Abstraction, Witnessing, and Repair; or, How Multimodal Research Can Destabilize the Coloniality of the Gaze

The recent renewal of attention to abstraction within Black literary and visual studies, it seems to us, has to do with an interest in the various ways abstraction rejects ascribed categories, eschews narrow assumptions about “relevance,” and embraces experimentation during a moment when it is arguably most needed. Abstraction moves us simultaneously outside of representative realism, and it embraces research practices that often require the kind of intimacies that have long been the bread and butter of anthropology. As multimodal ethnographers, we have long made our ethical commitments to interlocutors through embodied participation and collective knowledge production. In this essay, we attend to questions of abstraction, witnessing, and refusal within our own filmic and photographic practices addressing state violence in the Caribbean. We are interested in the spatio-temporality of both witnessing and refusal and in the relationships between form and audience. We are interested in how forms of abstraction capture the ephemeral, performative, affective, non-linear, and unpredictable ways something that feels like sovereignty circulates and is transmitted from one to another, without contributing to a process of overexposure or a desire for transparency.

A Defence of Direct Surface Realism

It is commonly believed that there are, in the world, large numbers of objects which occupy three-dimensional space. It is also commonly believed that at least a large part of people's experience is of the surfaces of these material objects. Nevertheless, arguments have been adduced in favour of the view that we are never aware of such surfaces but only of distinct items called ‘sense-data’. It has also been suggested that if we couple the view that experience is limited to sense-data with an empiricist thesis to the effect that knowledge is limited by experience then we are forced to the conclusion that we cannot have any knowledge of material objects. There have been many attempts to reconcile the sense-data thesis with common beliefs about material objects. Among them have been representative realism and phenomenalism. However, a view which may have found favour recently is the Quinean one that ‘the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience’.1

A Defense of Locke and The Representative Theory of Perception

This paper is a defense of the “representative theory of perception” in general, and Locke's views about perception in particular. It is intended only as a limited defense, but one against those objections which recently have been taken thoroughly to discredit both the general theory and Locke's particular position. The chief of these objections is that the representative theory leads inevitably to skepticism about the existence of objective material things. George Pitcher finds this objection to the representative theory completely persuasive and so well established that it scarcely requires discussion:It is just here [in the area of justifying perceptual knowledge of the world] that the most serious and notorious deficiencies of sense-datum theories are encountered. If the sense-datum theorist maintains the existence of physical objects, … as ordinarily conceived, then his claim that sense-data are metaphysically distinct from anything in the physical world commits him to a version of representative realism. The enormous epistemological difficulties [due to their skeptical consequences] faced by theories of this kind are well known, and I shall not say anything about them, except that I regard them as insuperable ….