intothe studio, how it is viewed, how useable sectionsare excerpted, how they are edited into new footage,and so forth. Various media are listed, in which andthrough which publicity is carried out, such as fax,telephone, Internet, satellite, and so forth. We seehow the work of organizing information—picturesand sounds—is conducted: there is a video desk,

production plans, and so forth. What is portrayed



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is a chain of the production of information, or inthe terms of the producers, “counter-information,”which is negatively defined by its distance fromthe information circulated by the corporate media.What this involves, then, is a faithful reproductionof the corporate media’s manner of production—albeit for a different purpose.

This different purpose is described by manymetaphors: “getting the word across,” “getting the

message across,” “getting the truth out.” What isto be disseminated is counter-information that isdescribed as truth. It is the “voice of the people,”and this voice must be heard. The voice of thepeople is conceived as the unity of differences, ofdifferent political groups, and it reverberates withinthe resonator of a filmic space-time, the homogene-ity of which is never called into question.

Yet we must not only ask ourselves how thisvoice of the people is articulated and organized, butalso what this voice of the people actually consistsof. In Showdown in Seattle, this expression—“voiceof the people”—is used unproblematically: as thesum of the voices of individual speakers from protestgroups, NGOs, unions, and so forth. Their demandsand positions are articulated across broad segmentsof the film in the form of talking heads. Because theshots of these talking heads are formally similar,their diverse positions are standardized and thusmade comparable. At the level of the standardizedlanguage of form, the different statements are thustransformed into a chain of formal equivalencies,which adds the political demands together in thesame way that pictures and sounds are strungtogether in the conventional chain of media montage.In this way, the form employed by Showdown inSeattle is completely analogous to the form used by

the corporate media, only the content is different, H

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Promotion for Deep Dish TV’s first transmission series, produced by Paper Tiger TV.



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namely an additive compilation of voices resulting inthe voice of the people—regardless of the fact thatthe speakers’ different political demands sometimesradically contradict one another, such as those fromenvironmentalists and union members, differentminorities, feminist groups, and so forth. It is notclear how these demands can be mediated. Whattakes the place of this missing mediation is a filmicand political addition—of shots, statements, and

positions—and an aesthetic form of concatenation,which unquestioningly adopts the organizationalprinciples of its adversary.2

In Ici et ailleurs, on the other hand, this methodof the mere addition of demands resulting in thevoice of the people is severely criticized—along withthe concept of the voice of the people itself.

Ici et ailleurs

Godard and Miéville, the directors (or ratherthe editors) of Ici et ailleurs take a radically criticalposition with respect to the terms of the popular.3 Their film consists of a self-critique of a self-produced film fragment. The Dziga Vertov Group(Godard/Jean-Pierre Gorin) shot a commissionedfilm on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)in 1970. This heroizing propaganda film that blustersabout the people’s battle was called Until Victory and was never finished. It consisted of several partswith titles such as “The Armed Battle,” “PoliticalWork,” “The Will of the People,” and “The ExtendedWar—Until Victory.” It showed battle training, scenesof exercise and shooting, and scenes of PLO agita-tion, in a formally almost senseless chain of equiva-lencies in which every image is forced to express ananti-imperialistic fantasy. Four years later in Ici etailleurs, Godard and Miéville inspect the material

more closely. They note that parts of the statements H

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of PLO adherents were never translated or werestaged to begin with. They reflect on the stagingsand the blatant lies of the material—but most ofall on their own participation in this, in the waythey organized the pictures and sounds. They ask:How did the adjuring formula of the “voice of thepeople” function here as populist noise to eliminatecontradictions? What does it mean to edit “TheInternationale” into any and every picture, rather like

the way butter is smeared on bread? What politicaland aesthetic notions are added together underthe pretext of the voice of the people? Why did thisequation not work? Godard and Miéville arrive at animportant conclusion: the additive and of the mon-tage is far from innocent and unproblematic.

Today the film is shockingly up to date, butnot in the sense of offering a position on the MiddleEast conflict. On the contrary, what makes it so topi-cal is the problematizing of the concepts and pat-terns in which conflicts and solidarity are reducedto binary oppositions of betrayal or loyalty andreduced to unproblematic additions and pseudo-causalities. For what if the model of addition iswrong? Or if the additive and does not represent anaddition, but rather grounds a subtraction, a divi-sion, or no relation at all? Specifically, what if theand in this Here and Elsewhere, in this France andPalestine, does not represent an addition but rathera subtraction?4 What if two political movementsnot only do not join, but actually hinder, contradict,ignore, or even mutually exclude one another?What if the and should really be or , because, or eveninstead of ? And what does an empty phrase like “thewill of the people” mean?

Transposed to a political level, the questionsare thus: On what basis can we draw a political com-

parison between different positions or establish



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equivalencies or even alliances? What exactly ismade comparable? What is added together, editedtogether, and which differences and oppositesare leveled for the sake of establishing a chain ofequivalencies? What if this and of political montageis functionalized specifically for the sake of a popu-list mobilization? And what does this question meanfor the articulation of protest today, if nationalists,protectionists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists,

Nazis, religious groups, and reactionaries all line uptogether at antiglobalization demos, in a dispiritingchain of equivalencies? Is this a simple case of theprinciple of unproblematic addition, a blind and thatpresumes that if sufficient numbers of differentinterests are added up, at some point the sum willconstitute “the people”?

Godard and Miéville do not relate their cri-tique solely to the level of political articulation—in other words, the expression of internal organiza-tion—but also to the organization of expression.Both are closely connected. An essential compo-nent of this problematic issue is how pictures andsounds are organized, edited, and arranged. AFordist articulation organized according to theprinciples of mass culture will blindly reproduce thetemplates of its masters, according to their thesis,so it has to be broken up and problematized. This isalso the reason why Godard and Miéville are con-cerned with the chain of production of pictures andsounds, although they choose an entirely differentkind of scene than Indymedia—they show a crowdof people holding pictures, wandering past a cameraas though on a conveyor belt and pushing each otheraside at the same time. A row of people carrying pic-tures of the “battle” is linked together by a machine,following the logic of the assembly line and camera

mechanics. Here, Godard and Miéville translate H

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the temporal arrangement of the film images intoa spatial arrangement. It becomes evident thatchains of pictures do not run one after the other,but rather are shown at the same time. They placethe pictures next to one another and shift the focusof attention onto their framing. What is revealed isthe principle of their concatenation. What appearsin the montage as an often invisible addition isproblematized in this way and set in relation to

the logic of machine production. This reflectionon the chain of production of pictures and soundsin this sequence makes it possible to think aboutthe conditions of representation in film in general.The montage is the result of an industrial systemof pictures and sounds, whose concatenation isorganized from the start—just as the principle ofthe production sequence from Showdown in Seattle is marked by its adoption of conventional schemataof production.

In contrast, Godard and Miéville ask: Howdo the pictures hang on the chain? How are theychained together? What organizes their articula-tion and what kinds of political significance aregenerated in this way? Here we see an experimentalsituation of concatenation, in which pictures arerelationally organized. Pictures and sounds fromNazi Germany, Palestine, Latin America, Vietnam,and other places are mixed together wildly—andcombined with a number of folk songs or songsthat invoke “the people” from both right-wing andleft-wing contexts. This produces the impressionthat the pictures naturally attain their significancethrough their concatenation. But more importantly,we see that incongruous concatenations occur: pic-tures from concentration camps and Venceremossongs, Hitler’s voice and a picture of My Lai, Hitler’s

voice and a picture of Golda Meir, My Lai and Lenin.



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It becomes clear that the voice of the people, whichwe hear in its wildly diverse articulations, is notin fact a basis for creating equivalencies. Instead,this sequence expose the radical political con-tradictions that the voice of the people strives tocover up. It generates sharp discrepancies withinthe silent coercion—as Theodor W. Adorno wouldsay—of the identity relationship. It produces con-traries instead of equations, and even provokes

sheer dread—everything except an unproblematicaddition of political desire. For what this populistchain of equivalencies displays is the void that it isstructured around, the empty inclusivist and thatkeeps blindly adding and adding, outside the realmof any political criteria.

In summary, we can say that the principle ofthe voice of the people assumes an entirely differentrole in the two films. Although it is the organizingprinciple in Seattle, the principle that constitutesthe gaze, it is never problematized. The voice of thepeople functions here like a blind spot, a lacuna,which, according to Jacques Lacan, constitutes theentire field of the visible but only becomes visibleitself as a kind of cover. The voice of the people orga-nizes the chain of equivalencies without allowingbreaks; it conceals the fact that its political objec-tive does not go beyond an unquestioned notion ofinclusivity. The voice of the people is thus simultane-ously the organizing principle of both a concatena-tion and a suppression. Yet what does it suppress?The empty topos of the voice of the people covers upa lacuna, specifically the lacuna of the question ofthe political measures and goals that are supposedto be legitimized by invoking the people.

So what are the prospects for the articula-tion of a protest movement based on the model of

an and—as though inclusion at any cost were its

Promotional image for a user-friendly Cinepress film splicer developed by Hama, 1972.



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primary goal? Why and for whom is the politicalconcatenation organized? What goals and criteriahave to be formulated—even if they might notbe very popular? And does there not have to be amuch more radical critique of the articulation ofideology using pictures and sounds? Does not aconventional form mean a mimetic clinging to theconditions that are to be critiqued, a populist formof blind faith in the power of the addition of arbi-

trary desires? Is it not therefore sometimes betterto break the chains than to organize everyone intoa network at all costs?

Addition or ExponentiationSo what turns a movement into an opposi-

tional one? For there are many movements that callthemselves protest movements but should rightlybe called reactionary, if not outright fascist. Suchmovements are those in which existing conditionsare radicalized in breathless transgression, scat-tering fragmented identities like bone splintersalong the way. The energy of the movement glidesseamlessly from one element to the next—travers-ing the homogeneous empty time like a wavemoving through the crowd. Images, sounds, andpositions are linked without reflection in a move-ment of blind inclusion. A tremendous dynamicunfolds in these figures—only to leave everythingas it was before.

What kind of movement of political montagewould result in oppositional articulations, insteadof a mere addition of elements for the sake of repro-ducing the status quo? Or to phrase the questiondifferently, what kind of montage of two images/elements would produce something beyond andoutside these two images/elements, something

that would not represent a compromise, but would H

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1Independent Media Center,

Showdown in Seattle (New York: DeepDish Television, 1999).

2This is not intended to imply that

there is any film that could take onthis work of mediation. However, afilm could insist that this cannot bereplaced by simple adjurations.

3

Ici et ailleurs, dir. Jean-Luc Godardand Anne-Marie Miéville (Neuilly-sur-Seine: Gaumont, 1975).

4And what does Here and Elsewhere

mean now, in 2002, when synagoguesare burning in France?

instead belong to a different order—roughly theway someone might tenaciously pound two dullstones together to create a spark in the darkness?Whether this spark, which one could also call thespark of the political, can be created at all is aquestion of this articulation.



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Politics of Art: ContemporaryArt and the Transition to Post-Democracy

A standard way of relating politics to art assumesthat art represents political issues in one wayor another. But there is a much more interestingperspective: the politics of the field of art as aplace of work.1 Simply look at what it does—notwhat it shows.

Among all other forms of art, fine art has beenmost closely linked to post-Fordist speculation,with bling, boom, and bust. Contemporary art is no

unworldly discipline nestled away in some remoteivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed inthe neoliberal thick of things. We cannot dissociatethe hype around contemporary art from the shockpolicies used to defibrillate slowing economies. Suchhype embodies the affective dimension of globaleconomies tied to Ponzi schemes, credit addiction,and bygone bull markets. Contemporary art is abrand name without a brand, ready to be slappedonto almost anything, a quick face-lift touting thenew creative imperative for places in need of anextreme makeover, the suspense of gambling com-bined with the stern pleasures of upper-class board-ing school education, a licensed playground for aworld confused and collapsed by dizzying deregula-tion. If contemporary art is the answer, the questionis, how can capitalism be made more beautiful?

But contemporary art is not only about beauty.It is also about function. What is the function of artwithin disaster capitalism? Contemporary art feedson the crumbs of a massive and widespread redis-tribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, con-ducted by means of an ongoing class struggle fromabove.2 It lends primordial accumulation a whiff ofpostconceptual razzmatazz. Additionally, its reachhas grown much more decentralized—importanthubs of art are no longer only located in the Western

metropolis. Today, deconstructivist contemporary H

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art museums pop up in any self-respecting autoc-racy. A country with human-rights violations? Bringon the Gehry gallery!

The Global Guggenheim is a cultural refineryfor a set of post-democratic oligarchies, as arethe countless international biennials tasked withupgrading and reeducating the surplus population.3 Art thus facilitates the development of a new multi-polar distribution of geopolitical power whose

predatory economies are often fueled by internaloppression, class war from above, and radicalshock-and-awe policies.

Contemporary art thus not only reflects, butactively intervenes in the transition toward a newpost-Cold War world order. It is a major player inunevenly advancing semiocapitalism whereverT-Mobile plants its flag. It is involved in mining forraw materials for dual-core processors. It pollutes,gentrifies, and ravishes. It seduces and consumes,then suddenly walks off, breaking your heart. Fromthe deserts of Mongolia to the high plains of Peru,contemporary art is everywhere. And when it isfinally dragged into Gagosian dripping from headto toe with blood and dirt, it triggers off rounds androunds of rapturous applause.

Why and for whom is contemporary art soattractive? One guess: the production of art pres-ents a mirror image of post-democratic forms ofhypercapitalism that look set to become the domi-nant political post-Cold War paradigm. It seemsunpredictable, unaccountable, brilliant, mercurial,moody, guided by inspiration and genius. Just asany oligarch aspiring to dictatorship might wantto see himself. The traditional conception of theartist’s role corresponds all too well with the self-image of wannabe autocrats who see government

potentially—and dangerously—as an art form.

Post-democratic government is very much relatedto this erratic type of male-genius-artist behavior.It is opaque, corrupt, and completely unaccount-able. Both models operate within male bondingstructures that are as democratic as your localmafia chapter. Rule of law? Why don’t we just leaveit to taste? Checks and balances? Cheques andbalances! Good governance? Bad curating! You seewhy the contemporary oligarch loves contemporary

art: it’s just what works for him.Thus, traditional art production may be a rolemodel for the nouveaux riches created by privatiza-tion, expropriation, and speculation. But the actualproduction of art is simultaneously a workshop formany of the nouveaux poor, trying their luck asJPEG virtuosos and conceptual impostors, as gal-lerinas and overdrive content providers. Becauseart also means work, more precisely, strike work.4 It is produced as spectacle, on post-Fordist all-you-can-work conveyor belts. Strike or shock workis affective labor at insane speeds—enthusiastic,hyperactive, and deeply compromised.

Originally, strike workers were excess labor-ers in the early Soviet Union. The term is derivedfrom the expression udarny trud for “superproduc-tive, enthusiastic labor” (udar for “shock, strike,blow”). Now, transferred to present-day culturalfactories, strike work relates to the sensual dimen-sion of shock. Rather than painting, welding, andmolding, artistic strike work consists of ripping,chatting, and posing. This accelerated form ofartistic production creates punch and glitz, sensa-tion and impact. Its historical origin as format forStalinist model brigades brings an additional edgeto the paradigm of hyperproductivity. Strike work-ers churn out feelings, perception, and distinction

in all possible sizes and variations. Intensity or H

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evacuation, sublime or crap, readymade or ready-made reality—strike work supplies consumers withall they never knew they wanted.

Strike work feeds on exhaustion and tempo,on deadlines and curatorial bullshit, on small talkand fine print. It also thrives on accelerated exploita-tion. I’d guess that—apart from domestic and carework—art is the industry with the most unpaid laboraround. It sustains itself on the time and energy of

unpaid interns and self-exploiting actors on prettymuch every level and in almost every function. Freelabor and rampant exploitation are the invisible darkmatter that keeps the cultural sector going.

Free-floating strike workers plus new (and old)elites and oligarchies equal the framework of thecontemporary politics of art. While the latter managethe transition to post-democracy, the former imageit. But what does this situation actually indicate?Nothing but the ways in which contemporary art isimplicated in transforming global power patterns.

Contemporary art’s workforce consists largelyof people who, despite working constantly, do notcorrespond to any traditional image of labor. Theystubbornly resist settling into any entity recogniz-able enough to be identified as a class. While theeasy way out would be to classify this constituencyas multitude or crowd, it might be less romantic toask whether they are not global lumpenfreelancers,deterritorialized and ideologically free-floating:a reserve army of imagination communicating viaGoogle Translate.

Instead of shaping up as a new class, thisfragile constituency may well consist—as HannahArendt once spitefully formulated—of the “refuseof all classes.” These dispossessed adventurersdescribed by Arendt, the urban pimps and hood-

lums ready to be hired as colonial mercenaries and Hito Steyerl, Strike,2010, 1’, HD video. H

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exploiters, are faintly (and quite distortedly) mir-rored in the brigades of creative strike workers pro-pelled into the global sphere of circulation knowntoday as the art world.5 If we acknowledge thatcurrent strike workers might inhabit similarly shift-ing grounds—the opaque disaster zones of shockcapitalism—a decidedly un-heroic, conflicted, andambivalent picture of artistic labor emerges.

We have to face up to the fact that there is

no automatically available road to resistance andorganization for artistic labor. That opportunism andcompetition are not a deviation of this form of laborbut its inherent structure. That this workforce is notever going to march in unison, except perhaps whiledancing to a viral Lady Gaga imitation video. Theinternational is over. Now let’s get on with the global.

Here is the bad news: political art routinelyshies away from discussing all these matters.6 Addressing the intrinsic conditions of the art field,as well as the blatant corruption within it—think ofbribes to get this or that large-scale biennial intoone peripheral region or another—is a taboo evenon the agenda of most artists who consider them-selves political. Even though political art managesto represent so-called local situations from all overthe globe, and routinely packages injustice and des-titution, the conditions of its own production anddisplay remain pretty much unexplored. One couldeven say that the politics of art are the blind spot ofmuch contemporary political art.

Of course, institutional critique has tradition-ally been interested in similar issues. But today weneed a quite extensive expansion of it.7 Becausein contrast to the age of an institutional criticism,which focused on art institutions, or even the sphereof representation at large, art production (con-

sumption, distribution, marketing, etc.) takes on a

different and extended role within post-democraticglobalization. One example, which is a quite absurdbut also common phenomenon, is that radical artis nowadays very often sponsored by the mostpredatory banks or arms traders and completelyembedded in rhetorics of city marketing, branding,and social engineering.8 For very obvious reasons,this condition is rarely explored within political art,which is in many cases content to offer exotic self-

ethnicization, pithy gestures, and militant nostalgia.I am certainly not arguing for a position ofinnocence.9 It is at best illusory, at worst just an-other selling point. Most of all it is very boring.But I do think that political artists could becomemore relevant if they were to confront these issuesinstead of safely parade as Stalinist realists, CNNsituationists, or Jamie Oliver-meets-probation offi-cer social engineers. It’s time to kick the hammer-and-sickle souvenir art into the dustbin. If politicsis thought of as the Other, happening somewhereelse, always belonging to disenfranchised commu-nities in whose name no one can speak, we end upmissing what makes art intrinsically political nowa-days: its function as a place for labor, conflict, and… fun—a site of condensation of the contradictionsof capital and of extremely entertaining and some-times devastating misunderstandings between theglobal and the local.

The art field is a space of wild contradictionand phenomenal exploitation. It is a place of powermongering, speculation, financial engineering, andmassive and crooked manipulation. But it is also asite of commonality, movement, energy, and desire.In its best iterations it is a terrific cosmopolitanarena populated by mobile strike workers, itinerantsalesmen of self, tech whiz kids, budget tricksters,

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digital vagrants and day laborers. It’s hardwired,thin-skinned, plastic-fantastic. A potential com-monplace where competition is ruthless and soli-darity remains the only foreign expression. Peopledwith charming scumbags, bully-kings, almost-beauty-queens. It’s HDMI, CMYK, LGBT. Pretentious,flirtatious, mesmerizing.

This mess is kept afloat by the sheer dyna-mism of loads and loads of hardworking women.

A hive of affective labor under close scrutiny andcontrolled by capital, woven tightly into its multiplecontradictions. All of this makes it relevant to con-temporary reality. Art affects this reality preciselybecause it is entangled into all of its aspects. It’smessy, embedded, troubled, irresistible. We couldtry to understand its space as a political one insteadof trying to represent a politics that is always hap-pening elsewhere. Art is not outside politics, butpolitics resides within its production, its distribu-tion, and its reception. If we take this on, we mightsurpass the plane of a politics of representationand embark on a politics that is there, in front of oureyes, ready to embrace.

1I am expanding on a notion devel-

oped by Hongjohn Lin in his curatorialstatement for the Taipei Biennial 2010.Hongjohn Lin, “Curatorial Statement,” in10TB Taipei Biennial Guidebook (Taipei:Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2010), 10–11.

2This has been described as a

global and ongoing process of expro-priation since the 1970s. See DavidHarvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

As for the resulting distribution ofwealth, a study by the Helsinki-basedWorld Institute for DevelopmentEconomics Research of the UnitedNations University (UNU-WIDER)found that in the year 2000, the richest1 percent of adults alone owned 40percent of global assets. The bottomhalf of the world’s adult populationowned 1 percent of global wealth.See http://www.wider.unu.edu/events/past-events/2006-events/en_GB/05-12-2006/.

3For just one example of oligarch

involvement, see Kate Taylor andAndrew E. Kramer, “Museum BoardMember Caught in Russian Intrigue,”New York Times, April 27, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/nyregion/28trustee.html. While suchbiennials span from Moscow to Dubaito Shanghai and many of the so-calledtransitional countries, we shouldn’tconsider post-democracy to be a non-Western phenomenon. The Schengenarea is a brilliant example of post-democratic rule, with a whole host of

political institutions not legitimized bypopular vote and a substantial sectionof the population excluded from citi-zenship (not to mention the Old World’sgrowing fondness for democraticallyelected fascists). The 2011 exhibitionat Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin,“The Potosí Principle,” organized byAlice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann,and Max Jorge Hinderer, highlightsthe connection between oligarchy andimage production from another histori-cally relevant perspective.

4I am drawing on a field of meaning

developed by Ekaterina Degot, CosminCostina, and David Riff for their 1stUral Industrial Biennial, 2010.

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Arendt may have been wrong on thematter of taste. Taste is not necessarilya matter of the common, as she argued,following Kant. In this context, it is amatter of manufacturing consensus,engineering reputation, and other deli-cate machinations, which—whoops—metamorphose into art-historicalbibliographies. Let’s face it: the politicsof taste are not about the collective, butabout the collector. Not about the com-mon but about the patron. Not aboutsharing but about sponsoring.

6There are of course many laudable

and great exceptions, and I admit that Imyself may bow my head in shame, too.

7As is also argued in Alex Alberro

and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional

Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2009). See also the collected issuesof the online journal transform: http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106.

8Recently on show at Henie

Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo wasGuggenheim Visibility Study Group, avery interesting project by Nomedaand Gediminas Urbonas that unpackedthe tensions between local (andpartly indigenist) art scenes and theGuggenheim franchise system, withthe Guggenheim effect analyzed indetail in a case study. See http://www.

vilma.cc/2G/. Also see Joseba Zulaika,Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa: Museums,

Architecture, and City Renewal(Reno:University of Nevada Press, 2003).Another case study: Beat Weber andTherese Kaufmann, “The Foundation,the State Secretary and the Bank: AJourney into the Cultural Policy of aPrivate Institution,” transform (April25, 2006), http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1145970626.See also Martha Rosler, “Take theMoney and Run? Can Political andSocio-Critical Art ‘Survive’?” e-flux

journal, no. 12, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/107; and TirdadZolghadr, “11th Istanbul Biennial,”frieze, no. 127 (November–December2009), http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/11th_istanbul_biennial/.

9This is evident from this text’splacement on e-flux as an advertise-ment supplement. The situation isfurthermore complicated by the factthat these ads may well flaunt my ownshows. At the risk of repeating myself,I would like to emphasize that I do notconsider innocence a political position,but a moral one, and thus politicallyirrelevant. An interesting commenton this situation can be found in LuisCamnitzer, “The Corruption in the Arts /the Art of Corruption,” published in thecontext of the “Marco Polo Syndrome,”a symposium at Haus der Kulturender Welt in Berlin (April 11, 1995). Seehttp://www.universes-in-universe.de/magazin/marco-polo/s-camnitzer.htm.

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Art as Occupation: Claims foran Autonomy of Life

I want you to take out your cellphone. Open the video.Record whatever you see for a couple of seconds.No cuts. You are allowed to move around, to pan andzoom. Use effects only if they are built in. Keep doingthis for one month, every day. Now stop. Listen.

Lets start with a simple proposition: whatused to be work has increasingly been turned intooccupation.1

This change in terminology may look trivial.

In fact, almost everything changes on the way fromwork to occupation—the economic framework, butalso its implications for space and temporality.

If we think of work as labor, it implies a begin-ning, a producer, and, eventually, a result. Work isprimarily seen as a means to an end: a product, areward, or a wage. It is an instrumental relation. Italso produces a subject by means of alienation.

An occupation is the opposite. An occupationkeeps people busy instead of giving them paidlabor.2 An occupation is not hinged on any result; ithas no necessary conclusion. As such, it knows notraditional alienation, nor any corresponding ideaof subjectivity. An occupation doesn’t necessarilyassume remuneration either, since the process isthought to contain its own gratification. It has notemporal framework except the passing of timeitself. It is not centered on a producer/worker, butincludes consumers, reproducers, even destroyers,time-wasters, and bystanders—in essence, any-body seeking distraction or engagement.

OccupationThe shift from work to occupation applies

in the most different areas of contemporary dailyactivity. It marks a transition far greater than theoften-described shift from a Fordist to post-Fordist

economy. Instead of being seen as a means of H

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earning, it is seen as a way of spending time andresources. It clearly accents the passage from aneconomy based on production to an economy fueledby waste, from time progressing to time spent oreven idled away, from a space defined by clear divi-sions to an entangled and complex territory.

Perhaps most importantly: occupation is not ameans to an end, as traditional labor is. Occupationis in many cases an end in itself.

Occupation is connected to activity, service,distraction, therapy, and engagement. But alsoto conquest, invasion, and seizure. In the military,occupation refers to extreme power relations, spa-tial complication, and 3-D sovereignty. It is imposedby the occupier on the occupied, who may or maynot resist it. The objective is often expansion, butalso neutralization, stranglehold, and the quelling ofautonomy.

Occupation often implies endless mediation,eternal process, indeterminate negotiation, andthe blurring of spatial divisions. It has no built-inoutcome or resolution. It also refers to appropria-tion, colonization, and extraction. In its processualaspect occupation is both permanent and uneven—and its connotations are completely different for theoccupied and the occupier.

Of course occupations—in all the differentsenses of the word—are not the same. But themimetic force of the term operates in each of thedifferent meanings and draws them toward eachother. There is a magic affinity within the word itself:if it sounds the same, the force of similarity worksfrom within it.3 The force of naming reaches acrossdifference to uncomfortably approximate situationsthat are otherwise segregated and hierarchized bytradition, interest, and privilege.

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A r t a s O c c u p a t i o

n : C l a i m s f o r a n A u t o n o m y o f L i f e

French political party Front National is violently attacked in Second Life byavatars as a means of protest against its ongoing Second Life campaign.



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Occupation as ArtIn the context of art, the transition from work

to occupation has additional implications. Whathappens to the work of art in this process? Does ittoo transform into an occupation?

In part, it does. What used to materializeexclusively as object or product—as (art)work—now tends to appear as activity or performance.These can be as endless as strained budgets and

attention spans will allow. Today the traditionalwork of art has been largely supplemented by art asa process—as an occupation.4

Art is an occupation in that it keeps peoplebusy—spectators and many others. In many richcountries art denotes a quite popular occupationalscheme. The idea that it contains its own gratifica-tion and needs no remuneration is quite acceptedin the cultural workplace. The paradigm of the cul-ture industry provided an example of an economythat functioned by producing an increasing numberof occupations (and distractions) for people whowere in many cases working for free. Additionally,there are now occupational schemes in the guiseof art education. More and more post- and post-post-graduate programs shield prospective artistsfrom the pressure of (public or private) art markets.Art education now takes longer—it creates zonesof occupation, which yield fewer “works” but moreprocesses, forms of knowledge, fields of engage-ment, and planes of relationality. It also producesever-more educators, mediators, guides, and evenguards—all of whose conditions of occupation areagain processual (and ill- or unpaid).

The professional and militarized meaning ofoccupation unexpectedly intersect here—in the roleof the guard or attendant—to create a contradictory

space. Recently, a professor at the University of

Portrait of an intern as found online. The intern is named Justine, like the main char-acter in Marquis de Sade’s 1791 book Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue.



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Chicago suggested that museum guards shouldbe armed.5 Of course, he was referring primarily toguards in (formerly) occupied countries like Iraqand other states in the midst of political upheaval,but by citing potential breakdowns of civic orderhe folded First World locations into his appeal.What’s more, art occupation as a means of killingtime intersects with the military sense of spatialcontrol in the figure of the museum guard—some of

whom may already be military veterans. Intensifiedsecurity mutates the sites of art and inscribes themuseum or gallery into a sequence of stages ofpotential violence.

Another prime example in the complicatedtopology of occupation is the figure of the intern(in a museum, a gallery, or, most likely, an isolatedproject).6 The term “intern” is linked to internment,confinement, and detention, whether involuntary orvoluntary. She is supposed to be on the inside of thesystem, yet is excluded from payment. She is insidelabor but outside remuneration: stuck in a spacethat includes the outside and excludes the insidesimultaneously. As a result, she works to sustain herown occupation.

Both examples produce a fractured time-space with varying degrees of occupationalintensity. These zones are very much shut off fromone another, yet interlocked and interdependent.The schematics of art occupation reveal a check-pointed system, complete with gatekeepers, accesslevels, and close management of movement andinformation. Its architecture is astonishingly com-plex. Some parts are forcefully immobilized, theirautonomy denied and quelled in order to keep otherparts more mobile. Occupation works on bothsides: forcefully seizing and keeping out, inclusion

and exclusion, managing access and flow. It may H

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not come as surprise that this pattern often butnot always follows fault lines of class and politicaleconomy.

In poorer and underdeveloped parts of theworld, the immediate grip of art might seem tolessen. But art-as-occupation in these places canmore powerfully serve the larger ideological deflec-tions within capitalism and even profit concretelyfrom labor stripped of rights.7 Here, migrant, liberal,

and urban squalor can again be exploited by artistswho use misery as raw material. Art “upgrades”poorer neighborhoods by aestheticizing theirstatus as urban ruins and drives out long-terminhabitants after the area becomes fashionable.8 Thus art assists in the structuring, hierarchizing,seizing, up- or downgrading of space; in organizing,wasting, or simply consuming time through vaguedistraction or committed pursuit of largely unpaidpara-productive activity; and it divvies up roles inthe figures of artist, audience, freelance curator, oruploader of cellphone videos to a museum website.

Generally speaking, art is part of an unevenglobal system, one that underdevelops someparts of the world, while overdeveloping others—and the boundaries between both areas interlockand overlap.

Life and AutonomyBut beyond all this, art doesn’t stop at

occupying people, space, or time. It also occupieslife as such.

Why should that be the case? Let’s start witha small detour on artistic autonomy. Artistic auton-omy was traditionally predicated not on occupation,but on separation—more precisely, on art’s separa-tion from life.9 As artistic production became more

specialized in an industrial world marked by an



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increasing division of labor, it also grew increasinglydivorced from direct functionality.10 While it appar-ently evaded instrumentalization, it simultaneouslylost social relevance. As a reaction, different avant-gardes set out to break the barriers of art and torecreate its relation to life.

Their hope was for art to dissolve within life,to be infused with a revolutionary jolt. What hap-pened was rather the contrary. To push the point: life

has been occupied by art, because art’s initial foraysback into life and daily practice gradually turnedinto routine incursions, and then into constantoccupation. Nowadays, the invasion of life by art isnot the exception, but the rule. Artistic autonomywas meant to separate art from the zone of dailyroutine—from mundane life, intentionality, utility,production, and instrumental reason—in order todistance it from rules of efficiency and social coer-cion. But this incompletely segregated area thenincorporated all that it broke from in the first place,recasting the old order within its own aestheticparadigms. The incorporation of art within life wasonce a political project (both for the Left and Right),but the incorporation of life within art is now anaesthetic project, and it coincides with an overallaestheticization of politics.

On all levels of everyday activity, art not onlyinvades life, but occupies it. This doesn’t mean thatit’s omnipresent. It just means that it has establisheda complex topology of both overbearing presenceand gaping absence—both of which impact daily life.

ChecklistBut, you may respond, apart from occasional

exposure, I have nothing to do with art whatsoever!How can my life be occupied by it? Perhaps one of

the following questions applies to you: H

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Does art possess you in the guise of endlessself-performance?11 Do you wake feeling like a mul-tiple? Are you on constant auto-display?

Have you been beautified, improved, upgraded,or attempted to do this to anyone/thing else? Hasyour rent doubled because a few kids with brushesrelocated into that dilapidated building next door?Have your feelings been designed, or do you feeldesigned by your iPhone?

Or, on the contrary, is access to art (and itsproduction) being withdrawn, slashed, cut off, impov-erished, and hidden behind insurmountable barriers?Is labor in this field unpaid? Do you live in a city thatredirects a huge portion of its cultural budget to funda one-off art exhibition? Is conceptual art from yourregion privatized by predatory banks?

All of these are symptoms of artistic occupa-tion. While, on the one hand, artistic occupationcompletely invades life, it also cuts off much artfrom circulation.

Division of LaborOf course, even if they had wanted to, the

avant-gardes could never have achieved the dissolu-tion of the border between art and life on their own.One of the reasons has to do with a rather paradoxi-cal development at the root of artistic autonomy.According to Peter Bürger, art acquired a special sta-tus within the bourgeois capitalist system becauseartists somehow refused to follow the specializationrequired by other professions. While in its time thiscontributed to claims for artistic autonomy, morerecent advances in neoliberal modes of productionin many occupational fields started to reverse thedivision of labor.12 The artist-as-dilettante andbiopolitical designer was overtaken by the clerk-

as-innovator, the technician-as-entrepreneur, the



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laborer-as-engineer, the manager-as-genius, and(worst of all) the administrator-as-revolutionary.As a template for many forms of contemporaryoccupation, multitasking marks the reversal of thedivision of labor: the fusion of professions, or rathertheir confusion. The example of the artist as creativepolymath now serves as a role model (or excuse) tolegitimate the universalization of professional dilet-tantism and overexertion in order to save money on

specialized labor.If the origin of artistic autonomy lies in therefusal of the division of labor (and the alienationand subjection that accompany it), this refusal hasnow been reintegrated into neoliberal modes of pro-duction to set free dormant potentials for financialexpansion. In this way, the logic of autonomy spreadto the point where it tipped into new dominant ideol-ogies of flexibility and self-entrepreneurship, acquir-ing new political meanings as well. Workers, femi-nists, and youth movements of the 1970s startedclaiming autonomy from labor and the regime of thefactory.13 Capital reacted to this flight by designingits own version of autonomy: the autonomy of capitalfrom workers.14 The rebellious, autonomous forceof those various struggles became a catalyst forthe capitalist reinvention of labor relations as such.Desire for self-determination was rearticulated asa self-entrepreneurial business model, the hope toovercome alienation was transformed into serialnarcissism and overidentification with one’s occupa-tion. Only in this context can we understand whycontemporary occupations that promise an unalien-ated lifestyle are somehow believed to contain theirown gratification. But the relief from alienation theysuggest takes on the form of a more pervasive self-oppression, which arguably could be much worse

than traditional alienation.15

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The struggles around autonomy, and above allcapital’s response to them are thus deeply ingrainedinto the transition from work to occupation. As wehave seen, this transition is based on the role modelof the artist as a person who refuses the divisionof labor and leads an unalienated lifestyle. This isone of the templates for new occupational formsof life that are all-encompassing, passionate, self-oppressive, and narcissistic to the bone.

To paraphrase Allan Kaprow: life in a gallery islike fucking in a cemetery.16 We could add that thingsbecome even worse as the gallery spills back intolife: as the gallery/cemetery invades life, one beginsto feel unable to fuck anywhere else.17

Occupation, AgainThis might be the time to start exploring the

next meaning of occupation: the meaning it hastaken on in countless squats and takeovers inrecent years. As the occupiers of the New School in2008 emphasized, this type of occupation tries tointervene into the governing forms of occupationaltime and space, instead of simply blocking andimmobilizing a specific area:

Occupation mandates the inversion of the stan-dard dimensions of space. Space in an occupa-tion is not merely the container of our bodies,it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozenby the logic of the commodity. In an occupation,one must engage with space topologically, as astrategist, asking: What are its holes, entrances,exits? How can one disalienate it, disidentify it,make it inoperative, communize it?18

To unfreeze the forces that lie dormant in the petri-

fied space of occupation means to rearticulate their



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functional uses, to make them non-efficient, non-instrumental, and non-intentional in their capaci-ties as tools for social coercion. It also means todemilitarize it—at least in terms of hierarchy—andto then militarize it differently. Now, to free an artspace from art-as-occupation seems a paradoxicaltask, especially when art spaces extend beyond thetraditional gallery. On the other hand, it is also notdifficult to imagine how any of these spaces might

operate in a non-efficient, non-instrumental, andnon-productive way.But which is the space we should occupy?

Of course, at this moment suggestions abound formuseums, galleries, and other art spaces to beoccupied. There is absolutely nothing wrong withthat; all these spaces should be occupied, now,again, and forever. But again, none of these spacesis strictly coexistent with our own multiple spacesof occupation. The realms of art remain mostlyadjacent to the incongruent territories that stitch upand articulate the incoherent accumulation of timesand spaces by which we are occupied. At the end ofthe day, people might have to leave the site of occu-pation in order to go home to do the thing formerlycalled labor: wipe off the tear gas, go pick up theirkids from child care, and otherwise get on with theirlives.19 Because these lives happen in the vast andunpredictable territory of occupation, and this isalso where lives are being occupied. I am suggestingthat we occupy this space. But where is it? And howcan it be claimed?

The Territory of OccupationThe territory of occupation is not a single

physical place, and is certainly not to be foundwithin any existing occupied territory. It is a space

of affect, materially supported by ripped reality. It

can actualize anywhere, at any time. It exists as apossible experience. It may consist of a compositeand montaged sequence of movements throughsampled checkpoints, airport security checks, cashtills, aerial viewpoints, body scanners, scatteredlabor, revolving glass doors, duty-free stores. Howdo I know? Remember the beginning of this text? Iasked you to record a few seconds each day on yourcellphone. Well, this is the sequence that accumu-

lated in my phone; walking the territory of occupa-tion, for months on end.Walking through cold winter sun and fading

insurrections sustained and amplified by mobilephones. Sharing hope with crowds yearning forspring. A spring that feels necessary, vital, unavoid-able. But spring didn’t come this year. It didn’t comein summer, nor in autumn. Winter came aroundagain, yet spring wouldn’t draw any closer. Occu-pations came and froze, were trampled under,drowned in gas, shot at. In that year people coura-geously, desperately, passionately fought to achievespring. But it remained elusive. And while springwas violently kept at bay, this sequence accumu-lated in my cellphone. A sequence powered by teargas, heartbreak, and permanent transition. Record-ing the pursuit of spring.

Jump cut to Cobra helicopters hovering overmass graves, zebra wipe to shopping malls, mosaicto spam filters, SIM cards, nomad weavers; spiraleffect to border detention, child care, and digitalexhaustion.20 Gas clouds dissolving between high-rise buildings. Exasperation. The territory of occupa-tion is a place of enclosure, extraction, hedging, andconstant harassment, of getting pushed, patronized,surveilled, deadlined, detained, delayed, hurried—it encourages a condition that is always too late, too

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Your phone is driving you through this journey,driving you mad, extracting value, whining like ababy, purring like a lover, bombarding you with dead-ening, maddening, embarrassing, outrageous claimsfor time, space, attention, credit card numbers. Itcopy-pastes your life to countless unintelligiblepictures that have no meaning, no audience, nopurpose, but do have impact, punch, and speed. Itaccumulates love letters, insults, invoices, drafts,

endless communication. It is being tracked andscanned, turning you into transparent digits, intomotion as a blur. A digital eye as your heart in hand.It is witness and informer. If it gives away your posi-tion, it means you’ll retroactively have had one. Ifyou film the sniper that shoots at you, the phone willhave faced his aim. He will have been framed andfixed, a faceless pixel composition.21 Your phone isyour brain in corporate design, your heart as a prod-uct, the Apple of your eye.

Your life condenses into an object in the palmof your hand, ready to be slammed into a wall andstill grinning at you, shattered, dictating deadlines,recording, interrupting.

The territory of occupation is a green-screenedterritory, madly assembled and conjectured by zap-ping, copy-paste operations, incongruously keyedin, ripped, ripping apart, breaking lives and heart.It is a space governed not only by 3-D sovereignty,but 4-D sovereignty because it occupies time, a 5-Dsovereignty because it governs from the virtual, andan n-D sovereignty from above, beyond, across—inDolby Surround. Time asynchronously crashes intospace; accumulating by spasms of capital, despair,and desire running wild.

Here and elsewhere, now and then, delay andecho, past and future, day and night nest within each

other like unrendered digital effects. Both temporal

Colin Smith, Poster for the Occupy Movement, 2011.



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1I am ripping these ideas from a bril-

liant observation by the Carrotworkers’Collective. See their “On Free Labour,”http://carrotworkers.wordpress.com/on-free-labour/.

2“The European Union language

promoting ‘occupation’ rather than‘employment,’ marking a subtle butinteresting semantic shift towardskeeping the active population ‘busy’rather than trying to create jobs.” Ibid.

3Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of

the Simi lar,” in Selected Writings,eds. Marcus Bullock and MichaelW. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999),2: 694–711, esp. 696.

4One could even say: the work of art

is tied to the idea of a product (boundup in a complex system of valorization).Art-as-occupation bypasses the endresult of production by immediatelyturning the making-of into commodity.

5Lawrence Rothfield as quoted in

John Hooper, “Arm museum guardsto prevent looting, says professor,”Guardian, July 10, 2011, http://www.

guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jul/10/arm-museum-guards-looting-war.“Professor Lawrence Rothfield, facultydirector of the University of Chicago’scultural policy center, told the Guardian that ministries, foundations and localauthorities ‘should not assume that thebrutal policing job required to preventlooters and professional art thievesfrom carrying away items is just one forthe national police or for other forcesnot under their direct control.’ He wasspeaking in advance of the annual con-ference of the Association for Researchinto Crimes Against Art (ARCA), heldover the weekend in the central Italiantown of Amelia. Rothfield said he wouldalso like to see museum attendants,site wardens and others given thoroughtraining in crowd control. And not just inthe developing world.”

6“The figure of the intern appears in

this context paradigmatic as it negoti-ates the collapse of the boundariesbetween Education, Work and Life.”Carrotworkers’ Collective, “On FreeLabour.”

7As critiqued recently by Walid

Raad in the building of the AbuDhabi Guggenheim franchise andrelated labor issues. See Ben Davis,“Interview with Walid Raad About theGuggenheim Abu Dhabi,” ARTINFO,

June 9, 2011, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37846/walid-raad-on-why-the-guggenheim-abu-dhabi-must-be-built-on-a-foundation-of-workers-rights/.

8Central here is Martha Rosler’s

three-part essay, “Culture Class: Art,Creativity, Urbanism,” e-flux journal,no. 21 (December 2010); no. 23 (March2011); and no. 25 (May 2011).

9These paragraphs are entirely

due to the pervasive influence of SvenLütticken’s excellent text “Actingon the Omnipresent Frontiers ofAutonomy,” in To The Arts, Citizens!,eds. Óscar Faria and João Fernandes(Porto: Serralves, 2010), 146–67.

Lütticken also commissioned the ini-tial version of this text, to be publishedsoon as a “Black Box” version in aspecial edition of OPEN magazine.

10The emphasis here is on the word

obvious, since art evidently retained amajor function in developing a particu-lar division of senses, class distinction,and bourgeois subjectivity even as itbecame more divorced from religiousor overt representational function.Its autonomy presented itself as dis-interested and dispassionate, while atthe same time mimetically adaptingthe form and structure of capitalistcommodities.

11The Invisible Committee lay out the

terms for occupational performativity:

“Producing oneself is becoming the

and spatial occupation intersect to produce individ-ualized timelines, intensified by fragmented circuitsof production and augmented military realities. Theycan be recorded, objectified, and thus made tangibleand real. A matter in motion, made of poor images,lending flow to material reality. It is important toemphasize that these are not just passive remnantsof individual or subjective movements. Rather, theyare sequences that create individuals by means of

occupation. They also subject them to occupation.As material condensations of conflictive forces,they catalyze resistance, opportunism, resignation.They trigger full stops and passionate abandon. Theysteer, shock, and seduce.

I might have sent something to you from myphone. See it spreading. See it become invaded byother sequences, many sequences, see it beingre-montaged, rearticulated, reedited. Let’s mergeand rip apart our scenarios of occupation. Breakcontinuity. Juxtapose. Edit in parallel. Jump the axe.Build suspense. Pause. Countershoot. Keep chas-ing spring.

These are our territories of occupation, force-fully kept apart from each other, each in his and herown corporate enclosure. Let’s reedit them. Rebuild.Rearrange. Wreck. Articulate. Alienate. Unfreeze.Accelerate. Inhabit. Occupy.

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dominant occupation of a society whereproduction no longer has an object:like a carpenter who’s been evictedfrom his shop and in desperation setsabout hammering and sawing himself.All these young people smiling for their job interviews, who have their teethwhitened to give them an edge, whogo to nightclubs to boost the companyspirit, who learn English to advancetheir careers, who get divorced ormarried to move up the ladder, whotake courses in leadership or practice‘self-improvement’ in order to better‘manage conflicts’—‘the most intimate

“self-improvement,”’ says one guru,‘will lead to increased emotional stabil-ity, to smoother and more open relation-ships, to sharper intellectual focus,and therefore to a better economicperformance.’” The Invisible Committee,The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 2009), 16.

12Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-

Garde (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984).

13It is interesting to make a link

at this point to classical key textsof autonomist thought as collectedin Sylvère Lotringer and ChristianMarazzi, eds., Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles:

Semiotext(e), 2007).14Antonio Negri has detailed the

restructuring of the northern Italianlabor force after the 1970s, whilePaolo Virno a nd Franco “Bifo” Berardiboth emphasize that the autonomoustendencies expressed the refusalof labor and the rebellious feminist,youth, and workers’ movements inthe ’70s was recaptured into new,flexibilized, and entrepreneurial formsof coercion. More recently Berardi hasemphasized the new conditions ofsubjective identification with labor andits self-perpetuating narcissistic com-ponents. See, among others, AntonioNegri, “Reti produttive e territori: ilcaso del Nord-Est italiano,” in L’invernoè finito: Scritti sulla trasformazionenegata (1989–1995), ed. Giovanni

Caccia (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996),

66–80; Paolo Virno, “Do You RememberCounterrevoluti on?,” in Radical Thoughtin Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. MichaelHardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1996);and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul atWork: From Alienation to Autonomy (LosAngeles: Semiotext(e)), 2010.

15I have repeatedly argued that one

should not seek to escape alienationbut on the contrary embrace it as wellas the status of objectivity and object-hood that goes along with it.

16In “What Is a Museum? Dialogue

with Robert Smithson,” Museum World no. 9 (1967), reprinted in Jack Flam, ed.,The Writings of Robert Smithson (NewYork: New York University Press, 1979),43–51.

17Remember also the now unfortu-

nately defunct meaning of occupation.During the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies “to occupy” was a euphe-mism for “have sexual intercoursewith,” which fell from usage almostcompletely during the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries.

18Inoperative Committee, Preoccu-

pied: The Logic of Occupation (2009), 11.19In the sense of squatting, which in

contrast to other types of occupation islimited spatially and temporally.

20I copied the form of my sequence

from Imri Kahn’s lovely video Rebeccamakes it!, where it appears with differ-ent imagery.

21This description is directly inspired

by Rabih Mroué’s terrific lecture, “ThePixelated Revolution,” on the use ofcellphones in recent Syrian uprisings.

Freedom from Everything:Freelancers and Mercenaries

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In 1990, George Michael released his song “Freedom’90.” It was a time when everybody was deliriouslysinging along with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” or theScorpions’s “Winds of Change,” celebrating whatpeople thought was the final victory of liberty anddemocracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mostabysmal of all these sing-along songs was DavidHasselhoff’s live rendition from on top of the BerlinWall of “Looking for Freedom,” a song describing the

trials and tribulations of a rich man’s son trying tomake his own fortune.But George Michael did something entirely

different. For him, freedom was not some liberalparadise of opportunity. Instead,

It looks like the road to heavenBut it feels like the road to hell.1

What sort of freedom does George Michael’s songdescribe? It is not the classic liberal freedomdefined by an ability to do or say or believe some-thing. It is rather a negative freedom. It is character-ized by absence, the lack of property and equalityin exchange, the absence even of the author andthe destruction of all props suggesting his publicpersona. And this is why the song feels much morecontemporary than all the odes to liberty from abygone age of the end of history. It describes a verycontemporary state of freedom: the freedom fromeverything.

We are accustomed to regarding freedomas primarily positive—the freedom to do or havesomething; thus there is the freedom of speech,the freedom to pursue happiness and opportunity,or the freedom of worship.2 But now the situationis shifting. Especially in the current economic

and political crisis, the flipside of liberal ideas of

freedom—namely, the freedom of corporationsfrom any form of regulation, as well as the freedomto relentlessly pursue one’s own interest at theexpense of everyone else’s—has become the onlyform of universal freedom that exists: the freedomfrom social bonds, freedom from solidarity, freedomfrom certainty or predictability, freedom fromemployment or labor, freedom from culture, publictransport, education, or anything public at all.

These are the only freedoms that we sharearound the globe nowadays. They do not applyequally to everybody, but depend on one’s economicand political situation. They are negative freedoms,and they apply across a carefully constructed andexaggerated cultural alterity that promotes: thefreedom from social security, the freedom from themeans of making a living, the freedom from account-ability and sustainability, the freedom from freeeducation, healthcare, pensions and public culture,the loss of standards of public responsibility, and inmany places, the freedom from the rule of law.

As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s justanother word for nothing left to lose.” This is thefreedom that people in many places share today.Contemporary freedom is not primarily the enjoy-ment of civil liberties, as the traditional liberalview has it, but rather like the freedom of free fall,experienced by many who are thrown into anuncertain and unpredictable future.

These negative freedoms are also those thatpropel the very diverse protest movements thathave emerged around the world—movements thathave no positive focal point or clearly articulateddemands, because they express the conditions ofnegative freedom. They articulate the loss of thecommon as such.

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The romantic free lance as portrayed in the book A Festival of Song: A Series of Evenings with the Greatest Poets of the English Language, 1876.

Negative Freedom as Common GroundNow it’s time for the good news. There is

nothing wrong with this condition. It is of coursedevastating for those who are subject to it, but atthe same time, it also reshapes the character ofopposition in a very welcome way. It diverts discus-sions away from the freedom to do, buy, say, orwear this or that. These discussions usually endup constructing an Other, whether the Islamic fun-

damentalist, the communist-atheist, the feministtraitor to the nation or culture—whoever fits the billwill be the one who forbids you to buy, say, or wearcertain things. However, to insist on speaking aboutnegative freedom opens the possibility of claimingmore negative freedoms: the freedom from exploita-tion, oppression, and cynicism. This means explor-ing new forms of relationships between people whohave become free agents in a world of free trade andrampant deregulation.

One particularly pertinent aspect of the con-dition of negative freedom today: the condition ofthe freelancer.

What is a freelancer? Let’s look at a verysimple definition.

1. A person who sells services to employerswithout a long-term commitment to any of them.2. An uncommitted independent, as in politicsor social life.3. A medieval mercenary.3

The word “freelance” derives from the medievalterm for a mercenary soldier, a “free lance,” that is, asoldier who is not attached to any particular masteror government and can be hired for a specific task.The term was first used by Sir Walter Scott (1771–

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warrior” or “free-lance,” indicating that the lance isnot sworn to any lord’s services. It changed to a figu-rative noun around the 1860s and was recognizedas a verb in 1903 by authorities in etymology such asthe Oxford English Dictionary . Only in modern timeshas the term morphed from a noun (a freelance) intoan adjective (a freelance journalist), a verb (a jour-nalist who freelances) and an adverb (she workedfreelance), as well as the noun “freelancer.”4

While today’s lance-for-hire takes on manydifferent forms—from stone crushers, shovels,baby bottles, and machine guns to any form ofdigital hardware—the conditions of employment donot appear to have changed as dramatically as thelance itself. Today, that lance—at least in the caseof writers—has most likely been designed by SteveJobs. But perhaps labor conditions have changedas well—the factory now seems to be dissolvinginto autonomous and subcontracted microunitsthat produce under conditions that are not far fromindentured and day labor. And this widespread,though by no means universal, reversal to historicalforms of feudalist labor could mean that, indeed, weare living in neo-feudal times.5

In Japanese cinema, there is a long traditionof portraying the figure of the itinerant freelance.This character is called the “ronin,” a wanderingsamurai who knows no permanent master. He haslost the privileges of serving a single master andnow faces a world characterized by the Hobbesianwarfare of all against all. The only thing he has leftare his fighting skills, which he rents out. He is alumpensamurai, downsized, degraded, but with keyskills nevertheless.

The classic freelancer film is Akira Kurosawa’sYojimbo (1961), which also became popular in

the West because it was adapted as a so-called

spaghetti western by Italian director Sergio Leone. A Fistful of Dollars (1964) launched both ClintEastwood and the superwide super-close-up,usually of sweaty males staring each other downbefore decisive shoot-outs. But the originalJapanese version is much more interesting. In itsopening sequence, we are faced with a surprisinglycontemporary situation. While the freelancer walksthrough a windswept and barren landscape, he

approaches a village and meets people in differentdegrees of anguish and destitution. The closingshot of the introduction is of a dog who strolls pastwith a human hand in his mouth.

In Kurosawa’s film, the country is transitioningfrom a production-based economy to a consump-tion- and speculation-based one. The village is ruledby two rival warlord-capitalists. People are giving uptheir manufacturing businesses to become brokersand agents. At the same time, textile production—a profession deeply associated with the creation anddevelopment of capitalism—is being outsourcedto housewives. Hookers abound, as do the securitypersonnel to whom they cater. Sex and security arevaluable commodities, as are coffins, which, apartfrom textile production, seem to be the main industryin town. In this situation, the freelancer appears onthe scene. He manages to pit the warlords againsteach other and liberates the villagers.

The MercenaryWhile the story of the ronin is a fitting

allegory for the conditions of contemporary free-lancers, the mercenary is not just an allegorical orhistorical figure—it is a very contemporary one.Indeed, we are living in an age in which the use ofmercenary forces has made a surprising comeback,

especially during the second Iraq War, which—as H

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The hollywood adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 filmYojimbo starred ClintEastwood. Clint Eastwood’s character, originally a freelance samurai, was adaptedby Sergio Leone to be a cowboy in his spaghetti western Dollar Trilogy.

we may have already forgotten—started out as“Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

The question of whether private securitycontractors can be called mercenaries underinternational law was hotly debated during the IraqWar. While US military contractors perhaps did notsatisfy all the criteria for being called mercenariesaccording to the Geneva Convention, the use ofabout 20,000 such personnel during the occupation

highlights the increasing privatization of warfareand the lack of state control over the actions ofthese private soldiers.

As many political scientists have noted, theprivatization of warfare is a symptom of an overallweakening of the structure of the nation-state—a sign of a loss of control over military power, whichundermines accountability and the rule of law. Itcalls into question the state’s so-called monopolyon violence and undermines state sovereignty,replacing it with what has been called “subcon-tracted sovereignty.” We thus have two figures,which complement each other and figure promi-nently in the scenario of negative freedom: thefreelancer in an occupational sense and the mer-cenary or private security contractor in the militaryoccupational sense.

Both freelancers and mercenaries lack alle-giance to traditional forms of political organization,like nation-states. They engage in free-floatingloyalities that are subject to economic and militarynegotiation. Thus, democratic political representa-tion becomes an empty promise, since traditionalpolitical institutions only give negative freedomsto freelancers and mercenaries: the freedom fromeverything, the freedom to be outlaws or, as thebeautiful expression goes: free game. Free game for

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of states, and, in the last instance, also the deregu-lation of liberal democracy itself.

Arguably, both freelancers and mercenariesare related to the rise of what Saskia Sassen callsthe “Global City.” This concept was beautifully sum-marized in a recent lecture by Thomas Elsaesser.He says that Global Cities are places that,

due to a number of distinct factors, have become

important nodes in the global economic system.The idea of the Global City therefore impliesthinking of the world in terms of networksthat come together at certain points, in citieswhose reach and reference go beyond a singlenation, thus suggesting transnationality orpost-nationality.6

Global Cities thus express a new geography of powerthat is intrinsically linked to economic globalizationand its many consequences, which have substan-tially transformed the role of the nation-state andits political institutions, such as representativedemocracy. This means that traditional modes ofdemocratic representation are deeply in crisis. Thiscrisis was not brought about by the interference ofsome culturally alien Other. It was brought about bythe system of political representation itself, whichhas, on the one hand, undermined the power of thenation-state by rolling back economic regulations,and, on the other hand, inflated the power of thenation-state through emergency legislation anddigitized surveillance. The liberal idea of represen-tative democracy has been deeply corrupted by theunrestrained forces of both economic liberalismand nationalism.

At this point a new negative freedom emerges:

the freedom not to be represented by traditional

institutions, which refuse any responsibility for youbut still try to control and micromanage your life,perhaps by using private military contractors orother private security services.

So what is the freedom to be representeddifferently? How can we express a condition ofcomplete freedom from anything, from attachment,subjectivity, property, loyalty, social bonds, andeven oneself as a subject? And how could we even

express it politically?Maybe like this?

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This layout for a do-it-yourself paper mask of V for Vendetta’s graphic novelcharacter Guy Fawkes has been used by protesters since 2008 in reference to theAnonymous hacker movement. A cutout mask allows users to avoid payingcopyrights for the mask, now property of Warner Brothers since the film studio’s

adaptation of the novel.



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Lose the Face Now, I’ve Got to Live…In 2008, the Guy Fawkes mask was appropri-

ated by the hacker group Anonymous as its publicface for a protest against Scientology. Since then ithas spread as a viral visual symbol of contemporarydissent. But it is virtually unknown that this is anappropriation of the face of a mercenary.

Guy Fawkes was not only the person whogot executed because he wanted to blow up the

British Parliament. He was also a religious mer-cenary, fighting for the cause of Catholicism allover the European continent. While his historicalpersona is more than dubious and frankly unap-pealing, the reappropriation of his abstracted like-ness by Anonymous shows an interesting if cer-tainly unconscious reinterpretation of the role ofthe mercenary.

But the new mercenary—who is supposedlyfree from everything—is no longer a subject, but anobject: a mask. It is a commercial object, licensedby a big corporation and pirated accordingly. Themask first appeared in V for Vendetta, a film about amasked rebel named V who fights a fascist Britishgovernment of the future. This explains why themask is licensed by Time Warner, which released V for Vendetta. So anticorporate demonstraters whobuy the official version of the mask help enrich thekind of corporation they protest against. But thisalso triggers counteractions:

[One] London protester said his brethren are try-ing to counter Warner Bros.’ control of the imagery.He claims that Anonymous UK has imported1,000 copies from China, and the distributiongoes “straight into the pockets of the Anonymousbeer fund rather than to Warner Brothers. Much

better.”7

This overdetermined object represents the freedomnot to be represented. A disputed object of copyrightprovides a generic identity for people who feel theyneed not only anonymity to be represented, but canonly be represented by objects and commodities,because, whether free lances or even mercenaries,they themselves are free-floating commodities.

But look at other uses of masks or artificialpersonas to see how the trope of the mercenary can

be taken even further. The Russian punk bank PussyRiot used neon-colored balaclavas to conceal theirfaces during highly publicized appearances on RedSquare in Moscow, where they told president Putinin no uncertain terms to go packing. Apart fromits use value in (at least temporarily) concealingfaces, the balaclava also references one of the mostfamous icons of good-humored militancy of recentdecades: the pipe-puffing subcomandante Marcos,unofficial spokesperson for the EZLN, also know asthe Zapatista movement.

And this also shows us how to flip the figure ofthe mercenary into the figure of the guerrilla. Indeed,historically both are intimately linked. During thesecond half of the twentieth century, mercenarieswere unleashed on insurgent groups throughout theworld, particularly in postcolonial conflicts in Africa.But paramilitary “advisors” were also deployedagainst guerrilla movements in Latin America duringthe dirty proxy wars to maintain US hegemony inthe region. In some sense guerrillas and mercenariesshare similar spaces, except for the fact that guerril-las usually do not get paid for their efforts. Of courseit is not possible to characterize all guerrilla move-ments along these lines—they are much too diverse.While in many cases their structure is similar to thatof mercenaries and paramilitary groups deployed

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paradigm and reverse it by taking up negative free-dom and trying to break free from dependency; fromoccupation in all its ambiguous meanings.

As figures of contemporary economic reality,mercenaries and free lancers are free to break freefrom their employers and reorganize as guerrillas—or to put it more modestly, as the gang of ronin por-trayed in Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai (1954). Seven free lancers team up to protect a

village from bandits. In situations of complete nega-tive freedom, even this is possible.

The MaskAnd now we can come back to George

Michael. In the video for “Freedom ’90,” all the ele-ments mentioned above are vividly expressed.With its unabashed and over-the-top veneration ofheteronormative celebrities, the video looks as sillynow as it did when it was first released.

George Michael never appears in the video.Instead, he is represented by supercommoditiesand supermodels, who lip-synch his song as ifthey were human mics. All the insignia of his stagepersona—the leather jacket, the jukebox, and theguitar—are destroyed in explosions, as if they werethe British Parliament blown apart. The set lookslike a foreclosed house in which even the furniturehas been pawned and nothing remains but a soundsystem. There is nothing left. No subject, no pos-session, no identity, no brand, with voice and faceseparated from each other. Only masks, anonymity,alienation, commodification, and freedom fromalmost everything remain. Freedom looks like theroad to heaven—but it feels like the road to hell, andit creates the necessity to change, to refuse to bethis subject who is always already framed, named,

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So here is the final good news. Only whenyou accept that there is no way back into the DavidHasselhoff paradigm of freedom, with its glorifica-tion of self-entrepreneurship and delusions ofopportunity, will the new freedom open up to you. Itmay be terrifying like a new dawn over a terrain ofhardship and catastrophe—but it doesn’t excludesolidarity. It says clearly:

Freedom: I won’t let you down.Freedom: I will not give you up. You got to givewhat you take.

In our dystopia of negative freedom—in our atom-ized nightmares—nobody belongs to anybody(except banks). We don’t even belong to ourselves.Not even in this situation will I give you up. Will I letyou down. Have some faith in the sound. It’s the onlygood thing we got.

Just like Kurosawa’s free lancers and merce-naries, who form bonds of mutual support in situa-tions of Hobbesian warfare, feudalism, and warlord-ism, there is something we are free to do, when weare free of everything.

The new freedom: you’ve got to give for whatyou take.





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Missing People: Entanglement,Superposition, and Exhumationas Sites of Indeterminacy

1.In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger devised an insidi-

ous thought experiment. He imagined a box with acat inside, which could be killed at any moment bya deadly mixture of radiation and poison. Or it mightnot be killed at all. Both outcomes were equallyprobable.

But the consequence of thinking through thissituation was much more shocking than the initial

setup. According to quantum theory, there wasn’t just one cat inside the box, dead or alive. Therewere actually two cats: one dead, one alive—bothlocked into a state of so-called superposition, thatis, copresent and materially entangled with oneanother. This peculiar state lasted as long as the boxremained closed.

Macrophysical reality is defined by either/orsituations. Someone is either dead or alive. ButSchrödinger’s thought experiment boldly replacedmutual exclusivity with an impossible coexistence—a so-called state of indeterminacy.

But that’s not all. The experiment becomeseven more disorienting when the box is opened andthe entanglement (Verschränkung) of the dead andthe live cat abruptly ends. At this point, either adead or a live cat decisively emerges, not becausethe cat then actually dies or comes to life, butbecause we look at it. The act of observation breaksthe state of indeterminacy. In quantum physics,observation is an active procedure. By taking mea-sure and identifying, it interferes and engages withits object. By looking at the cat, we fix it in one oftwo possible but mutually exclusive states. We endits existence as an indeterminate interlocking wave-form and freeze it as an individual chunk of matter.

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ments of quantum theory. It’s not radiation or poisongas that ultimately decides the fate of the cat, butthe fact that it is identified, seen, described, andassessed. Being subject to observation provokesthe second death of the cat: the one that ends itsstate of limbo.

2.According to common logic, a missing person

is either dead or alive. But is she really? Doesn’t thisonly apply at the moment when we find out whathappened to her? When she turns up or when herremains are identified?

But what, then, is the state of missing itself?Does it take place inside Schrödinger’s box, so tospeak? Is it being both dead and alive? How can weunderstand its conflicting desires: to want and todread the truth at the same time? The urge to bothmove on and keep hope alive? Perhaps the state ofmissing speaks of a paradoxical superposition thatcannot be understood with the conceptual tools ofEuclidian physics, human biology, or Aristotelianlogic. Perhaps it reaches out to an impossiblecoexistence of life and death. Both are materiallyinterlaced in limbo—as long as no observer opensthe “box” of indeterminacy. Which is, in many cases,a grave.

3.In 2010, Spanish prosecutor Baltasar Garzón

brushed up against the state of superposition.1 Twoyears prior, he had brought charges against leadingofficials of the Franco regime, including GeneralFranco himself, for crimes against humanity. Heopened investigations into the disappearance andsuspected murder of around 113,000 people—

mostly Republicans from the Civil War period—as

well as the forceful appropriation of 30,000 children.Many of the disappeared ended up in mass gravesaround the country, which at that time were beingpatiently dug up by relatives of the disappeared andvolunteers. None of the thousands of kidnappings,disappearances, summary executions, and killingsby starvation or exhaustion had ever been pros-ecuted legally in Spain. And total impunity had beenmade legal by a so-called amnesty law in 1977.

Garzón’s case was the first to challenge thissituation. Predictably, it ran into immediate con-troversy. One of the many points on which he waschallenged was that many of the accused, includingFranco himself, were dead. And, according to thelaw, if they were dead then Garzón had no jurisdic-tion. He found himself in a legal deadlock: he hadto assert that the dead were still alive in order toinvestigate whether they were dead in the first placeand guilty in the second.

This is where superposition comes into play,since a potential legal argument in this case can bederived from Schrödinger’s paradigm. Garzón couldhave argued that one had to get to the point of beingable to open Schrödinger’s box. Only then could onedetermine whether the defendants were dead oralive, and until this happened, a state of superposi-tion between life and death had to be assumed.Franco, for instance, had to be proven dead. If not, ithad to be assumed that he was in a state of super-position, until proper observation and measurementcould take place. As long as Franco was at leastpotentially alive, investigations into the crimes ofthe Franco period could continue.

But the state of superposition not only affec-ted the accused perpetrators. It also determinedthe legal status of many of the disappeared. As law-

yer Carlos Slepoy argued, any disappeared person, H

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regardless of the date of disappearance, had to beassumed to be alive. As long as he or she was in astate of having been kidnapped and not yet found,the crime was ongoing. It could not fall under anystatute of limitations. As long the victims weren’tproven dead—as long as they were still missing—they were in a state of superposition and indetermi-nacy. While the crime was lingering, Schrödinger’sbox remained closed and both a potentially dead

missing person and a potentially living missing per-son were entangled in a paradoxical legal quantumstate. This state of indeterminacy enabled the casesto remain open and investigations to proceed.

4.Schrödinger’s mental exercise in indetermi-

nacy echoes another famous thought image: theidea of the two bodies of the king. In 1957, historianErnst Kantorowicz described how the bodies ofmedieval kings were split into a natural body and abody politic.2 While the natural body was mortal, thebody politic, which represented the mystical dignityand justice of the realm, was immortal. While the

king was in power, both states were superimposedon his body. He incorporated the nation in a bodypolitic that was immortal and immaterial.

In addition, the king also possessed a natural,material body that was subject to passion, foolish-ness, infancy, and death. The idea of the twin bodyof the king became one of the defining factors indeveloping the concept of sovereignty—rulingpower incorporated within a body, in which deathand eternal life are superposed.

Neither Schrödinger nor his numerous inter-preters took into account the fact that in the twen-tieth century, his thought experiment was uncannilyechoed by new experimental forms of assertingsovereignty. The result was a state that no quantumphysicist could foresee.

In the twentieth century—the age of geno-cide, racism, and terror—the superposition of lifeand death became a standard feature of variousforms of government.3 In these experiments,Schrödinger’s “box” became a site of lethal deten-tion or mass extinction by radiation and poisongas—as in Schrödinger’s original setup—or byexplosives, which Albert Einstein eagerly added tothe quantum list of WMDs.4

Schrödinger even went as far as to explicitlymention the name of the poison gas that threatened

the cat’s life in 1935: hydrocyanic acid. In 1939,

The metaphor of film can illustrate the two possible states of Schrödinger’s cat in time.

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hydrocyanic acid was used in a Nazi gas chamberin Poznan to kill disabled people. Later on, it wasproduced industrially as Zyklon B by a companycalled Degesch and employed in the gas chambersof all the major extermination camps of the NationalSocialist empire.

5.In 2011, I was in the Spanish town of Palencia,

where a mass grave from the Civil War was beingexhumed on the site of a children’s playground.Volunteers rushed to recover as many remains aspossible from the roughly 250 people suspectedto be buried there, who were summarily shot byFrancoist militias. Funding was going to be cut offwithin days, so every volunteer was given equipmentto participate in the excavation. I was assigned agrave in which a baby’s coffin sat on top of the bonesof a person, who was most likely executed. The armbone of this person revealed perimortem trauma—a wound sustained around the time of death and anindicator of a violent demise.

But why would a baby be buried on top of amurdered Republican? The archaeologist explainedthat babies who died unbaptized were (or even stillare) believed to go to limbo. The limbo of infants hasbeen a subject of discussion in the Roman CatholicChurch since the days of Augustine. The question iswhether unbaptized infants can be granted salva-tion, since their original sin isn’t purged by baptism.On the one hand, unbaptized people are supposedto go to hell after they die. On the other, deceasedbabies haven’t had time to commit many sins, so itwas thought that their punishment should be rathermild. The solution was the limbo of infants.

The limbo of infants—an intermediary state

between salvation and damnation, bliss and

torture—is thus not just a place of eternal boredomand hopelessness. In limbo the children mighteven ascend to a state of ultimate happiness byestablishing a different vision of things—beingunresolved things themselves, dumped onto thebodies of people shot as terrorists and insurgents.Things superposed onto other things in a cemeterysuperposed on a children’s playground, as the firstSpanish republic shines uncomfortably through

the second.The baby was gone. The crumbling coffin wasempty. Its remains had possibly been taken alongwhen the bones of the richer people in the cemeterywere moved to a new location. Only a tiny fingerbone remained, which mixed with the remains of theexecuted supporter of the Republic.

6.In 2011, a plaster cast of a skull said to belong

to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was put on display inHannover. But many doubt whether the skull reallybelonged to the philosopher.

In 1714, Leibniz developed the idea of themonad. According to Leibniz, the world is made ofmonads, each of which encloses the whole struc-ture of the universe. He calls them “perpetual livingmirror(s) of the universe”:

All is a plenum (and thus all matter is connectedtogether) and in the plenum every motion hasan effect upon distant bodies in proportion totheir distance, so that each body not only isaffected by those which are in contact with it andin some way feels the effect of everything thathappens to them, but also is affected by bodiesadjoining itself. This inter-communication of

things extends to any distance, however great. H

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And consequently every body feels the effect ofall that takes place in the universe, so that hewho sees all might read in each what is happen-ing everywhere, and even what has happened orshall happen, observing in the present that whichis far off as well in time as in place.5

But monads also have different degrees of resolu-tion. Some are more clear in storing information,

some less. Like monads, bones, skulls, and otherobjects of evidence condense not only their ownhistory, but—in an opaque and unresolved form—everything else as well. They are like hard disksthat fossilize not only their own history, but thehistory of their relations to the world. According toLeibniz, only God is able to read all monads. They aretransparent to his gaze alone and remain vague andblurry to ours. As the only being able to read them,God is in all things.

But humans are also able to decipher somelayers of monads. The strata of crystallized time ineach monad capture a specific relation to theuniverse and conserve it, as in a long exposure pho-tograph. In this way, we can understand a bone as amonad—or more simply, as an image. But equally,these objects condense the forms of observationthat produce them as durable and individual objects,and snap them back into one distinct state of mat-eriality. This also applies to the plaster cast ofLeibniz’s skull, as well as to the story of its retrieval.Already at the time of its “recovery,” many peopledoubted whether the skull triumphantly presentedas Leibniz’s was really his.

These doubts were exacerbated by the fact thatthe church documents relating to Leibniz’s burial

had been lost. Eventually, on Friday 4 July 1902,

the remains under the Leibnitian marker wereexhumed. On Wednesday 9 July 1902, they wereexamined by one Professor Dr. W. Krause, by orderof one Herr Waldeyer. Whatever casket had occu-pied the grave was by then entirely rotted awayand thus left not a clue as to its original occupant.Nevertheless, Krause concluded that the skeletalremains were indeed those of Leibniz.6

While the origin of the skull is contested, the prov-enance of the cast seems better established:

According to records, the cast came from theestate of a former NS civil servant. His ninety-year-old widow offered it for sale fifteen totwenty years ago, along with 3,000 books aboutracial science. Indeed, there is a report fromthe Institute for Germanic Ethnology and RaceScience of the [Third Reich] district capital ofHannover, which indicates that Leibniz’s gravewas opened between the end of 1943 and thebeginning of 1944.7

Leibniz, the coinventor of mathematical probability,might have computed the likelihood that the skullbelonged to him. But could he have imagined thatthe skull was both his and not his?

7.Probability became the crucial difference

between the experiments in political sovereigntyand Schrödinger’s experiment. In Schrödinger’sexperiment, the probability that a live cat wouldemerge from the box was 50/50. But wheneverthe metaphorical box of political laboratories wasopened, this probability would drop to extreme

lows. And whatever emerged wouldn’t be a cat, but H

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humans—more precisely, corpses upon corpses.The box became a site for the superposition ofdeath upon death, and a factory for the breathtak-ing multiplication of victims. The twentieth centuryradically advanced the development of all kinds ofweapons of mass destruction. It took the box andturned it inside out so it would spill all over theplanet. Why stop at two dead creatures? Why notmillions and millions?

Additionally, the twentieth century also per-fected observation as a method of killing. Measure-ment and identification became tools of murder.Phrenology. Statistics. Medical experimentation.Economies of death. In his lectures about biopolitics,Michel Foucault described the stochastic calculusthat determined life or death.8 Counting and observ-ing were radicalized to make sure that anything thatentered the box died when the box was reopened.

This development also signified the death ofthe political idea of the two bodies of the king, onedead, one immortal. Now one had to imagine twodead bodies: not only the natural body, but also thebody politic. Not only were natural bodies killed inand outside the insidious boxes of sovereignty. Thebody politic, which was supposed to be immortal,died as well. The idea of a state, nation, or race incor-porated within a single body was radically denied bythousands of mass graves—the fosses communes,which were deemed necessary to violently manufac-ture a “perfect” and homogenous body politic.

The mass graves thus formed a negative imageof the desired incorporation—and its only tangiblereality. Any idea of a natural “organic body” of thenation (race, state) had to be painfully realized byextermination and genocide. The fosse commune wasthe body politic of fascism and other forms of dicta-

torship. It made perfectly clear that the “community”

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War , 1871, oil on canvas, 127 ×197 cm.

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that produced it was a “fausse commune,” a com-plete and disastrous fake vying for legitimacy.

Schrödinger’s innocent if eccentric quantumstate of indeterminacy was echoed in political labo-ratories of sovereignty. Here, gaping political limboswere created in which law and exception blurred indeadly superposition, transforming certain deathinto a matter of probability. Schrödinger’s thoughtexperiment came to presence the mass graves

that violently ended many possible superpositionsand entanglements of humans and things. And thedream of parallel worlds in which incompossiblerealities coexisted was transformed into the prolif-eration of possible deaths and the impossibility ofany world other than the one that miserably draggedon existing.

8.As quantum theory predicts, the state of

entanglement is transitional. It can even be excep-tionally short—a window of opportunity made tobe missed. And as mass graves were successivelyexcavated, states of indeterminacy ended too, forc-ing decisions between the state of life and the stateof death, which—the twentieth century being whatit was—overwhelmingly fell on the side of death.Missing persons were identified and their remainswere reburied or returned to relatives. And as thebones were retransformed into persons and reintro-duced into language and history, the spell of the lawover them ceased.

But many of the missing remain nameless.The remains of some of them are stored in theanthropology department at the AutonomousUniversity of Madrid for lack of funding to proceedwith DNA testing. This lack of funding is of course

connected to the precarious political situation in

which this investigation finds itself in. The unidenti-fied skulls and bones speak about anything buttheir names and identities. They show perimortemtrauma and indicators of stature, gender, age, andnutrition, but this doesn’t necessarily lead to iden-tification.9 More than anything, the unidentifiedremain generic, faceless, all mixed up with combs,bullets, watches, other people, animals, or the solesof shoes. Their indeterminacy is part of their silence,

and their silence determines their indeterminacy.They maintain an obstinate opaque silence in theface of sympathetic scientists and waiting relatives.As if they chose not to answer to their last finalinterrogators either. Shoot me all over again, theyseem to say. I’m not telling. I will not give it away. Butwhat is the thing they refuse to betray?

Perhaps the bones refuse to reenter the worldof relatives, family, and property, the world of nameand measure, in which skulls are forced to speak ofrace and rank instead of love and decomposition.Why should they want to reenter an order that sus-tained and strengthened itself over their deadbodies? That had to execute them in the first placein order to keep the realm of belonging, faith, andknowledge intact? Why should they want to returnfrom the world of naked matter in which they freelymix with the dust of the universe?

This is what the unidentified missing teach us:even as their bones are carefully handled by forensicanthropologists, they staunchly remain things,refusing to be identifiable in the register of humanbeings. They insist on being things that decline tobe named and known—things that claim the stateof potentially being both dead and alive. They thustransgress the realms of civil identity, property, theorder of knowledge, and human rights alike.

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9.In 2011, Hüsnü Yıldız went on a hunger strike

to force the exhumation of his brother, who disap-peared in 1997 while fighting as a leftist guerrilla.His grave had been located in early 2011 amonghundreds of other nondescript mass graves in theKurdish region of Turkey. Thousands of bodies,most killed during the dirty war of the 1990s, arebelieved to have been dumped into shallow graves,

waste dumps, and other places of disposal.10 Asmore mass graves are discovered every day, Turkishauthorities have for the most part refused to openinvestigations or even recover the remains of thedead. Sixty-four days into Yıldız’s hunger strike, thegrave where his brother was suspected to be buriedwas finally excavated. Fifteen sets of remains wererecovered, but as authorities have not initiated DNAtests, Yıldız still doesn’t know whether the remainsof his brother are among them. In the meantime,Yıldız has declared that not only the fifteen peoplerecovered, but also the thousands more missingare his brothers and sisters. The indeterminacy ofremains universalizes family relations. They rip theorder of family and belonging wide open.

10.

00:15:08:05HS – I see one box which does not containremains.LR – Yes this is ...HS – Can you show it to us?LR – This is a complex case because this camefrom the cemetery of Toledo, a city near Madrid,and then the relatives with an undertaker of thecemetery, they went to dig in the common grave

where they thought their relatives were. So they

did that with a shovel and put all the bones in bigplastic bags …So we have a mess of bones and of these shoes,we don’t know if they belong to the people killedor to other, like, normal mortality, and they alsowent to the common grave … But this, we found,it’s very common to find, to find personal objectsin the excavations.HS – What sort of objects? Shoes?

LR – This is the heel of a shoe and that is for theshirts, the buttons, some other buttons andsome coins … well, metal objects and … But wehave found, this is the … for the belt? Yes, thebuckle. So for example all this came from one,from skeleton sixty.11

11.But in the twentieth century and beyond, we

have almost always waited in vain to access theother quantum state involved in superposition, thestate in which the missing would still be alive—notpotentially, but actually. Paradoxically alive, as thingsin a state of entanglement. In which we could heartheir voices, touch their breathing skin. In which theywould be living things outside the registers of iden-tity, pure language, and the utter overwhelming ofsenses; things superposing on ourselves as things.

They would form a state beyond any state-hood—one in which they wouldn’t be entangled withtheir own dead bodies, but with our living ones. Andwe would no longer be separate entities but thingslocked in indeterminate interaction—material exti-macy, or matter in embrace.

They would drag us to this place, where wewould become entangled matter, outside of any cat-egories of identification and possession. We would

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subjectivity to become locked in the paradoxicalobjectivity of quantum realities.

12.The mass grave that is supposed to contain

the remains of my friend Andrea Wolf is located inthe mountains south of Van, Turkey. The gravesiteis littered with rags, debris, ammunition cases, andmany fragments of human bone. A charred photo

roll I found on site may be the only witness to whathappened during the battle that took place there inlate 1998.

Even though several witnesses have comeforward stating that Andrea and some of her fellowfighters in the PKK were extrajudicially executedafter having been taken prisoner, there have been noattempts to investigate this suspected war crime,nor to identify the roughly forty people supposedlyburied in the mass grave. No official investigationever took place. No experts went on site.

No authorized observer can break super-position, not because there were no observers, butbecause they have not been authorized. It is anincompossible place, incompatible with the exist-ing rules of political realism, constructed by thesuspension of the rule of law and aerial supremacy,beyond the realm of the speakable, the visible, thepossible. On this site, even blatant evidence is farfrom being evident.12 Its invisibility is politically con-structed and maintained by epistemic violence. Thisis the main reason why the pictures on the charredphoto roll remain unavailable for now, pushed intoa zone of zero probability.13 Technical means, expertknowledge, and political motivation to investigateand analyze them are unavailable.

But these illegible images can also be seen

from a different perspective: as poor images, things

Luís Moya Blanco, Architectonic Dream, 1938. Proposal for a post-Spanish Civil Warfascist monument.

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wrecked by violence and history. A poor imageis an image that remains unresolved—puzzlingand inconclusive because of neglect or politicaldenial, because of a lack of technology or funding,or because of hasty and incomplete recordingscaptured under risky circumstances.14 It cannot givea comprehensive account of the situation it is sup-posed to represent. But if whatever it tries to showis obscured, the conditions of its own visibility are

plainly visible: it is a subaltern and indeterminateobject, excluded from legitimate discourse, frombecoming fact, subject to disavowal, indifference,and repression.

Poor images take on another dimension whenthey expand into fractional space.15 They may beblurred 3-D scans, cakes of dirt compressing but-tons, bones and bullets, burnt photo rolls, dispersedashes, or lost and unintelligible pieces of evidence.16 Just as commercial, political, and military interestsdefine the resolution of satellite images of theearth’s surface, so do these interests define theresolution of the objects buried beneath it. Theseindeterminate objects are low-resolution monads, inmany cases literally materially compressed objects,fossilized diagrams of political and physical vio-lence—poor images of the conditions that broughtthem into being. Even if they cannot show the extra-

judicial executions, political murders, or shootings atdemonstrations that they might have recorded, theybear the traces of their own marginalization. Theirpoverty is not a lack, but an additional layer of infor-mation, which is not about content but form. Thisform shows how the image is treated, how it is seen,passed on, or ignored, censored, and obliterated.

Even if its content is destroyed, the charred35 mm roll shows what happened to itself as it went

up in flames, doused with unknown chemicals,

incinerated along with the photographers’ deadbodies. It shows the violence of maintaining thisparticular state of indeterminacy.

Through their material composition, thesepoor images reach far beyond the sphere of rep-resentation and into a world where the order ofthings and humans, of life, death, and identity, issuspended, and “all is a plenum (and thus all matteris connected together) [...] And consequently every

body feels the effect of all that takes place in theuniverse, so that he who sees all might read in eachwhat is happening everywhere, and even what hashappened or shall happen, observing in the presentthat which is far off as well in time as in place.”17

But who is the ominous reader in Leibniz’stext? Is he the ultimate observer endowed withunlimited authority? Whoever he is, he is not up tothe task.18 We cannot leave the task of observationto some obscure monotheist idol, who supposedlyreads and knows everything. And we do not needto. The zone of zero probability, the space in whichimage/objects are blurred, pixelated, and unavail-able, is not a metaphysical condition. It is in manycases man-made, and maintained by epistemicand military violence, by the fog of war, by politicaltwilight, by class privilege, nationalism, mediamonopolies, and persistent indifference. Its resolu-tion is managed by legal, political, and technologicalparadigms. A bone that would be abject debris insome parts of the world, a poor image mixed withtrash and dumped into landfills alongside brokenTVs, could be overexposed in others, scanned inHD or 3-D, highly resolved, investigated, tested,and interpreted until its mysteries are solved.19 Thesame bone can be seen in two different resolutions:once as an anonymous poor image, once as a crystal-

clear piece of official evidence. H

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Positivism is thus another name for epistemicprivilege, assumed by official observers who controlhi-tech tools of measurement and are authorizedto establish facts. But mistaking this privilege for asolution, when it is just proof of superior epistemicresolution, is sloppy and convenient thinking. It notonly denies the existence of expanding pockets ofzero probability and gaping limbos in the rule of law.It also shields itself from the unsettling thought that

everything could be different and that probabilitycannot reign in contingency.If Leibniz’s omnivisionary male observer is

impotent, then justice is blind to resolution. Shecarefully runs her fingers over the edges, gaps, andrifts of rugged and glossy images, of low-resolutionmonads left in fractional space, registering theirtectonic profile, feeling their bruises, fully confidentthat the impossible can and indeed will happen.

9Luis Ríos, José Ignacio Casado

Ovejero, and Jorge Puente Prieto,“Identification process in mass gravesfrom the Spanish Civil War,” ForensicScience International 199, no. 1 (June2010).

10See “Discovery of Kurdish Mass

Graves Leads Turkey to Face Past,”Voice of America, February 8, 2011,http://www.voanews.com/content/turkey-facing-past-with-discovery-of-kurdish-mass-graves-115640409/

134797.html; and Howard Eissenstat,“Mass-graves and State Silence inTurkey,”Human Rights Now, March 15,2011.

11Interview with Luis Ríos,

September 12, 2011.

12Thank you to Tina Leisch, Ali Can,

Necati Sönmez,iyar, and many otherswhose names cannot be mentioned.

13In the meantime, this text has

been redeveloped into part of a jointperformance with Rabih Mroué called“Probable Title: Zero Probability.” I amdeeply indebted to Rabih’s contribu-tions, especially in his brilliant text

“The Pixelated Revolution,” whichgives other examples of low-resolutionevidence.

14I discussed some examples of

documentary pictures, mainly fromGeorges Didi-Huberman’s essay“Images malgré tout,” in Hito Steyerl,“Documentarism as Politics of Truth,”Republic Art (May 2003), http://republicart.net/disc/representations/steyerl03_en.htm.

15See Jalal Toufic, “The Subtle

Dancer,” 24: “A space that i s neithertwo-dimensional nor three-dimen-sional, but between the two.” Availableat http://d13.documenta.de/research/assets/Uploads/Toufic-The-Subtle-Dancer.pdf.

16Ayça Söylemez, “Bones of

the Disappeared Get Lost Againafter Excavation,” Bianet, March2, 2011, http://bianet.org/english/english/128282-bones-of-the-disappeared-get-lost-again-after-excavation.

17Leibniz,Monadology , 251.

18For him, whatever is the case is

necessarily the best of all possible

worlds anyway.

19This applies particularly to the

bones of murdered Kurdish individuals,which get extremely different treat-ment according to whether they werekilled during the Anfal operationsordered by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, orby Turkish armed forces and militiasduring the civil war of the 1990s. TheAnfal mass murders were investigatedby world-class military specialists andinterdisciplinary teams, whereas theTurkish cases were barely investigatedat all.

1Thank you to Jenny Gil Schmitz,

Emilio Silva Barrera, Carlos Slepoy,Luis Ríos, Francisco Etxeberria, JoséLuis Posadas, Marcelo Esposito forall information relating to this issueand for their generous hospitality. Thisfirst part of the text owes very much todiscussions with Eyal Weizman.

2See Ernst H. Kantorowicz,The

King’s Two Bodies: A Study in MediaevalPolitical Theology (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1997).

3See Giorgio Agamben’s The State

of Exception and Homo Sacer . See alsoFoucault on biopower.

4

In a letter written in the 1950s.

5G. W. Leibniz, Monadology (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1898), 251.

6“Leibniz’s Skull?,” http://www.

gwleibniz.com/leibniz_skull/leib-niz_skull.html.

7Michael Grau, “Universalgenie

Leibniz im Visier der Nazis,”Berliner Morgenpost, September 12, 2011 (mytranslation).

8Michel Foucault, The Birth of

Biopolitics: Lecture at the Collège deFrance, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart,trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke:Palgrave, 2008).

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The Spam of the Earth:Withdrawal from Representation

Dense clusters of radio waves leave our planet everysecond. Our letters and snapshots, intimate andofficial communications, TV broadcasts and textmessages drift away from earth in rings, a tectonicarchitecture of the desires and fears of our times.1 In a few hundred thousand years, extraterrestrialforms of intelligence may incredulously sift throughour wireless communications. But imagine the per-plexity of those creatures when they actually look

at the material. Because a huge percentage of thepictures inadvertently sent off into deep space isactually spam. Any archaeologist, forensic, or histo-rian—in this world or another—will look at it as ourlegacy and our likeness, a true portrait of our timesand ourselves. Imagine a human reconstructionsomehow made from this digital rubble. Chancesare, it would look like image spam.

Image spam is one of the many dark mattersof the digital world; spam tries to avoid detectionby filters by presenting its message as an imagefile. An inordinate amount of these images floatsaround the globe, desperately vying for humanattention.2 They advertise pharmaceuticals, replicaitems, body enhancements, penny stocks, anddegrees. According to the pictures dispersed viaimage spam, humanity consists of scantily dresseddegree-holders with jolly smiles enhanced by orth-odontic braces.

Image spam is our message to the future.Instead of a modernist space capsule showing awoman and man on the outside—a family of “man”—our contemporary dispatch to the universe is imagespam showing enhanced advertisement manne-quins.3 And this is how the universe will see us; it isperhaps even how it sees us now.

In terms of sheer quantity, image spam out-

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Medical spam image retrieved from corporation Symantec Intelligence’s blog.

a silent majority, indeed. But of what? Who are thepeople portrayed in this type of acceleratedadvertisement? And what could their images tellpotential extraterrestrial recipients about con-temporary humanity?

From the perspective of image spam, peopleare improvable, or, as Hegel put it, perfectible.They are imagined to be potentially “flawless,”which in this context means horny, super skinny,

armed with recession-proof college degrees, andalways on time for their service jobs, courtesyof their replica watches. This is the contemporaryfamily of men and women: a bunch of peopleon knockoff antidepressants, fitted with enhancedbody parts. They are the dream team of hyper-capitalism.

But is this how we really look? Well, no. Imagespam might tell us a lot about “ideal” humans, butnot by showing actual humans—quite the contrary.The models in image spam are photochopped repli-cas, too improved to be true. A reserve army of digi-tally enhanced creatures who resemble the minordemons and angels of mystic speculation, luring,pushing, and blackmailing people into the profanerapture of consumption.

Image spam is addressed to people who donot look like those in the ads: they neither are skinnynor have recession-proof degrees. They are thosewhose organic substance is far from perfect froma neoliberal point of view. People who might opentheir in-boxes every day waiting for a miracle, or justa tiny sign, a rainbow at the other end of permanentcrisis and hardship. Image spam is addressed to thevast majority of humankind, but it does not showthem. It does not represent those who are consid-ered expendable and superfluous—just like spam

itself; it speaks to them. H

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The image of humanity articulated in imagespam thus has actually nothing to do with it. On thecontrary, it is an accurate portrayal of what human-ity is actually not. It is a negative image.

Mimicry and EnchantmentWhy is this? There is an obvious reason, which

is too well known to elaborate on here: imagestrigger mimetic desires and make people want to

become like the products represented in them. Inthis view, hegemony infiltrates everyday culture andspreads its values by way of mundane representa-tion.4 Image spam is thus interpreted as a toolfor the production of bodies, and ultimately endsup creating a culture stretched between bulimia,steroid overdose, and personal bankruptcy. Thisperspective—one of more traditional CulturalStudies—views image spam as an instrument ofcoercive persuasion as well as of insidious seduc-tion, and leads to the oblivious pleasures of surren-dering to both.5

But what if image spam were actually muchmore than a tool of ideological and affective indoc-trination? What if actual people—the imperfectand nonhorny ones—were not excluded fromspam advertisements because of their assumeddeficiencies but had actually chosen to desert thiskind of portrayal? What if image spam thus becamea record of a widespread refusal, a withdrawal ofpeople from representation?

What do I mean by this? For a certain timealready I have noted that many people have startedactively avoiding photographic or moving-imagerepresentations, surreptitiously taking their dis-tance from the lenses of cameras. Whether it’scamera-free zones in gated communities or elitist

techno clubs, someone declining interviews, Greek

Ed Ruscha, PRODUCTS – SPAM, 1961/2003, gelatin silver print, 33.02 x 25.4 cm.

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anarchists smashing cameras, or looters destroyingLCD TVs, people have started to actively, and pas-sively, refuse constantly being monitored, recorded,identified, photographed, scanned, and taped.Within a fully immersive media landscape, pictorialrepresentation—which was seen as a prerogativeand a political privilege for a long time6—feels morelike a threat.

There are many reasons for this. The numb-

ing presence of trash talk and game shows has ledto a situation in which TV has become a mediuminextricably linked to the parading and ridiculing oflower classes. Protagonists are violently made overand subjected to countless invasive ordeals, con-fessions, inquiries, and assessments. Morning TVis the contemporary equivalent to a torture cham-ber—including the guilty pleasures of torturers,spectators, and, in many cases, also the torturedthemselves.

Additionally, in mainstream media people areoften caught in the act of vanishing, whether it be inlife-threatening situations, extreme emergency andperil, warfare and disaster, or in the constant streamof live broadcasts from zones of conflict aroundthe world. If people aren’t trapped within natural orman-made disasters, they seem to physically van-ish, as anorexic beauty standards imply. People areemaciated or made to shrink or downsize. Dieting isobviously the metonymic equivalent to an economicrecession, which has become a permanent realityand caused substantial material losses. This reces-sion is coupled with an intellectual regression,which has become a dogma within all but a very fewmainstream media outlets. As intelligence doesn’tsimply melt away via starvation, derision and rancorlargely manage to keep it away from the grounds of

mainstream representation.7

Thus the zone of corporate representation islargely one of exception, which seems dangerousto enter: you may be derided, tested, stressed, oreven starved or killed. Rather than representingpeople it exemplifies the vanishing of the people:it’s gradual disappearance. And why wouldn’t thepeople be vanishing, given the countless acts ofaggression and invasion performed against them inmainstream media, but also in reality?8 Who could

actually withstand such an onslaught without thedesire to escape this visual territory of threat andconstant exposure?

Additionally, social media and cellphonecameras have created a zone of mutual masssurveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urbannetworks of control, such as CCTV, cellphone GPStracking and face-recognition software. On topof institutional surveillance, people are now alsoroutinely surveilling each other by taking countlesspictures and publishing them in almost real time.The social control associated with these practicesof horizontal representation has become quiteinfluential. Employers google reputations of jobcandidates; social media and blogs become hallsof shame and malevolent gossip. The top-downcultural hegemony exercised by advertisement andcorporate media is supplemented by a down-downregime of (mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining, which is even harder to dislocate thanearlier regimes of representation. This goes alongwith substantial shifts in modes of self-production.Hegemony is increasingly internalized, along withthe pressure to conform and perform, as is the pres-sure to represent and be represented.

Warhol’s prediction that everybody would beworld-famous for fifteen minutes had become true

long ago. Now many people want the contrary: to H

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be invisible, if only for fifteen minutes. Even fifteenseconds would be great. We entered an era of masspaparazzi, of the peak-o-sphere and exhibitionistvoyeurism. The flare of photographic flashlightsturns people into victims, celebrities, or both. As weregister at cash tills, ATMs, and other checkpoints—as our cellphones reveal our slightest movementsand our snapshots are tagged with GPS coordi-nates—we end up not exactly amused to death but

represented to pieces.9

WalkoutThis is why many people by now walk away

from visual representation. Their instincts (and theirintelligence) tell them that photographic or movingimages are dangerous devices of capture: of time,affect, productive forces, and subjectivity. They can

jail you or shame you forever; they can trap you inhardware monopolies and conversion conundrums,and, moreover, once these images are online theywill never be deleted again. Ever been photographednaked? Congratulations—you’re immortal. Thisimage will survive you and your offspring, provemore resilient than even the sturdiest of mummies,and is already traveling into deep space, waiting togreet the aliens.

The old magic fear of cameras is thus rein-carnated in the world of digital natives. But in thisenvironment, cameras do not take away your soul(digital natives replaced this with iPhones) butdrain away your life. They actively make you disap-pear, shrink, and render you naked, in desperateneed of orthodontic surgery. In fact, it is a misun-derstanding that cameras are tools of representa-tion; they are at present tools of disappearance.10 The more people are represented the less is left of

them in reality.

To return to the example of image spam Iused before—it is a negative image of its constitu-ency, but how? It is not—as a traditional CulturalStudies approach would argue—because ideologytries to impose a forced mimicry on people, thusmaking them invest in their own oppression andcorrection in trying to reach unattainable standardsof efficiency, attractiveness, and fitness. No. Let’sboldly assume that image spam is a negative image

of its constituency because people are also activelywalking away from this kind of representation,leaving behind only enhanced crash-test dummies.Thus image spam becomes an involuntary record ofa subtle strike, a walkout of the people from pho-tographic and moving-image representation. It is adocument of an almost imperceptible exodus froma field of power relations that are too extreme to besurvived without major reduction and downsizing.Rather than a document of domination, image spamis the people’s monument of resistance to beingrepresented like this. They are leaving the given frame of representation.

Political and Cultural RepresentationThis shatters many dogmas about the rela-

tion between political and pictorial representation.For a long time my generation has been trained tothink that representation was the primary site ofcontestation for both politics and aesthetics. Thesite of culture became a popular field of investiga-tion into the “soft” politics inherent in everydayenvironments. It was hoped that changes in the fieldof culture would hark back to the field of politics. Amore nuanced realm of representation was seen tolead to more political and economical equality.

But gradually it became clear that both were

less linked than originally anticipated, and that the H

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partition of goods and rights and the partition ofthe senses were not necessarily running parallelto each other. Ariella Azoulay’s concept of photog-raphy as a form of civil contract provides a richbackground to think through these ideas. If photog-raphy was a civil contract between the people whoparticipated in it, then the current withdrawal fromrepresentation is the breaking of a social contract,having promised participation but delivered gossip,

surveillance, evidence, serial narcissism, as well asoccasional uprisings.11

While visual representation shifted into over-drive and was popularized through digital technolo-gies, political representation of the people slippedinto a deep crisis and was overshadowed by eco-nomic interest. While every possible minority wasacknowledged as a potential consumer and visuallyrepresented (to a certain extent), people’s participa-tion in the political and economic realms becamemore uneven. The social contract of contemporaryvisual representation thus somewhat resembles thePonzi schemes of the early twenty-first century, or,more precisely, participation in a game show withunpredictable consequences.

And if there ever was a link between the two,it has become very unstable in an era in which rela-tions between signs and their referents have beenfurther destabilized by systemic speculation andderegulation.

Both terms do not only apply to financializa-tion and privatization; they also refer to loosenedstandards of public information. Professional stan-dards of truth production in journalism have beenoverwhelmed by mass media production, by thecloning of rumor and its amplification on Wikipedia discussion boards. Speculation is not only a finan-

cial operation but also a process that takes place in

between a sign and its referent, a sudden miracu-lous enhancement, or spin, that snaps apart anyremaining indexical relation.

Visual representation matters, indeed, but notexactly in unison with other forms of representation.There is a serious imbalance between both. On theone hand, there is a huge number of images withoutreferents; on the other, many people without repre-sentation. To phrase it more dramatically: a growing

number of unmoored and floating images corre-sponds to a growing number of disenfranchized,invisible, or even disappeared and missing people.12

Crisis of RepresentationThis creates a situation that is very different

from how we used to look at images: as more or lessaccurate representations of something or someonein public. In an age of unrepresentable people andan overpopulation of images, this relation is irrevo-cably altered.

Image spam is an interesting symptom of thecurrent situation because it is a representation thatremains, for the most part, invisible.

Image spam circulates endlessly withoutever being seen by a human eye. It is made bymachines, sent by bots, and caught by spam filters,which are slowly becoming as potent as anti-immigration walls, barriers, and fences. The plasticpeople shown in it thus remain, to a large extent,unseen. They are treated like digital scum, and thusparadoxically end up on a similar level to that ofthe low-res people they appeal to. This is how it isdifferent from any other kind of representationaldummies, which inhabit the world of visibility andhigh-end representation. Creatures of image spamget treated as lumpen-data, avatars of the conmen

who are indeed behind their creation. If Jean Genet H

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were still alive, he would have sung praise to thegorgeous hoodlums, tricksters, prostitutes, andfake dentists of image spam.

They are still not a representation of thepeople, because, in any case, the people are not arepresentation. They are an event, which might hap-pen one day, or maybe later, in that sudden blink ofan eye that is not covered by anything.

By now, however, people might have learned

this, and accepted that any people can only berepresented visually in negative form. This negativecannot be developed under any circumstance, sincea magical process will ensure that all you are evergoing to see in the positive is a bunch of populistsubstitutes and impostors, enhanced crash-testdummies trying to claim legitimacy. The image ofthe people as a nation, or culture, is precisely that: acompressed stereotype for ideological gain. Imagespam is the true avatar of the people. A negativeimage with absolutely no pretense to originality? Animage of what the people are not as their only pos-sible representation?

And as people are increasingly makers ofimages—and not their objects or subjects—they are perhaps also increasingly aware that thepeople might happen by jointly making an imageand not by being represented in one. Any image is ashared ground for action and passion, a zone oftraffic between things and intensities. As their pro-duction has become mass production, imagesare now increasingly res publicae, or public things.Or even pubic things, as the languages of spamfabulously romance.13

This doesn’t mean that who or what is beingshown in images doesn’t matter. This relation isfar from being one-dimensional. Image spam’s

generic cast is not the people, and the better for it.

Rather, the subjects of image spam stand in for thepeople as negative substitutes and absorb the flakof the limelight on their behalf. On the one hand,they embody all the vices and virtues (or, more pre-cisely, vices-as-virtues) of the present economicparadigm. On the other, they remain more oftenthan not invisible, because hardly anybody actuallylooks at them.

Who knows what the people in image spam

are up to, if nobody is actually looking? Their publicappearance may be just a silly face they put on tomake sure we continue to not pay attention. Theymight carry important messages for the aliens in themeantime, about those who we stopped caring for,those excluded from shambolic “social contracts,”or any form of participation other than morning TV;that is, the spam of the earth, the stars of CCTV andaerial infrared surveillance. Or they might temporar-ily share in the realm of the disappeared and invis-ible, made up of those who, more often than not,inhabit a shameful silence and whose relatives haveto lower their eyes to their killers every day.

The image-spam people are double agents.They inhabit both the realms of over- and invisibility.This may be the reason why they are continuouslysmiling but not saying anything. They know that theirfrozen poses and vanishing features are actuallyproviding cover for the people to go off the record inthe meantime. To perhaps take a break and slowlyregroup. “Go off screen,” they seem to whisper. “We’llsubstitute for you. Let them tag and scan us in themeantime. You go off the radar and do what you haveto.” Whatever this is, they will not give us away, ever.And for this, they deserve our love and admiration.

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1Douglas Phillips, “Can Desire

Go On Without a Body?” in The SpamBook: On Viruses, Porn, and Other

Anomolies from the Dark Side of DigitalCulture, eds. Jussi Parikka and Tony D.Sampson (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press,2009), 199–200.

2The number of spam e-mails

sent per day is at roughly 250 billion(as per 2010). The total amount ofimage spam has varied considerablyover the years, but in 2007, imagespam accounted for 35 percent ofall spam messages and took up 70percent of bandwidth bulge. “Image

spam could bring the internet to a

standstill,” London Evening Standard, October 1, 2007, see ht tp://http//www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23381164-image-spam-could-bring-the-internet-to-a-standstill.do.

All the pictures of image spamaccompanying this text have beenborrowed from the invaluable source“Image Spam,” by Mathew Nisbet,see http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/image-spam. To avoidmisunderstandings, most image spamshows text, not pictures.

3

This is similar to the goldenplaques on the Pioneer space capsuleslaunched in 1972 and 1973, whichdepicted a white woman and a whiteman, with the woman’s genitals omit-ted. Because of the criticism directedat the relative nudity of the humanfigures, subsequent plaques showedonly the human silhouettes. It will beat least 40,000 years until the capsulecould potentially deliver this message.

4This is a sloppy, fast-forward

rehash of a classical Gramscian per-spective from early Cultural Studies.

5Or it may more likely be analyzed

as partially self-defeating andcontradictory.

6I have discussed the failed promise

of cultural representation in “TheInstitution of Critique,” in InstitutionalCritique: An Anthology of Artists’Writings, eds. Alex Alberro and BlakeStimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2009). 486–87.

7This applies unevenly around the

world.

8In the 1990s, people from former

Yugoslavia would say that the formerantifascist slogan of the Second WorldWar had be turned upside down: “Deathto fascism, freedom to the people” hadbeen transformed by nationalists fromall sides into, “Death to the people,

freedom to fascism.”

9See Brian Massumi, Parables

for the Virtual (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2002).

10I remember my former teacher Wim

Wenders elaborating on the photo-graphing of things that will disappear.It is more likely, though, that things willdisappear if (or even because) they arephotographed.

11I cannot expand on this appropri-

ately here. It might be necessary tothink through recent Facebook riotsfrom the perspective of breaking intol-erable social contracts, and not fromentering or sustaining them.

12The era of the digital revolution

corresponds to that of enforced massdisappearance and murder in formerYugoslavia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Algeria,Iraq, Turkey, and parts of Guatemala,to list just a few. In the DemocraticRepublic of the Congo, which sawroughly 2.5 million war casualtiesbetween 1998 and 2008, it is agreedon by researchers that demand forraw materials for the IT industries(such as coltane) played a direct role inthe country’s conflict. The number ofmigrants who died while trying to reach

Europe since 1990 is estimated to be18,000.

13This derives from a pirated DVD

cover of the movie In the Line of Fire (1993), which states, in no uncertainterms, that pubic performance of thedisc is strictly prohibited.

Rendition of iSee Manhattan, a web-based application charting the locations ofCCTV surveillance cameras in urban environments. Users are able to locate routesthat avoid being filmed by unregulated security monitors.

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Cut! Reproduction andRecombination

A cut is a cinematic term.1 It separates two shots. Italso joins two shots. It is a device that constructscinematic space and time and articulates differentelements into a new form.

A cut is obviously also an economic term. Itrefers to a reduction. In the context of the currenteconomic crisis, cuts mostly concern governmentspending on welfare, culture, pensions, and othersocial services. It can refer to any reduction in

resources or allocations.How do both of these types of cuts affectbodies? And which bodies? Do they affect the bodiesof artificial or natural persons, corpses or corpora-tions? And what can we learn from cinema and itstechniques of reproduction that might help us dealwith the effects of post-continuity cutting in theeconomic realm?

Cuts in Economic DiscourseIn current economic discourse, cuts are often

described using metaphors of the human body.In the language of austerity and debt, states andeconomies are often compared to individuals, whichneed to lose (or are losing) body parts. Suggestedinterventions into the body politic range from diet-ing (cutting fat) to amputations (to keep so-calledcontagion from spreading) to trimming down weight,tightening belts, getting lean and fit, and eliminatingsuperfluous parts.

Interestingly enough, a tradition of cutting intothe body is at the heart of the creation of the notionof the subject itself, which is strongly connected tothe idea of debt. In his new book, Maurizio Lazzaratodiscusses Nietzsche’s description of the makingof the subject as a historical form.2 In order toremember debt and guilt, people need memory, and

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literally in the form of cuts. Nietzsche mentions awhole range of methods used to enforce debt, mem-ory, and guilt: human sacrifice as well as mutilationssuch as castration. He brims with enthusiasm as hedetails a full catalog of torture, pointing out withdelight that Germans are especially creative when itcomes to the design of cuts into the body: quartering,cutting off pieces of flesh from the breast, cuttingoff strips of skin, and so on.

The clearest connection between debt andcutting the body is expressed by Roman law. Theso-called Twelve Tables mention explicitly that thebody of a debtor can rightfully be split among credi-tors, which means that the latter are entitled to cutoff parts of the debtor’s body. And whether they cuta little more or less shouldn’t really matter, accord-ing to this view of law.

Where a party is delivered up to several persons,on account of a debt, after he has been exposedin the Forum on three market days, they shallbe permitted to divide their debtor into differentparts, if they desire to do so; and if anyone ofthem should, by the division, obtain more or lessthan he is entitled to, he shall not be responsible.3

This brings us to the question of whose body weare talking about. There are always several bodiesimplied in this traffic of metaphors: a literal body,which is really or metaphorically cut, as well as ametaphorical body, which represents a nationaleconomy, a country, or indeed a corporation. Thereis a natural body as well as a body politic involvedin the equation, and the body being cut is a node ofexchange, or rather an edit in between both kindsof bodies. If we follow the famous definitions by

Ernst Kantorowicz, who analyzed the trope of the

body politic and its emergence in the legal sphere,the body politic is immortal and ideal, whereas thebody natural is fallible, foolish, and mortal.4 Andin fact both are undergoing cuts, both literally andmetaphorically.

Bodies in PostproductionWhile cuts have moved center stage in eco-

nomic discourse, cutting or editing is also a tradi-

tional tool of cinema. While editing is usually under-stood as a modification in the temporal dimension,cinema also cuts bodies in space by framing them,retaining only what’s useful to the narration.5 Thebody is disarticulated and rearticulated in a differ-ent form. As Jean-Louis Comolli dramatically states,the frame cuts into the body as “sharp, crisp, andclean as a razor’s edge.”6

While a long or full shot will mostly leave thebodies represented intact, medium shots or close-ups will chop off large parts of the bodies. The mostextreme of these incisions is the so-called Italianshot, named after Sergio Leone’s Dollar Trilogy,which focuses on vigilante guns-for-hire in animaginary Wild West.

But the economy of editing is also cruciallytied to more general economic narratives: editingwas introduced into the world of cinema in 1903with the film The Great Train Robbery , which dealswith questions of private property, privatization,appropriation, the frontier, expansion, and othercommon topics of Western movies. To underscore itsmessage, it introduced cross cutting and narrationacross several locations.

Other groundbreaking advances in editingequally deploy economic narratives. One of the firstfilms to use parallel montage—D. W. Griffith’s

A Corner in Wheat (1908)—is about futures trading H

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on the Chicago stock exchange and the ruin ofwheat farmers through speculation.7 While it widelyrefrains from using close-ups or medium shots, thefilm dramatically shows a shot of a single hand—that of a suffocating wheat speculator—to perhapsconvey the idea of the invisible hand of the marketsevered from any actual body.

Partes Secando

Griffiths’s form of montage not only dealswith advanced and extremely contemporary eco-nomic mechanisms, like robbery and speculation.It also derives from economic necessities. Parallelmontage—the narration of two strands of the storyin parallel—is cheaper and more efficient in termsof production because one doesn’t need to shootchronologically. Tom Gunning has shown it to be anextremely efficient method of adapting cinema to aFordist system of production.8 By 1909 this type ofediting became universal.

At this stage, editing or postproductionbecomes a crucial device to tell the story, to dis-member and rearticulate individual and collectivebodies, to separate and rearrange them according toeconomic efficiency. Even though A Corner in Wheat is—on the level of its narration—a romantic andessentialist call to return to subsistence farming,its own form is perfectly consistent with capitalistrationalization and pushes it ahead.9

But one can also reverse this logic, specificallyby affirming the fragmentation of the subject—butwithout capitalism. The potential of recombinantbodies is emphasized in a text written by SiegfriedKracauer in 1927 called “The Mass Ornament.”He analyzes a group of showgirls named the TillerGirls. At the beginning of the century they became

extremely popular because of their invention of

what was called “precision dance”—a formationdance in which female bodies, or rather body parts,as Kracauer emphasized, moved synchronously andin unison. Kracauer analyzes precision dance as asymptom of a Fordist regime of production, compar-ing the articulation of the Tiller Girls on stage to thecomposition of a conveyor belt. Of course, they firsthad to be disarticulated in order to be rearticulated,and this was done by cutting time and activity into

fragments and assigning them to separate elementsof the body.Kracauer doesn’t denounce this arrangement,

though. He doesn’t call for a return to a more naturalbody, whatever that could mean. He even thinksit’s no longer possible to restore the Tiller Girls tohuman beings. Instead, he faces this constellationin order to see how one could, so to speak, breakthrough to its other side, radicalize fragmentation,to reverse it as one would in a reverse shot. In fact,he even thinks that the cutting of the body—and itsreediting—are not radical enough.

The industrial body of the Tiller Girls isabstract, artificial, alienated. Precisely because ofthis, it breaks with the traditional and, at that time,racially imbued ideologies of origin, belonging, aswell as with the idea of a natural, collective bodycreated by genetics, race, or common culture. In theartificial bodies and the artificially articulated bodyparts of the Tiller Girls, Kracauer saw an anticipa-tion of another body, which would be freed from theburden of race, genealogy, and origin—and we canadd, free of memory, guilt, and debt—precisely bybeing artificial and composite. The recombination ofthe cut-off parts produces a body without subjector subjection. In fact, this is what has been cut: theindividual, as well as its identity and its unalienable

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affirms its artificial composition while openingitself up to inorganic flows of matter and energy.

But Kracauer’s views at the time of debtcrisis and economic depression were not shared.On the contrary, a hyperinflation of metaphors ofpure national-social and racial bodies set in, whichwere realized using all possible means of violence.Bodies were cut, exploded, and violated—andtheir dispersed remains constitute the grounds we

walk on today.

PostproductionThis is how editing is historically embedded

into an economic context. It came to define an areacalled cinematic postproduction. And even thoughthe name “postproduction” made it appear to be asupplement to production proper, its logic flippedback to influence and structure production itself.

With digital technologies, these processeshave accelerated substantially. Traditionally, post-production meant synching, mixing, editing, colorcorrection, and other procedures performed aftershooting a movie. But in recent years, postproduc-tion has begun to take over production wholesale.In newer mainstream productions, especially in3-D or animation, postproduction is more or lessequivalent to the production of the film itself.Compositing, animation, and modeling now belongto postproduction. Fewer and fewer componentsactually need to be shot, because they are partiallyor wholly created in postproduction. Paradoxically,production increasingly starts to take place withinpostproduction. Production transforms into anaftereffect.10

A few years ago, Nicolas Bourriaud pointedto a few aspects of this shift in his essay “Post-

production.”11

But now in times of crisis we have to

dramatically revise his fragmentary hints, whichwere mostly referring to processes of digital repro-duction within art and its repercussions for theart object. The impact of postproduction goes waybeyond the world of art or media, even far beyondthe world of digital technology, to become one of themain capitalist modes of production today.

The things that people used to do afterwork—for example, the so-called reproduction of

their labor power—are now integrated into produc-tion. Reproduction concerns both so-called repro-ductive labor, which includes affective and socialactivities, and processes of digital and semioticreproduction.12 Postproduction in a very literal senseis production today.

This also shifts the temporality inherent inthe term postproduction. The prefix “post-,” whichdenotes an immobile state past history, is replacedby the prefix “re-,” which points at repetition orresponse. We are not after production. Rather,we are in a state in which production is endlesslyrecycled, repeated, copied, and multiplied, butpotentially also displaced, humbled, and renewed.Production is not only transformed but funda-mentally displaced to locations that used to formits outside: to mobile devices, scattered screens,sweatshops and catwalks, nurseries, virtual reality,offshore production lines. It is endlessly edited andrecombined.

With the loss of the idea of production allgoes the loss of the figure of the heroic male worker,replaced by Foxconn employees wearing Spidermanoutfits to ward off the temptation to jump out thewindow. By kids living off the scrap metal of indus-trialism, scavenging for the bones of imperial orsocialist factories. By picture people reproducing

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exhibitionism. By invisible women who keep theworld going. In the age of reproduction, Vertov’sfamous man with the movie camera has beenreplaced by a woman at an editing table, baby on herlap, a twenty-four-hour shift ahead of her.

But as production is cut and dismembered, socan it be recombined and renewed within reproduc-tion. Today’s reproducers are updates of Kracauer’sTiller Girls, artificially remodeled online, slapped

together from resurrected debris, spammed byoffers for penny stock, flat rates, and civil warfare,sleepless with fear and yearning.

The Angel of HistoryWe can find an example of a space of repro-

duction in the image of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) inflated and replicated on a giant ballooninside an artificial entertainment world calledTropical Islands close to Berlin. This structure usedto be a factory space for huge zeppelins, when itwas still believed that this specific post-socialistregion in the former GDR could be economicallydefillibrated and somehow industrially reanimated.When the enterprise went bust, a Malaysian inves-tor transformed it into a multiexotic spa landscape,complete with replicas of rainforests, jacuzzi look-a-likes of Mayan sacrificial pits, as well as giant photo-shopped infinity-horizon wallpapers. It is cut-and-paste territory, jumbled, airbrushed, dragged anddropped in 3-D—quintessential bubble architecturewith a stunning number of inflatable elements.

Why does this site embody the basic tensionsof the age of reproduction? It literally transformedfrom a space of industrial production to a space ofpostproduction, showing the aftereffects of produc-tion, so to speak. This space is not produced, but

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mortgages and the perpetual guilt of not being fitand lean enough. But on the other hand, it is equallyimportant that the moves are nevertheless fabulous,because energy and grace cannot be cut, ever.

As Kracauer rightly emphasized, we shouldnot shy away from the ornament of multitude andlament some natural state that never existed.Instead, we should embrace it and firmly breakthrough it. One example of how to do this is given by

the fact that the version of the video I am describinghere is not necessarily Bookchin’s at all.13 A user(who may or may not be the author) uploaded it,removed parts of the music because of YouTubecopyright concerns, and replaced it with the soundof laptop keys. In fact, this is the only conceivablesoundtrack for this piece. Collective postproductionthus generates not only composite bodies but com-posite works.

And we have a new important tool in order todo so, namely parallel screens. If a part of the bodyis cut, we can add a substitute for it on the nextscreen. We can reedit the cut-off parts of the bodyto create a body that doesn’t exist in reality, only inediting, a body composed of limbs cut from otherbodies, limbs deemed superfluous and inconvenientor excessive. We can recompose a new body withthese cut-off pieces, a body that combines thebones of the dead and the folly of the natural bodiesof the living. A form of life that exists in editing andby editing.

We can reedit the parts that were cut—whole countries, populations, even whole parts ofthe world, of films and videos that have been cutand censored because they do not conform to ideasof economic viability and efficiency. We can editthem into incoherent, artificial, and alternative

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edits, hard cuts, and blurred transitions betweendifferent chunks of contained exoticas.

And Klee’s Angelus Novus is no longerdragged away toward a future horizon as it surveyshistorical catastrophe. The lateral movement isgone, and with it a movement toward a future.Gone are horizon and linear perspective. Instead,the angel shuttles up and down like an elevatoron patrol. It looks down on a paradise without sin

and without history, in which the future has beenreplaced by the promise of temporary upwardmobility. The horizon loops. An angel becomesdrone; divine violence divested into killing time.

Reverse ShotBut what is the reproduced angel looking at

now? What can we edit to its gaze? Who are we, itsspectators, and what form will our bodies assumeunder the angel’s gaze?

In a fantastic work from 2009, NatalieBookchin made a pertinent suggestion. She updatedKracauer’s “Mass Ornament” essay as a multichan-nel video installation. By recombining videos oflonely teenagers dancing in their bedrooms to thegaze of their webcams, Bookchin catapulted preci-sion dance into the age of mediated disconnection.Instead of body parts severed by the stroke of theconveyor belt, atomized bodies relegated to domes-tic spheres move in unison. Just as the Tiller Girlswere equally separated and recombined into massornaments by precision dance, so are the teenageprotagonists postproduced by the combined forcesof social media and enforced occupation synchro-nized to Lady Gaga soundtracks.

On the one hand, these are the ripped and cutbodies the economy wants to see—isolated in their

homes, producing themselves as subjects beset by



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A KissBut there is an alternative interpretation.

Let’s take a look at a differently postproduced imageof cut and censored bodies. In the film CinemaParadiso (1988), a man watches a film roll madefrom the parts that a projectionist had to censorfrom fiction films. The result is a reel made of kissesthat were too provocative to be shown in public, asthey jeopardize ideas of family, property, race, and

nation sustained by sexual norms and restrictions.14 A reel of ousted kisses. Or is it the same kisspassed on from take to take across different pro-tagonists? A kiss that replicates, travels, spreadsuncontrollably; a kiss that creates vectors of pas-sion and affect, of labor, and, potentially, violence?15 A kiss is an event that is shared and consistsprecisely of sharing, exchanging, and happening inbetween bodies. It is an edit articulating affect inever-different combinations. It creates new junc-tions and forms between and across bodies, a formthat is ever shifting and changing. A kiss is a movingsurface, a ripple in time-space. Endless reproduc-tions of the same kiss: each one unique.

A kiss is a wager, a territory of risk, a mess.The idea of reproduction condensed into a fleetingmoment. Let’s think of reproduction as this kiss,which moves across cuts, from shot to shot, fromframe to frame: linking and juxtaposing. Acrosslips and digital devices. It moves by way of editing,exquisitely flipping around the idea of the cut, redis-tributing affects and desire, creating bodies joinedby movement, love, pain.

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1Many of the ideas in this text are

based on dicussions around a seminarcalled “Crisis” (given in 2009), on theideas of Alex Fletcher about cinematiccuts, and on my response to MaijaTimonen’s PhD presentation, whichdealt with the idea of the body cutby austerity. Other ideas in the textderive from discussions around aseminar called “junkspace,” especiallydicussions with Boaz Levin aroundpostproduction. This text is dedicatedto Bifo and Helmut Färber.

2 Maurizio Lazzarato, La fabriquede l’homme endetté: Essai sur lacondition néolibérale (Paris: ÉditonsAmsterdam, 2011).

3 Samuel Parsons Scott, ed., The CivilLaw: Including the Twelve Tables, theInstitutes of Gaius, the Rules of Ulpian,the Opinions of Paulus, the Enactmentsof Justinian, and the Constitutions, vol. 1(New York: AMS Press, 1973), 64.

4Ernst H. Kantorowicz,The King’s

Two Bodies: A Study in MediaevalPolitical Theology (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1997).

5

In French, the word for “frame”is cadre. This implies that the bodyframed is disciplined and managed, asJean-Louis Comolli has emphasized.Thank you to Charles Heller for men-tioning this work to me.

6“Coupant, tranchant, et net,

comme peut l’être le fil d’un rasoir.”Jean-Louis Comolli, Cadre et corps(Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2012), 538.

7See Helmut Färber’s invaluable

analysis, “ A Corner in Wheat” von D. W.Griffith 1909: Eine Kritik (Paris: HelmutFärber, 1992).

8Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and

the Origins of American Narrative Film (Champaign: University of IllinoisPress, 1993).

9This applies more to its editing

than its framing.

10There is also another important

component in the relation of cinematicpostproduction to production: itsrelation to reality. While the cinema

of production had—even in the caseof completely fictional stories—anindexical link to reality by virtue of,for example, being filmed with analog35 mm film cameras, digital postpro-duction completely renegotiates thatindexical link to the scene in front ofthe camera. Contemporary post is thearea of the making over of images, notthe making of. In postproduction, theindexical link to reality is loosened byincluding composited backgrounds,animated protagonists, and generallymodeling reality. Of course, the indexi-cal link was always rather fictional, butnewer technologies permit doing awaywith it to an unprecedented degree,creating perspectives with the libertyof painting.

11

See Nicolas Bourriaud, Postpro-duction: Culture as Screenplay; How ArtReprograms the World, trans. JeanineHerman (New York: Lukas & Sternberg,2005).

12For feminist perspectives on repro-

ductive labor, see the works of SilviaFederici, Arlie Hochschild, EncarnaciónGutiérrez Rodríguez, and Precarias a laDeriva.

13See http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=CAIjpUATAWg.

14Thank you to Rabih Mroué for

mentioning this film to me.



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15These ideas refer to the kiss men-

tioned by Boris Buden in the introduc-tion of his book Zone des Übergangs—Vom Ende des Postkommunismus: akiss received by an anonymous blackman from the militia man who abductedand probably killed him in the BosnianWar. A kiss which is still out there,being passed on via rape camps andteenage parties, in children’s hospitalsand bordellos—with love or conde-scension, ennui or elation, gentle,duplicitous, incisive.

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Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer.She teaches New Media Art atUniversität der Künste Berlin and hasrecently participated in documenta 12,the 7th Shanghai Biennale, and the37th International Film FestivalRotterdam.

I would like to thank David Riff for long-standing discussions on almost everytext in this collection. Exchanges withThomas Elsaesser, Elisabeth Lebovici,Sven Lütticken, Tirdad Zolghadr, KatyaSander, Phil Collins, Polly Staple, Rabih

Mroué, Diana McCarty, Kodwo Eshun,Tina Leisch, Thomas Tode, Maria Lind,Sebastian Markt, Gerald Raunig, CarlesGuerra, Joshua Simon, and, above all,my students, who have greatly contrib-uted to the texts in this volume. I wasable to write them thanks to commis-sions from Tone Hansen, eipcp, HendrikFolkerts, Simon Sheikh, Franco “Bifo”Berardi, Aneta Szylak, Tirdad Zolghadr,Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, GrantWatson, T. J. Demos, Nina Möntmann,and of course e-flux journal. Thanksto Laura Hamann for the extremelyimportant task of taking care of mydaughter; to my assistants, Yeliz Palakand Alwin Franke; and to all copy edi-tors, proofreaders, and designers whospent time fixing my sloppy footnotesand spelling. Thank you to Brian KuanWood for vastly improving every single

text, Mariana Silva for the excellentimage editing, and Anton Vidokle andJulieta Aranda for consistently backingmy efforts. Thank you especially toBoris Buden for supporting my work forten years. To Esme Buden.

“In Free Fall” was commissioned bySimon Sheikh for the 2nd FormerWest Research Congress in Istanbul,which took place November 4–6,2010. A very different version waspublished in On Horizons: A CriticalReader in Contemporary Art, eds.Maria Hlavajova, Simon Sheikh, andJill Winder (Rotterdam: Post Editions2011), copublished with BAK, basisvoor actuele kunst.

“Politics of Art: Contemporary Art andthe Transition to Post-Democracy”is dedicated to the people who bear

with me through digital hysteria,

frequent-flyer syndrome, and instal-lation disasters. Thanks especially toTirdad Zolghadr, Christoph Manz, DavidRiff, and Freya Chou.

Thanks to Peter Grabher / kinoki forcalling attention to the films in “TheArticulation of Protest.” This text wascommissioned by eipcp in 2002.

“A Thing Like You and Me” was writtenfor the catalog Hito Steyerl, publishedby Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Norway,2010). Thank you to Tone Hansen.

An earlier version of “In Defense ofthe Poor Image” was improvised ina response given at the conference“Essayfilm: Ästhetik und Aktualität”in Lüneburg, Germany, organized byThomas Tode and Sven Kramer in 2007.The text benefitted tremendously fromthe remarks and comments of ThirdText guest editor Kodwo Eshun, whocommissioned a longer version for anissue of Third Text on Chris Marker andThird Cinema, which was never pub-lished for copyright reasons. Anothersubstantial inspiration for this text wasthe exhibition “Dispersion” at the ICAin London (curated by Polly Staple in2008), which included a brilliant readeredited by Staple and Richard Birkett.The text also benefitted greatly fromBrian Kuan Wood’s editorial work.

“Art as Occupation: Claims for anAutonomy of Life” is dedicated to com-radeiyar and the IHD in Siirt. Thankyou to Apo, Neman Kara, Tina Leisch,Sahin Okay, Selim Yildiz, Ali Can, AnetaSzylak, Roee Rosen, Joshua Simon,Alessandro Petti, and Sandi Hilal.

“Freedom from Everything” was com-missioned by Hendrik Folkerts forthe lecture series “Facing Forward,”co-organized by Stedelijk Museum,University of Amsterdam, de Appelarts centre, W139, Stedelijk MuseumBureau Amsterdam, and Metropolis M.It was written using material from lec-tures commissioned by Grant Watson,T. J. Demos, and Nina Möntmann.

“Missing People” is indebted to theamazing generosity of Emilio SilvaBarrera, Carlos Slepoy, Luis Ríos,

Francisco Etxeberria, Jenny Gil

Schmitz, José Luis Posadas, MarceloEsposito, Hüsnü Yildiz, Eren Keskin,Oliver Rein, Reinhard Pabst, ThomasMielke, Martina Trauschke, AlwinFranke, Aneta Szylak, and almostequally to extreme obstructions, pro-crastination, contempt, and disrespectby others.

“The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawalfrom Representation” originated as apresentation at the “Human Snapshot”conference, organized by TirdadZolghadr and Tom Keenan at the LumaFoundation in Arles, July 2–4, 2011.

It is the third part of a trilogy aboutspam, the first two of which werepublished in October 138 (Fall 2011),guest-edited by David Joselit. Partone is entitled “Spam and the Angelof History,” and part two “Letter to anUnknown Woman: Romance Scams andEpistolary Affect.” The writer would liketo thank Ariella Azoulay, George Baker,Phil Collins, David Joselit, Imri Kahn,Rabih Mroué, and the many others whosparked or catalyzed various ideasin the trilogy. Thank you also to Brian,as ever.

“Cut! Reproduction and Recombi-nation” is based on discussions withAlex Fletcher, Maija Timonen, andmany of my students, especially withBoaz Levin. Thank you to Henk Slagerand Jan Kaila. It was written for a pre-

sentation at Franco Berardi’s school,SCEPSI, in Kassel and relies heavilyon his ideas of recombination. To Bifoand Helmut Färber.

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Illustration credits

Images on pages 88, 106, 124, and142 used under a Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike license:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

pp. 16–17 Courtesy of GurariCollections. http://www.gurari.com,last accessed July 30, 2012.

p. 25 © ESA, European Space Agency.

p. 34 Photo: Mario Marin Torres.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariomarin/5440332519/, lastaccessed July 30, 2012.

p. 37 http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/web-cinema-alone-together-chris-marker-second-life, lastaccessed July 30, 2012.

p. 54 http://ordeotraipse.blog-spot.com/2011/05/art-strike-mantra.html,last accessed July 30, 2012.

p. 64 © OMA

p. 68 above: © Harun Farocki;below: Courtesy istaro. http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1081467257038511751DzRTBR, lastaccessed July 30, 2012.

p. 83 http://papertigerex hibit.blogspot.com/, last accessed June 30,2012.

p. 88 Photo: Hamawiki . http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Filmklebepresse.jpg, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 105 Courtesy Wagner James Au.http://nwn.blogs.com, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 106 Photo: Adpowers. http://www.flickr.com/photos/adpowers/2627036668/, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 116 Courtesy of the artist.

p. 124 http://www.flickr.com/photos/circasassy/7215771012/, last accessed

July 30, 2012.

p. 128 http://www.musicstack.com/album/ennio +morricone/ for+a+few+dollars+more, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 131 https://why-weprotest .net/community/threads/guy-fawkes-mask.1938/page-2, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 142 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MWI_Schrodingers_cat.png, lastaccessed July 30, 2012.

p. 149 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Vasily_Vereshchagin, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 154 http://otraarquitecturaesposible.blogspot.com/2012/01/comentarios-al-sueno-arquitectonico.html, last accessedJuly 30, 2012.

p. 162 http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/image-spam, lastaccessed July 30, 2012.

p. 164 © Ed Ruscha. CourtesyGagosian Gallery.

p. 174 http://welovemedi acrit.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html, last accessed July 30, 2012.

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Hito SteyerlThe Wretched of the Screen

ISBN 978-1-934105-82-5

© 2012 e-flux, Inc., Hito Steyerl,Sternberg PressAll rights reserved, including the rightof reproduction in whole or in part inany form.

PublisherSternberg Press

Series editors

Julieta ArandaBrian Kuan WoodAnton Vidokle

Managing editorMariana Silva

DesignKloepfer – Ramsey

Copy editors and proofreadersMichael AndrewsMax BachPhillip Stephen TwilleyLeah Whitman-Salkin

“The Articulation of Protest”translated from the German byAileen Derieg.

For further information,

contact [email protected]/journal

Sternberg PressCaroline SchneiderKarl-Marx-Allee 78D-10243 Berlinwww.sternberg-press.com

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