Dynamis of the Image: Moving Images in a Global World

388 Pages·2020·21.866 MB·English

by  Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto

Dynamis of the Image
Contact Zones
Editors
Lars Blunck, Bénédicte Savoy, Avinoam Shalem
Volume 5
Dynamis of the Image
Moving Images in a Global World
Editors
Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto
Éditions de la Maison des sciences de lʼhomme
The book is published in cooperation with the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.
ISBN Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme 978-2-7351-2428-2
ISBN De Gruyter 978-3-11-052874-9
e-ISBN (PDF) De Gruyter 978-3-11-053054-4
ISSN De Gruyter 2196-3746
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934247
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover illustration: Allan Sekula, Panorama. Mid-Atlantic from Fish Story (1989–1995).
Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio
Typesetting: Satzstudio Borngräber, Dessau-Roßlau
Printing and Binding: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza
www.degruyter.com
Content
Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto
The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book)   1
Potentialities
Gil Bartholeyns
On the ‘Virtus’ of Images
Medieval Practices, Contemporary Theories   15
Ticio Escobar
Ta’angá verá
The Power of Images in an Amerindian Perspective   37
Hans Belting
The Migration of Images
An Encounter with Figuration in Islamic Art   63
Linda Báez-Rubí
Wanderstrassen
Traveling Images — Moving Ideas Between Continents   79
W.J.T. Mitchell
Method, Madness, and Montage   103
Philippe-Alain Michaud
On Screen   123
Images at War, Images of Wars
Georges Didi-Huberman
Torrents and Barricades   141
Emmanuel Alloa
‘Just Terror’
The Visual Communication of ISIS   159
VI   Content
Susan Buck-Morss
Visual Empire 2.0   175
Chiara Cappelletto
The Dynamis of Fiction in the Globalized World
On Walid Raad’s Images in Transfer   201
Angela Mengoni
Visualizing Autoimmunity
Gerhard Richter’s War Cut   235
Decentering Visual Studies
Sunil Manghani
Image Degree Zero
From the Empirical Image to Image as Capacity   263
A.S. Aurora Hoel
Images as Active Powers for Reality
A Simondonian Approach to Medical Imaging   287
Morad Montazami
From Speculative to Heretical Orientalism
The Paul Klee Syndrome in the Hamed Abdalla Archives   311
Avinoam Shalem
The Transformative Museum. Why We Need an Other Museum
for the Arts of Islam   329
Authors   353
Picture Credits   359
Plates   363
Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto
The Dynamis of the Image
(and the Genesis of a Book)
Global Spectacle
What is the imaginary that we resort to when thinking of the world? What is the imagi-
nary that carries us away? Let us start with the still frame that figures as a cover to this
volume: gigantic cargo ships, flying flags from Singapore, Liberia, or Panama, which,
like their freights, have themselves become indistinguishable. Crossing the Northern
Atlantic, the Strait of Hormuz, or the South China Sea, these marine pachyderms are
loaded with multicolored, albeit unified boxes made of weathering steel. Piled up
by cranes, the towering stacks very much resemble massive LEGO bricks. Blue, red,
brown, green, yellow: despite the astounding variety of colors, ultimately, the cargos
are ‘black boxes’ and their whereabouts are inscrutable. We can only surmise what
these containers, six to twelve meters long, each capable of holding up to twenty-four
tons of cargo, are carrying along their transatlantic routes. We are left, as it were, with
the medium as our only message. And yet these carriers, so crucial to the worldwide
network of exchange, remain generally out-of-focus.
In his 1995 photo-essay Fish Story, Allan Sekula decided to look at these new
logistical realities, highlighting the extent of the hitherto unseen alliance between
homogenization and portability:1 while rarely depicted as such, the cargo containers
stand out as the ultimate icons of globalization, as unified isotypes of the generalized
migration of goods (fig. 1). The subsequent film The Forgotten Space (2010), co-di-
rected by Sekula and Noël Burch, from which the cover of the present book was taken,
carried this investigation a step further (fig. 2). In their respective ways, the two works
document the often-invisible supply chains of global trade, consisting of maritime
routes, gargantuan super-harbors, dock warehouses, and intermodal hoists. In track-
ing the radical change to sea commerce over a period of a couple decades, Sekula was
keen to understand how the sea, as this forgotten space afloat with a visual imagi-
nary of seafarers, pirates and mutineers, had been replaced with standardized vessels
of worldwide exchange. Thanks to ‘intermodality’—that is, the seamless shift from
one mode of transportation to another (from ship to train to truck, and the other way
around)—demarcations between land and sea have been lost, and the two realms
have merged into a single giant transit zone. The old jigsaw puzzle of how to stow
a ship has become a thing of the past, as fully automated cranes reach high above
the hulls and hoist standardized containers onto the decks, while simultaneously
1 Alan Sekula, Fish Story, Düsseldorf/Rotterdam: Richter/The Center 1995.
2   Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto
Fig. 1: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Düsseldorf/Rotterdam: Richter/The Center 1995, p. 57.
unloading other vessels that have just entered the land–sea terminal. Sekula remarks
that if commodities, according to Marx’s view, are containers for ‘dead labor’, and the
slave ship was arguably the first ‘container ship’ inasmuch as it yielded, qua floating
means of transportation, potential labor in its hold, the cargo container could be con-
sidered a ‘coffin’ hauling already dead labor whose product is now being distributed
throughout the world. This uncanny global playing field, while never fully comple-
tive, is nevertheless always already incubational and on the verge of realization.
The containerized units that Sekula photographed epitomize the worldwide cir-
culation and the new economy of ‘just-in-time’ production. While signaling, through
the maritime medium, the reality of liquid capitalism, they also gesture toward the
solid and sealed enclosure of the box as the ultimate unit of exchange-value today.
In many respects, the cargo containers not only hide the process of their own making
but also exhibit a pure exteriority via an endless series of color patterns, setting up an
enormous screen onto which a fantasized content may be projected. What do these
steel crates hold in reserve? Their exteriors offer no clues whatsoever, only iconic sur-
faces. While Sekula wonderfully demonstrates how these maritime cargomobilities
serve as a proxy for the standardized, anonymous exchanges that increasingly make
up today’s experiences, he strangely omits to draw the one conclusion that there is to
be drawn: that all we are left with, to figure these ever-more complex phenomena of
planetary scale, are images. What, if anything, do they hold in reserve?
Indeed, Sekula’s cargo containers capture today’s processes of globalization in
a compelling image that diverges from the usual depictions advertising the products
and goods themselves. No doubt, globalization has gone hand in hand with new
The Dynamis of the Image (and the Genesis of a Book)    3
Fig. 2: Allan Sekula, Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space (still frame), film essay (NL/AT, 2010).
visual hegemonies—with brands, icons, and logotypes that contribute to a unified
world-picture—and such standardization has often been decried. However, images
are not merely relays of meaning, shipped around the globe to achieve a unified spec-
tatorship; insofar as their critical and subversive potential is recognized, they are
also powerful forces of resistance against these hegemonies, and they can help shape
alternative viewpoints on the real. In order fully to grasp the potential for addressing
the global dimension and the overlooked conflict of forces at hand in images, the
becoming-world of the image itself must be acknowledged. The Dynamis of the Image
starts here: from the urgent need to provide an account of these modified frameworks
that affect our thinking about cultural imaginaries and visual artifacts. It is impera-
tive, at a time when the very idea of free circulation is true only for certain groups and
certain goods, while insurmountable walls are erected against others, that we investi-
gate the role of images in this new distribution of agency.
Images as Dynamos
No doubt, images carry messages, and they often do so very competently. In qua-
si-logistical terms, they are often the shortest way to get a content from A to B. But this
freight metaphor, facilitated by shallow theories of visual communication—and still
too often dominant in discussions about ‘pictorial competence’ and visual engineer-
ing—misses the point, and certainly cannot explain the new forms of violence exerted
4   Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto
against images. There is no denying it: images are static and need special devices,
both material (true for digital and film media alike) and immaterial, if they are to be
set in motion. In other words, they are not auto-mobile. But that does not mean that
images do not move. Whether they consist of flickering images traveling at high speed
around the globe or static Neolithic cave paintings, religious altarpieces or televised
advertisements, these artifacts have an incontestable power to move their spectators,
stir emotions, and provoke reactions.
Visual scholars are indebted to one author in particular, Aby Warburg (1886–
1929), who recognized this power early on when he described images as “energy-con-
tainers”. Indeed, in his case, seeing the many ships entering and leaving the harbor
of his hometown of Hamburg may well have fueled a maritime imagination and an
interest in trade routes. Warburg not only devoted a specific article to flying ships
and submarines as imagined since the Middle Ages2 but also studied the migration
of forms between the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Northern Europe, docu-
menting the specific “migratory routes” (Wanderstraßen) that were followed.3 Taking
particular interest in the material infrastructure of the border crossings and the way
in which visual devices, such as tapestries, came to serve as ‘automobile vehicles’ for
this migration, Warburg was keen to understand images’ unique power for convey-
ing forms through space and time. Rather than opposing shapes and drives, or forms
and forces, Warburg invites us to consider visual forms as crystallized affects, pre-
served to facilitate transportation over geographical and chronological distances, but
poised for reactivation when the time is ripe. The notion that Warburg puts forward in
this connection—that of dynamo-engram (‘Dynamo-Engramm’)—is in itself notewor-
thy. On other occasions, Warburg refers to “dynamograms”,4 and he possibly even
planned to write an “aesthetics of the dynamogram” (Ästhetik des Dynamogramms).5
Warburg thus conceived of images, against the backdrop of biopsychological theo-
ries of memory, not only as conserves or traces (gramma in the sense of ‘imprint’)
that preserve a record of past affects, but also as the visualizations of these affects
(after all, gramma can also refer to graphic symbolization). But more important, for
Warburg, the image’s gramma is that of a dynamis, and this concept emerges as a
common thread in the present volume.
2 Aby Warburg, “Luftschiff und Tauchboot in der mittelalterlichen Vorstellungswelt,” Die Erneuerung
der heidnischen Antike. Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig: Teubner, 1931, vol. I, pp. 243–249.
3 Aby Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoia,” Die
Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig: Teubner, 1932, vol. 2, p. 466.
4 Notebook entry from June 2, 1927 (‘Allgemeine Ideen’). Warburg Institute WIA, III, 102.1.4.1: “Das
antikische Dynamogramm wird in maximaler Spannung aber unpolarisiert in Bezug auf die passive
oder aktive Energetik […] überliefert. Erst der Contact mit der Zeit bewirkt die Polarisation. Diese kann
zur radikalen Umkehr des echten antikischen Sinnes führen.”
5 Notebook entry from May 18, 1927 (‘Allgemeine Ideen’), Warburg Institute WIA III, 102.1.4.2.