Visual Regimes & Virtual Becomings: The Production of (Augmented) Space in the 'New Berlin'

<p>This thesis is grounded in the belief that the city is a key site of contestation in an ongoing theoretical debate concerning the nature of the relationship between new media and society. It is guided by a desire to engage with two distinct, but related, theoretical frameworks for making sense of this relationship, the ‘virtual city,’ as informed by the work of Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, and cyberpunk author William Gibson, and the ‘augmented city,’ derived from Lev Manovich’s “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” After providing an overview of these two paradigms of knowledge, it attempts to address the limitations of both frameworks, which the author claims are reductionist as the former tends towards a binary distinction between the material (urban space) and the immaterial (virtual space), while the latter is underpinned by a narrow, Euclidean understanding of space that limits its efficacy in an urban context. In order to address these concerns, the author proposes a methodology for understanding the city as a virtual space that is distinct from the ‘virtual city’ paradigm of 1990s cyber-theory by attempting to open up a dialogue between the work of Deleuzian philosopher Pierre Lévy, and the Marxist dialectician Henri Lefebvre. Using Berlin as a case study, this framework is deployed in an attempt to generate an understanding of how the city functions as a mediated landscape whose space is produced socially as a result of a dialectical process involving the accretion and entanglement of an ongoing series of representations, political decisions, and social experiences. As a mediated space, the city is understood as being produced and reproduced through acts of representation in both cinema and new media, as well as through the distinctive visual regimes that emerge out of them, which in turn structure the way the city is experienced. It also reads the city as a discursive space and draws connections between the discourses of the ‘New Berlin’—the space that emerged after the city’s reunification in 1989—and the promise of the new inherent in the discourses of new media technologies. Finally, the study argues that the discourses and visual regimes of augmented space in Berlin are not merely informed by virtual processes, but that the virtual and the distinctive social space of the city out of which augmented space emerges work in conjunction to actively structure the ways in which augmentation should be understood as both techno-cultural formation, and as (urban) spatial practice.</p>

Visual Regimes & Virtual Becomings: The Production of (Augmented) Space in the 'New Berlin'

<p>This thesis is grounded in the belief that the city is a key site of contestation in an ongoing theoretical debate concerning the nature of the relationship between new media and society. It is guided by a desire to engage with two distinct, but related, theoretical frameworks for making sense of this relationship, the ‘virtual city,’ as informed by the work of Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, and cyberpunk author William Gibson, and the ‘augmented city,’ derived from Lev Manovich’s “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” After providing an overview of these two paradigms of knowledge, it attempts to address the limitations of both frameworks, which the author claims are reductionist as the former tends towards a binary distinction between the material (urban space) and the immaterial (virtual space), while the latter is underpinned by a narrow, Euclidean understanding of space that limits its efficacy in an urban context. In order to address these concerns, the author proposes a methodology for understanding the city as a virtual space that is distinct from the ‘virtual city’ paradigm of 1990s cyber-theory by attempting to open up a dialogue between the work of Deleuzian philosopher Pierre Lévy, and the Marxist dialectician Henri Lefebvre. Using Berlin as a case study, this framework is deployed in an attempt to generate an understanding of how the city functions as a mediated landscape whose space is produced socially as a result of a dialectical process involving the accretion and entanglement of an ongoing series of representations, political decisions, and social experiences. As a mediated space, the city is understood as being produced and reproduced through acts of representation in both cinema and new media, as well as through the distinctive visual regimes that emerge out of them, which in turn structure the way the city is experienced. It also reads the city as a discursive space and draws connections between the discourses of the ‘New Berlin’—the space that emerged after the city’s reunification in 1989—and the promise of the new inherent in the discourses of new media technologies. Finally, the study argues that the discourses and visual regimes of augmented space in Berlin are not merely informed by virtual processes, but that the virtual and the distinctive social space of the city out of which augmented space emerges work in conjunction to actively structure the ways in which augmentation should be understood as both techno-cultural formation, and as (urban) spatial practice.</p>

Racial formations as data formations

This commentary uses Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that new technoscientific processes are instituting an ‘end to race’ as a provocation to discuss the epistemological transformation of race in algorithmic culture. We situate Gilroy’s provocation within the context of an abolitionist agenda against racial-thinking, underscoring the relationship between his post-race polemic and a post-visual discourse. We then discuss the challenges of studying race within regimes of computation, which rely on structures that are, for the most part, opaque; in particular, modes of classification that operate through proxies and abstractions and that figure racialized bodies not as single, coherent subjects, but as shifting clusters of data. We argue that in this new regime, race emerges as an epiphenomenon of processes of classifying and sorting – what we call ‘racial formations as data formations’. This discussion is significant because it raises new theoretical, methodological and political questions for scholars of media and critical algorithmic studies. It asks: how are we supposed to think, to identify and to confront race and racialisation when they vanish into algorithmic systems that are beyond our perception? What becomes of racial formations in post-visual regimes?

ГРАНИЦЫ ВИЗУАЛЬНОГО РЕЖИМА МОДЕРНА: СИНКРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ОБРАЗЫ РЯДОМ С ЕДИНООБРАЗИЕМ ВИДЕНИЯ

В статье автор прослеживает становление способа видения, присущего модерну, с целью определить его границы и тем самым зоны контакта, в которых он соприкасается с другими способами видения. Такие зоны рассматриваются в качестве социальных пространств. Отправной точкой анализа является констатация тезиса о том, что модерн должен быть охарактеризован посредством указания на центральное положение и даже гегемонию зрения, но только с учётом особенностей человека и общества, преобразованных модернизацией. Переход от непосредственности общественных отношений к преобладанию опосредования в эпоху модерна выявляет тот факт, что зрение представляет собой социокультурный конструкт, который встраивается в сеть опосредующих структур и превращается в визуальность в качестве способа видения, зависящего от них. Исследование ориентируется на концепцию визуальности в качестве репрезентации, которая, хотя она и предполагает дуализм означаемого и означающего, не может быть истолкована как просто отражение, подражание или копирование реальности. Главным в понимании репрезентации является то, что она не является спокойным и ненапряжённым отношением между означаемым и означающим, а представляет собой всеобъемлющее упорядочение репрезентируемой реальности. Именно допущение, что субъект с определённой точки зрения принудительно придаёт реальности некоторую структуру, позволяет, в соответствии с пониманием Мартина Хайдеггера, истолковать модерн как эпоху репрезентации. В результате признание наличия в репрезентации принудительного элемента позволяет определить способ видения модерна как визуальный режим. Такой подход открывает возможность, с одной стороны, обнаружения особенностей способов видения, предшествующих модерну, а с другой стороны, выявления сходств между теорией линейной перспективы и концепцией субъективности. Рассмотрение исходит из положения, согласно которому образы, определяемые способами видения премодерна, отличаются недостаточной структурной упорядоченностью и включают в свой состав синкретическую совокупность разнородных элементов или, как назвал эту произвольную множественность Клод Леви-Строс, «бриколаж». Переход от способа видения, присущего премодерну, к начальным формам визуального режима модерна сравнивается с возникновением метафизики и логики. Они включили принудительный элемент в неорганизованное мышление и, кроме того, создали возможности для определяющей роли репрезентации. Изобретение линейной перспективы понимается как кульминационный пункт развития концепции репрезентации и в том же ключе как аналог развития субъективности. Указывается также, что линейная перспектива лежит в основе того единственного визуального режима, который, как представляется, без каких-либо оговорок совместим с основополагающими принципами модерна и потому часто называется «картезианским перспективизмом». Тем не менее похоже, что вопрос о возможности других способов видения не закрыт и визуальные режимы Северного Возрождения и барокко чаще всего претендуют на принадлежность к модерну. В статье приводятся доводы в пользу правдоподобия попытки иного осмысления альтернативных визуальных режимов и, следовательно, решения вопроса об обоснованности их отнесения к модерну. В заключение рассматривается возможность использования концепции барокко в широком смысле в качестве исследовательского инструмента, с помощью которого синкретические визуальные режимы могли бы изучаться в качестве границ визуального режима модерна.The paper retraces the formation of the way of seeing of modernity with a view to identifying its limits and thereby the contact zones as the social spaces where it engages with other ways of seeing. The starting point of the analysis is the statement that modernity in the aspect under consideration should be defined by means of pointing at the centrality and even the hegemony of the sight, but only taking into account the peculiarities of man and society that have been transformed by the modernization. The shift from immediacy of societal relations to prevalence of mediation in modernity discloses the fact of social and cultural construction of vision that becomes entangled in a network of mediating structures and turns into visuality as a way of seeing which depends on them. The consideration focuses on the concept of visuality as a representation that, albeit it presupposes the dualism of the signified and the signifier, cannot be interpreted as barely reflecting, imitating, or copying reality. What is at issue in the construal of representation is not the quiet and relaxed relation between the signified and the signifier, but the pervasive ordering of reality to be represented. Just the assumption that the subject coercively frames reality from a certain point of view makes it possible to construe the modernity in tune with Martin Heidegger’s understanding as the age of the dominance of representation. In the issue, the admission of the coercive element of representation makes it possible to specify the way of seeing in modernity as the visual regime. Such approach opens up possibilities, on the one hand, for specifying the ways of seeing which precede modernity and, on the other hand, for the detection of similarities between the theory of the linear perspective and the concept of subjectivity. The consideration proceeds from the point that the imagery of the pre-modern ways of seeing that is characterized by the insufficient structural order contains the syncretic combination of heterogeneous entities or “bricolage” as such random multitude was designated by Claude Levi-Strauss. The transition from the pre-modern way of seeing to the rudiments of the visual regime of modernity is regarded as comparable to the emergence of metaphysics and logic. They had embedded the coercive element in unorganized thinking and besides opened the door for the dominance of representation. The invention of linear perspective is interpreted as the climax of the concept of representation and in the same vein as the counterpart of the formation of subjectivity. It is also pointed out that the linear perspective underlies the only visual regime which seems to be compatible with the philosophy of modernity without reserve and therefore this visual regime is often called “Cartesian perspectivism”. Nevertheless, the question of other ways of seeing does not look as if it is closed and the visual regimes of Northern Renaissance and Baroque as often as not also have a claim on belonging to modernity. In the paper it is argued in favor of the plausibility of another trying to find the sense of alternative visual regimes and hence to decide the issue of the relevance of their attribution to modernity. In fine the concept of baroque in the wide sense is supposed to be the research tool through which the syncretic visual regimes could be studied as the limits for the visual regime of modernity.

A Structure of Terror in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

Literature by women of the third world is capable of expressing emergent feelings attached to objects and everyday activities, which reveal underlying economic processes. One such activity that inspires diverging feelings, the Caribbean vacation, reveals a continued exploitative colonial economy. Jamaica Kincaid’s essays in A Small Place dramatize the competing narratives of vacation as happiness object and misery-causing activities within the framework of the structure of terror. Many critics read differences of race and class developed through figures of the tourist and the native in the early essays as necessarily divisive post-colonial critique, but they read Kincaid’s final essay as an attempt to transcend such divisions. Many have lauded Kincaid’s call to throw off old categories and focus on shared (biological) humanity, yet this very category of “human” has been constructed through (social) discourses of race, gender, and class. Instead, I argue that Kincaid continues insisting on multiple subject positions, subverting the argument she seems to make on the surface and critiquing colonial epistemologies—in discourse and visual regimes—through application of Sylvia Wynter’s interrogation of dominant worldviews of both humanism and an approach to environments.

'Black but Human'

The African presence in imperial Spain, of between 10-15 per cent of the population, was due to the institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade that brought between seven- to eight hundred thousand Africans as slaves to Spain and Portugal. If we add those slaves born in these European territories and the three to four hundred thousand Moor, Berber and Turk slaves, there were approximately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula during this period. The Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ that provides part of the book’s title, serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which certain visual representations of slavery both embody and reproduce hegemonic visions of subaltern groups, and at the same time provide material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves themselves. It thus allows us to generate critical insights into the articulations of slave subjectivity by exploring the links between visual regimes and the early modern Spanish and New World discourses on slavery and human diversity. My book provides a complex new reading of neglected moments of artistic production in Hapsburg Spain establishing their importance as relays of power and resistance. We could claim that the ‘Black but Human’ topos encodes the multilayered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance, and the ways in which these moments are articulated visually by a range of artists. Thus, this proverb is the main thread of the six chapters of this book.

Visual Regimes of Juche Ideology in North Korea’s The Country I Saw

This article discusses the North Korean film series The Country I Saw, focusing on transformations in the function of the Japanese colonial gaze in post–Cold War North Korean media. By comparing and contrasting the representation of fact-based empiricist journalism in Part One (1988) with the expression of a mediated sovereign exceptionality in the sequels (2009–2010), the essay shows how the series gives aesthetic form to North Korean juche ideology and spectacles of a realized communist utopia in the decolonized DPRK only through the repetition of generally modern visual regimes that are integrally tied to the history of Japanese colonialism and US neocolonialism. It asks us to rethink the history of communist visual cultures, particularly in formerly colonized countries, in relation to this kind of repetition and appropriation of colonial ways of seeing within the media of communist, postcolonial nation-states.