Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad - Rethinking Art and Visual Culture - The Poetics of Opacity-Palgrave Macmillan (2020)

Rethinking Art and
Visual Culture
The Poetics of Opacity
Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad
Rethinking Art and Visual Culture
Rethinking Art and

Visual Culture
The Poetics of Opacity
Information Science & Media Studies
University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway
ISBN 978-3-030-46175-1 ISBN 978-3-030-46176-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8
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Acknowledgments
The seeds of this book were planted during my stewardship of the

Nomadikon project “New Ecologies of the Image,” and more particularly
my study of cinematic form and ethics that became the monograph Film
and the Ethical Imagination (Palgrave, 2016). I express my gratitude to
the Trond Mohn Foundation (formerly the Bergen Research Foundation)
for generously providing the grant with which to establish the Nomadikon
Center for Visual Culture. I also thank the Faculty of Social Sciences and
the Department of Information Science and Media Studies for their con-
tinued support of my research. I owe a big debt to professor Arild Fetveit,
whose spirited invitation back in the fall of 2012 to join his immensely
stimulating project “The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic” occasioned
my initial encounter with the topic of opacity in the visual arts. In the
spring of 2015 this project, sponsored by the Independent Research Fund
of Denmark, facilitated a full semester’s worth of research for this book.
Throughout our series of memorable research seminars between 2012 and
2015, I learned a lot from fellow project members Kjetil Rødje, Susanne
Østby Sæther, Erika Balsom, and Antonio Somaini. I furthermore send
my most heartfelt thanks to the Fulbright Program Norway for kindly
providing me with a grant for a visiting professorship at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 2017–2018. Many thanks to professor Mark
Sandberg and the Department of Film and Media for being such gracious
hosts; my family and I really had the best of times while in Berkeley.
Another big thanks is due Ksenia Fedorova, for inviting me to give a talk
about my book at the University of California, Davis, in October 2017, as
well as for insightful feedback. Many thanks also to Kristopher Fallon and
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Colin Milburn for their astute remarks at the same event. Snippets of this
manuscript have been presented as papers at various conferences over the
last few years; these are too many to list here but I am very thankful for all
the questions and comments received from other participants. I also thank
the anonymous reviewers for their thorough, engaging, and productive
advice, which undoubtedly improved the manuscript, as well as Julia
Brockley and Emily Wood at Palgrave, with whom it has been an absolute
joy to work. Finally, I thank my wonderful family Stephanie, Sunniva,
Sebastian, and Joanna for every single day we spend together.
A section from Chap. 3 has been previously published in an altered
form as “The Aesthetic Imaginary and the Case of Ernie Gehr,” in
Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, eds. Lene Johannessen and Mark
Ledbetter, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. Reprinted with permission
from the editors.
Bergen, March 5, 2020 Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Contents
1 Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency Versus

Virtues of Opacity 1
2 On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory 21
3 Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr 53
4 Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere of the Image: John

Akomfrah 77
5 The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders103
6 And Dark Within: David Lynch117
7 A Hermeneutics of the Black Site: Trevor Paglen135
8 Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas153
9 Sublime Static: Low171
Afterword185
Index 189
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Screengrab The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah) 99

Fig. 5.1 Frame from Passageworks (Matt Saunders) 108
Fig. 6.1 Screengrab from Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch) 123
Fig. 7.1 Photo from Limit Telephotography project (Trevor Paglen) 137
Fig. 8.1 Photo from Facial Weaponization Suite (Zach Blas) 155
Fig. 9.1 Photo from Double Negative (Low) 178
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency

Versus Virtues of Opacity
The aim of this book is to explain the aesthetic and political affordances,
functions, and affects of a range of artistic expressions that are marked by
illegibility or semi-legibility. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The
Poetics of Opacity provides answers to the following questions: what are
the epistemological, ethical, and cultural values of indeterminate, blurry,
distorted, degraded, indefinite, or indistinct works of art? What might
such broken or informationally compromised representations or post-
representations have in common? What would be some of the key instances
of a poetics of opacity? What are their place and purpose in the firmament
of aesthetic history? How do precarious forms of art address or reflect
problems of knowledge, mediation, information, and data? While exam-
ples of opaque images and sounds abound in our audiovisual culture, this
is the first book to map out a coherent theory of indistinct art. It is also,
moreover, the first attempt to consider work by artists as diverse as Ernie
Gehr, John Akomfrah, David Lynch, Matt Saunders, Trevor Paglen, Zach
Blas, and Low together and in the context of a poetics of opacity. The
research aims to intervene in current debates around regimes of visibility
and surveillance by showing how indistinct aesthetics may offer a critique
of the positivist impulse informing these regimes.
This book is both a contribution to the field of media theory and a
rigorous engagement with, and critique of, what I propose to name a poli-
tics of transparency. Encompassing photography, film, video, television,
and music, the study is also a multidisciplinary intervention that spans the
© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. S. Grønstad, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8_1
2 A. S. GRØNSTAD
fields of visual culture, cinema and television, and sound studies. Its fun-
damental objective is to determine the artistic, ethical, and epistemologi-
cal values of materially compromised forms of art, advancing a notion of
opacity as a corrective to the political and social investment in an increas-
ingly belligerent brand of positivism. The observation upon which the
study is premised is this: visual culture and its multifarious objects and
operations orbit around a set of tacit presuppositions. These assumptions
and beliefs are, for instance, that the image be completely legible, that in
principle anything can be visualized, that our screens will always grow
incrementally brighter, and that vision and light are phenomena that are
intrinsically good. From mainstream cinema’s historical predilection for
unobtrusive staging to porn’s axiomatic appropriation of maximum visi-
bility, the medium of film has favored what could be seen as a poetics of
transparency. From a technological point of view, the history of the image
is the story of ever more sophisticated machines for the production of
sharpness.1 A dream of optimal transparency seems to drive both the image
industries and the expectations of the consumer-viewer. In this deification
of high definition, what has gone largely unnoticed in the various critical
engagements with images and the visual world is the place of the seeming
adversary of vision that nevertheless constitutes its inextricable counter-
part. Some images are not bright and shiny. Some images are not easy on
the eyes. Some images are not transparent. Some images are not presented
for maximum visibility. Some images are not immediately codifiable. Such
objects cause representational problems. They are an affront to hermeneu-
tic efficacy. Co-existing with all the flawless images that populate our vari-
ous screens, this complementary image ecology is rife with objects and
practices that gravitate toward various forms of what some would see as
visual imperfection. Found across a heterogeneity of contemporary audio-
visual media and genres—photography, documentary, fiction films, televi-
sion news, music, the social web—this aesthetic is easily recognizable
1
Consider, for example, the exalted reports from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas in 2013, a fair that hailed the latest improvements in high-resolution technology that
were unveiled during the event. The LA Times praised the new 4K TV set for reproducing
“stunningly good pictures on very large screens” with “an amazing level of detail and bright-
ness.” See Jon Healey, “CES 2013: Sharp Shows Off Super-Sharp 8K TV, Waits for Content,”
The LA Times, January 10, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-
ces-sharp-8k-tv-20130110,0,5741879.story, accessed February 21, 2014. Digital culture’s
penchant for pellucidity, it appears, defines the state of the art in image technology and
production.
1 INTRODUCTION: THE DEVOTION TO TRANSPARENCY VERSUS VIRTUES… 3
through its reliance on a set of recurring properties: fuzzy graphics, motion

blurs, out-of-focus or grainy images, discolorations, wobbly cameras,
elliptical editing, intrusion of “noise” either from the environment or the
recording apparatus itself, technical glitches, and material decay
(nitrate film).
This aesthetics of illegibility, along with its philosophical implications,
constitutes the core of this book. We do not yet have an art history of the
ruined or opaque image, and while that history is beyond the grasp of this
project, I want to scrutinize forms and examples that might merit inclu-
sion in such a history. But more important than references to particular
works, for this undertaking, are the kinds of epistemological and ethical
matters that pertain to indecipherable visualities. My assumption is that a
critique not of visibility per se but of the qualities of sharpness and of clar-
ity as an unproblematically teleological desire needs to be undertaken
from within the field of media theory. This book aims to examine a selec-
tion of images (and, in one instance, sounds) that are dense and even
sometimes impenetrable. Thus, its subject matter and empirical reach
extend to artworks that are damaged and materially compromised, bro-
ken—in short, artworks that are steeped in opacity. On the fringes of the
paradigm of transparency, then, there is another style of audiovisual repre-
sentation that increasingly has come to the fore in contemporary media
culture. To provide an incisive account of this style is the overriding con-
cern of this book.
To that end, the analysis is divided up into a preliminary chapter, dedi-
cated to an expansive examination of opacity as a concept both in media
theory and in artistic practice, and seven case studies. These chapters zero
in on a quite diverse body of work that in one way or another manifests or
thematizes the subject of opacity: the experimental films of the American
avant-garde practitioner Ernie Gehr (and, to a lesser extent, those of Bill
Morrison), the essay films and installations of the British artist and film-
maker John Akomfrah, the hybrid projects of the American artist Matt
Saunders, one singular episode from the television work of the American
director David Lynch, the photographic interventions of the American
artist Trevor Paglen, the facial masks of the American artist and writer
Zach Blas, and, finally, the experiment with static and noise by the mini-
malist and so-called slowcore Minnesota ensemble Low. These works are
evidently a mere selection from a much larger pool of possible cases, some
of which are cited throughout this book. While as aesthetic effect or tech-
nique opacity extends across many different media and genres, the
4 A. S. GRØNSTAD
proclivity for employing it in a sustained manner seems higher in the

experimental arts. The current range of cases is thus a reflection of this
state of affairs. My choice of material is by no means haphazard and has
developed organically as the research progressed. In chronological terms,
works by Ernie Gehr and John Akomfrah constitute the kernel of the
research, but my awareness of, and interest in, the projects of Trevor
Paglen and Zach Blas with regard to the opaque informed my approach
from an early stage. The heterogeneity of the cases is at least in part engi-
neered, as what I was after was a mix of perhaps less widely known and
maybe even unexpected works, on the one hand, and, on the other, more
obvious and “canonical” examples. Likewise intentional was the gamut of
aesthetic forms, from cinema and video to photography, television, and
album covers.
In this introductory part, I lay bare the premises for the study. Two
observations are paramount in this regard. One is the awareness that con-
temporary culture is doused in a pervasive yet largely unquestioned faith
in the preeminence of transparency, of total illumination. The other is the
discovery of a vital yet mostly uncharted propensity for non-transparency,
for lack of clarity in both a material and a conceptual sense, in works of art
across the various disciplines. Tying these observations together, the chap-
ter places the notion of opaque art in the context of a precarious aesthet-
ics, the inscription of vulnerability into the formal affordances of the work
itself. Acknowledging that an interrogation of ostensibly unchallengeable
qualities such as transparency and clarity might represent a provocation,
the chapter proposes an argument for the ethical and political values of a
poetics of opacity. Important interlocutors in this chapter are Édouard
Glissant, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and Jonathan Crary.
The ambition of Chap. 2, On the Concept of Opacity in Art and
Theory, is to survey an array of works that in various ways adopt (partial)
illegibility as a poetic device and, more substantially, to chart the critical
genealogies of the present attempt at theorizing opacity. Identifying a pos-
sible origin for the thesis that the photographic/filmic image is essentially
opaque in the anti-mimetic criticism of early film theorists such as Ricciotto
Canudo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Rudolf Arnheim, the chapter
connects their ideas with the theoretical writings of later, post-classical
thinkers such as Jean-Paul Fargier, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier,
Jean-François Lyotard, Louis Marin, Paul Virilio, and Trinh Minh-ha.
These two historically circumscribed streams of thought are then linked to
more ongoing debates about indistinct art, blurry images, low definition,
and visual noise in a compendium of theorists, from Hito Steyerl and

Laura U. Marks to J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Martine Beugnet,
Arild Fetveit, Erika Balsom, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, and Christine
Ross. The chapter is intended as a compressed history of ideas around the
notions of what I have elsewhere termed amimetic art as well as the
transparency-opacity spectrum.2 Especially significant for this discussion is
the theory of the constitutive thickness of the image, the hypothesis that
the transparency of the image is an illusion because the figurations cap-
tured on it are akin to a kind of semiotic crust whose inevitable presence
always makes the content of the image generative rather than reflective.
What kind of document, if any, is an image that exists, precariously one
might say, on the fringes of the discernible? This is the question that the
next chapter tries to resolve. The subject of opaque art readily invokes
matters of mediality, and this is the point of departure for Chap. 3,
Boundaries of Discernibility. Here, I examine the strange and optically
regenerative practices by which materially impaired images exploit their
own opacity to attain a new modality of existing as a visual artifact. In
order to do this, I turn toward American avant-garde cinema, in particular
works by Bill Morrison and Ernie Gehr. With reference to Kazimir
Malevich’s notion of “cinema as such,” the chapter argues that the use of
indefinite or decaying images in films like Decasia, Dawson City: Frozen
Time, Abracadabra, and the Auto-Collider series may be considered spec-
tral in the sense suggested by Aby Warburg and Giorgio Agamben. The
bulk of the chapter however is committed to an analysis of Gehr’s work
and the materialization throughout his oeuvre of a poetics of opacity. The
claim is put forth that this work has produced a set of recurring stylistic
and thematic concerns that together come to constitute a particular aes-
thetic imaginary. An artist whose work spans half a century of filmmaking,
Gehr has consistently been drawn toward problems involving, among
other things, the materiality of the medium, visual opacity, the perception
of space, urban sites, and the apparitional. Gehr’s aesthetic—equally
entrancing and mystifying, rigorous yet sensual, constricting yet invigorat-
ing—embodies, the chapter claims, a post-representational mode of
image-making that in existential terms is generative rather than reflective.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the imaginary as “games of
2
See Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfiguration: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American
Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.
6 A. S. GRØNSTAD
mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection,”3 the

chapter shows how the aesthetic imaginary in Gehr’s cinema is perhaps
most prominently figured in the phenomenon that Jacques Derrida calls
phantomality.4 Examining how Gehr’s films enact a process of spatial defa-
miliarization, the article also ties this preoccupation with spectrality to an
older art historical tradition in which the image and the ghost keep close
company.
Ernie Gehr’s spectral re-animation of scraps of old silent films produces
a form of opacity organized around the figure of the ruin. His filmmaking
practice thus inscribes itself into a longer and deeply melancholic artistic
tradition which foregrounds the poetic intensity of the fragment and of
various states of degeneration. In Chap. 4, Archival Ghosts, or, the
Elsewhere of the Image, we will see that in the work of the British film-
maker artist, filmmaker, and collagist John Akomfrah the trope of the ruin
takes on a new guise, which is that of intertextuality. In a historical con-
text, the intertextual fragment embodies another manifestation of the aes-
thetics of decay, of the ruin as an object of philosophical contemplation.
In a work like The Nine Muses (2010), the ruin is no longer a natural or
constructed object such as a skull, a crumbling staircase, or an abandoned
power station but the splinters of key literary and cultural texts. For the
Ghana-born Akomfrah, a founding member of the Black Audio Film
Collective (1982–1998) and director of the seminal Handsworth Songs
(1986), the cultural archive is neither a static nor transparent compilation
of artefacts but an epistemic resource that may be galvanized aesthetically
to envision a different future. Across an oeuvre that (at the time of writ-
ing) contains more than thirty projects, Akomfrah has consistently and
imaginatively mined a particular theme as well as deployed a particular
method: on the level of narrative, the multifariousness of Black diasporic
experience, and on the level of form, the complexities of various systems
of mediation and representation. An essential component of his practice, I
suggest, is an aesthetics of opacity, frequently connected with (although
not exclusive to) the intertext understood—in an allegorical sense—as a
ruin (his first feature length film Testament (1988) begins with Zbigniew
3
Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” [1972], trans. Melissa
McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David
Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, 170–192.
4
Antoine de Baecque & Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with
Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse, 37.1–2 (2015): 26.
Herbert’s evocative quotation that “[i]f we lose the ruins, nothing will be
left”). Migration, displacement (geographic, social, and psychic), and the
reclamation of cultural memory in a postcolonial, globalized era are issues
that occupy a decisive place in Akomfrah’s works. But this subject matter
is filtered through an emphatically dense and at times impenetrable trans-
aesthetic collage founded upon the principle of the intertextual ruin and
its productive opacity.
The remolding of the cultural archive is something Akomfrah shares
with many of his contemporaries, notable among them the American,
Berlin-based painter, photographer, and film and video artist Matt
Saunders. In Chap. 5, The Shape of the Secret, I situate his 2010 instal-
lation Passageworks within the context of an art of opacity, showing how
the work in its stratified materiality recalls both Gehr’s poetics of spectral-
ity and Akomfrah’s fascination with transtextuality and its archival accent.
Like that of Gehr, Saunders’s art seeks to transcend the boundaries of the
filmic, both in a technical-material, representational, and cultural sense.
His work probes the interstitial space between, on the one hand, painting
and drawing, and on the other, photography and film. Because he creates
a negative by hand, either drawing or painting onto Mylar, he eschews the
component habitually considered essential to photography—the camera,
with its viewfinder, lens, and shutter (although the process does rely upon
other elements of the technical apparatus such as photographic paper, an
enlarger, and a darkroom). The images that emerge from this practice, as
the examples from Passageworks reveal, are hybrid forms that are neither
fully figurative and photographic nor entirely painterly and abstract. What
they contribute is a kind of mongrel visuality. Likewise, representationally
they hover between the recognizable and the indecipherable. At the same
time, a composition such as Passageworks also broadens the scope of cin-
ema’s cultural memory, in that it reintroduces films, characters, actors,
places, and plots mostly forgotten, imbuing these with a poignant spectral
power. Claiming that the opacity in Saunders’s films allegorizes these
objects that exist on the cultural periphery, the chapter goes on to contex-
tualize this filmmaking practice with reference to a poetics of the secret, as
well as to Janet Harbord’s notion of ex-centric cinema and Ropars-
Wuilleumier’s concept of cinécriture.
The subject of spectrality resurfaces again in Chap. 6, And Dark
Within, which shifts the focus from experimental cinema to what might
be termed avant-garde television. Approaching the phenomenon of opac-
ity from not only a graphic but also a narrative point of view, the chapter
8 A. S. GRØNSTAD
considers the eight installment of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return
(2017), an episode in which “clarity is besides the point,” as one critic has
noted.5 In order to make sense of this unusual work, I re-appropriate
Anthony Vidler’s concept of warped space to show how Lynch’s aesthetic
affordances not only rekindle the cultural anxieties and psychological tor-
ment suffusing modernist architecture but also radiate another form of
opacity. Like Inland Empire before it (2006), The Return’s episode 8—
with its ashen, spidery ghosts, deranged woodsman, and its murky, gray
hues—yields forth images onto which issues of spatial warping, architec-
tural uncanniness, ecological fears, and interpretive impenetrability all
coalesce. The critical reception of the episode has suggested that its the-
matic backbone is nothing less than the origin of evil in the world, epito-
mized by the image of the mushroom cloud from the first nuclear test site
in White Sands, New Mexico. Discharged on July 16, 1945, the operation
known under the John Donne-inspired code name of “Trinity” ushered in
the atomic age. The chapter explores the idea that the episode’s graphic
and narrative opacities conjure a haunted and menacing universe and set
up a compositional structure that is at once an origin story and an extinc-
tion narrative.
In the work of artists such as John Akomfrah and Zach Blas, the poetics
of opacity stays close to the ends Glissant envisions for this particular
medium of expression, which is to operate as a bulwark against epistemic
attempts to reduce the complexity and fundamental unknowability of
experience. But the opaque image can also serve to further other objec-
tives. Blurry photographs, for example, can serve as an index of a con-
spicuous absence, as a reminder that potentially significant information is
being intentionally withheld from us. One such use of opacity is realized
through the projects of the artist and researcher Trevor Paglen. Focusing
on stealthy military operations and test sites—remote desert installations
in the southwest or a classified spacecraft orbiting the Earth—Paglen pro-
duces photographs across substantial distances. The contribution of these
often illegible images thus lies in the way in which they gesture toward not
only the existence of barely visible objects but, maybe more importantly,
the intended act of keeping something out of view in the first place.
Chapter 7, A Hermeneutics of the Black Site, closely examines some of
5
Corey Atad, “Last Night’s Terrifying Twin Peaks Will Be Remembered as One of the
Best Episodes of Television Ever,” Esquire, June 26, 2017, http://www.esquire.com/enter-
tainment/tv/a55877/twin-peaks-part-8-recap/, accessed December 21, 2017.
Paglen’s projects. His blurry photographs, I argue, enact a certain redistri-

bution of the sensible, in that they debunk the increasingly untenable fic-
tion of the transparency of the public sphere. Here, the poetics of opacity
is engaged in the process not of showing seeing but of showing non-
seeing, or the attempt itself to curtail the right to look. Perhaps more
plainly than in the work of Gehr and Akomfrah, the indistinct image in
Paglen inscribes itself into the perceptual sensorium we call aesthetics; it
demonstrates that opacity is not the threatening Other of artistic commu-
nication but, on the contrary, an epistemologically rejuvenating possibility
that is of the aesthetic, not something that swallows it up.
So far the poetics of opacity has for the most part been located in vari-
ous screen media. But the phenomenologically indistinct is not exclusively
a feature of cinema, video, television, or contemporary art—or of sound
and writing—but appears in the extra-textual world, too. A fairly pervasive
site for displays of opacity is the face. From the niqab and the burqa to
Anonymous’s Guy Fawkes disguises, Antifa’s black mask, and the KKK
hoods, the veiling of the human face represents a culturally diverse prac-
tice that has confidentiality as its aim and opacity as its method. Chapter
8, Faceless, Nameless, analyzes the facemasks made by the artist Zach
Blas in his Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014) in the context of a
poetics of opacity as an instrument of political resistance. In the chapter, I
approach Blas’s projects as a reaction to the increasing dominance of bio-
political forms of governmentality. Resembling a new ocular regime, these
forms encompass measures such as the application of biometric technol-
ogy for visas and international travel, the extensive deployment of surveil-
lance cameras in metropolitan clusters, individualized consumer marketing,
and social media applications for facial authentication. The transecting
interests of the state, the military, and commercial enterprises are mobiliz-
ing to transparenticize the face. A project like Facial Weaponization Suite,
the chapter contends, opposes the practice of biometric facial recognition
by producing so-called collective masks. From the amassed facial data of
several participants the work generates opaque masks that modern facial
recognition technology is unable to read. In conclusion, the argument
finds that the various processes of defacement—in effect, a poetics of
opacity—enable new ethical relations to emerge, relations that contradict
the disembodiment and objectification that are the outcome of biometric
technologies.
In the book’s last chapter, Sublime Static, I widen the scope of the
poetics of opacity to include sound. Turning to the 2018 release of Double
10 A. S. GRØNSTAD
Negative, the Minnesota slowcore band Low’s 12th album, the chapter
considers the sonic radicalism of the record in the context of its historical
moment. I argue that the record’s profound use of distortion and noise
epitomizes the musicians’ attempt to capture and respond to the intensify-
ing pollution of the social sphere by the incessant chatter of social media,
the ubiquity of false information, and the deafening blare of polarized
politics. The chapter discusses the album’s relation to noise aesthetics in
general and to philosopher Michel Serres’s notion of the parasite in par-
ticular, presenting the central argument that Low with Double Negative
harnesses an acoustics of opacity as a device through which to rethink the
meaning of mediality and communication for the contemporary moment.
In the book’s Afterword, I summarize the vital insights concerning opacity
as a concept in art, criticism, and theory.
Opacity as an Aesthetic
Etymologically, the term opacity surfaces in the mid-sixteenth century
with the content “darkness of meaning” and “obscurity,” which in turn
derives from the French opacité, from the Latin opacitatem (nominative
opacitas), meaning “shade” or “shadiness,” again from opacus, “shaded”
or “dark.” Opacity as the state of being “impervious to light” was first
recorded in the 1630s. As a word, it thus seems closely aligned with opti-
cality. While I shall highlight the material aspect of opacity throughout, I
will also deploy it in a more conceptual sense, denoting that which is epis-
temologically indeterminate. In the domain of artistic expression, opacity
cuts across a wide range of genres and modes, from experimental works
such as Decasia, The Decay of Fiction, and To Lavoisier, Who Died in the
Reign of Terror (Michael Snow 1991) to commercial movies such as those
of the Dogme movement, certain segments in Paul Haggis’s In the Valley
of Elah (2007), to amateur footage posted on YouTube and, finally, docu-
mentaries like Rouge Parole (Elyes Baccar 2011), to name a few casual
examples.
Before moving on, let me briefly dwell on an additional context for this
study. What appears salient for a consideration of the boundaries of dis-
cernibility is the notion of a precarious aesthetic, which, I suggest, inter-
sects powerfully with the concept of opacity. Whatever qualities one would
like to attribute to images that have been damaged and impaired, a pre-
liminary issue that needs to be addressed is the existence of precariousness.
Morrison’s Decasia, for instance, is as a case in point. What I mean by this
is that the film, through its splendid procession of decaying images, dra-
matizes the interplay between material and perceptual forms of vulnerabil-
ity, between object and vision.6 What is opaque and difficult to discern
may generate a sense of the precarious. But in recent intellectual discus-
sions the concept of a precarious aesthetic is perhaps most immediately
evocative of Judith Butler’s reflections on the problem of how to deal with
“a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability,” as she puts it in Precarious
Life.7 The backdrop against which her intervention is set is the catastrophe
of 9/11 and the invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since then there have
been more precipitous and unprecedented vulnerabilities to negotiate,
most crucially the twin threats of the financial and environmental crises.
One could probably be forgiven for thinking that the perceived difficulties
within the field of aesthetics cannot but be obliterated by these more
urgent and ubiquitous predicaments. I do not want to suggest otherwise
here, but I do want to remain for a little while with Butler’s emphasis on
vulnerability as perhaps a key condition of life in the twenty-first century.
For some time now, aesthetic experience has been a contested site.8
This is yet another context for the concept of the precarious. Paying too
much attention to the aesthetic dimension has long been regarded as
somewhat suspect, politically. First, the aesthetic fell victim to the scienti-
fication of the humanities, thereafter, to the remarkable intellectual and
institutional force of cultural studies in its manifold guises, postcolonial-
ism, and various sociological readings of art and culture. While the former
6
Hal Foster has written about the art of the first decade of the twenty-first century in terms
of the precarious. According to his account, much of the art made under the sign of the
precarious—Jon Kessler’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (2005), Paul Chan’s series The 7 Lights
(2005–2007), Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007), and Isa Genzken’s Skulptur Projekte
Münster (2007), to name a few—sidesteps modernist practices of negation, suggesting
instead the almost inverse effort to embrace the formlessness of the times. See Hal Foster,
“Precarious,” Artforum, 48.4 (2009): 207–209.
7
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso,
2004, 42. The term has also more recently been invoked by both Nicolas Bourriaud and Hal
Foster. See Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant: No. 17, New York: Sternberg Press, 2009; and
Hal Foster, “Precarious,” Artforum, 48.4 (2009): 207–209.
8
A few decades ago the idea of aesthetic beauty became so beleaguered that prominent
defenses were published by authors such as Wendy Steiner and Elaine Scarry. See, for
instance, Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1995, Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999, and Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
12 A. S. GRØNSTAD
sought to map and thoroughly explain every single feature of the aesthetic
object, in the process rooting out the inherent enigma of the aesthetic that
Adorno among others asserted as an indispensable element of aesthetic
ontology, the latter more or less systematically privileged politicized and
often formulaic analyses of the art object, readings that often tended to
either overlook or brutalize the formal properties of the work.
The pairing of the terms “precarious” and “aesthetic” is thus not as
capricious as it may seem at first. We could say that there are two basic
senses of the precarious aesthetic, the material and the conceptual (or the
explicit and the implicit). The material sense designates various forms of
what one could understand as impaired or imperfect images. The second
sense is more abstract and would imply something that is quite close to a
state of semiotic or hermeneutic opacity. The two senses also appear intui-
tively related, and they straddle the distinctions between different forms of
opacity. Furthermore, phenomena identifiable as instantiations of a pre-
carious aesthetic may possess a particular force, or power, and this force
might be locatable precisely in their very precariousness. Etymologically,
“precarious,” from the Latin precārius, was a legal term first registered in
the 1640s and close in meaning to “prayer.” It denoted a favor asked of
someone more powerful than the one doing the asking. A little later the
meaning of the word shifted toward the sense of “risky,” “uncertain,”
“perilous,” “unstable” and subject to chance. Within the art world, exam-
ples of a precarious aesthetic might be Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia)
(1971), in which a series of photos showing mundane places and objects
like bathroom stalls and moldering pasta are placed on a slow-burning hot
plate gradually to incinerate before our eyes the moment after we have
heard a description of the photo. A film that underscores the difference
between language and image, it also simultaneously lays bare the seem-
ingly inherent link between particular varieties of a precarious aesthetic
and the iconoclastic impulse. A more recent case is Israeli visual artist
Keren Cytter’s image of a burning turntable. As some of the case studies
below will reveal, there are intimate affiliations between materially indis-
tinct forms and social and existential conditions of vulnerability and
precariousness.
Politicized Visibilities
Interrogating the supposedly unchallengeable merits of luminescence is a
fraught proposition. Clarity, transparency, brightness—these qualities
appear so obviously laudable, so central to our innermost conception of
how reality fundamentally works, that contesting them risks coming across
as counterintuitive or even heretical. Transparency, Nicole Simek writes,
has become so widespread an ideal, valued and invoked by diverse constitu-

encies in so many sectors of contemporary life across the globe (from gov-
ernment to business to education), that its moral authority often appears
obvious. Though deploying it to different ends, neoliberal, liberal, and left-
ist discourses all frequently take transparency, or disclosure, to be a key prin-
ciple of good governance and social relations.9
One could also object that, although interrelated in ways that I will try to
unravel below, socially and psychically deleterious kind of aggressive illu-
mination constitutes an issue altogether different from the aesthetics of
opacity that is the subject of this book. Yet, I am going to insist that the
two are related. Art that foregrounds a lack of clarity, both in a material
and a narrative sense, may make us more aware of the limits of sight, its
epistemological limits specifically. Artworks that embrace opacity as a
poetic technique also index another way of being in the world, and they
engender a different form of affect. In many cases, the aesthetics of opacity
will also be embroiled in complex questions concerning temporality, tech-
nology, and mediation.
Defenses of structures of opacity on ethical grounds are thus not the
only context for reappraising the value and function of opacity. My objec-
tive here is not only to map out the different conceptual sites that the
opaque image might inhabit but also to suggest how they could be con-
nected. When our imagination is stimulated by an absence of certainty, we
are presented with richer opportunities for exercising our ethical sensibili-
ties. Indefinite images also index the constructedness of the finished
image, reminding us that clarity need not equal candor and the definite or
definitive need not imply natural inevitability. When cognition is stirred by
something that is only half there or barely there, it might be akin to a kind
of trigger effect that is a notable quality of the opaque image. We could
perhaps call this “the blow-up theory” of indistinct visual forms, after
9
Nicole Simek, “Stubborn Shadows,” symploke, 23.1–2 (2015): 363–373; 363.
14 A. S. GRØNSTAD
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film that derives so much of its intellec-

tual energy from the tantalizing epistemological promise of the pixel.
Finally, the indefinite image may be helpful in exposing and critiquing the
vaguely positivist fetishization of visual sharpness in contemporary culture.
As a critical topos, opacity extends then far beyond the sphere of rar-
efied works of art. In September 2016, the journal Critical Studies pub-
lished a themed issue on the subject of visibility/invisibility, stating in their
editorial that their intention was in part to consider “the value of remain-
ing, precisely, invisible, of keeping off the radar, of staying underground,
for radical activism, artistic performance, and alternative politics?”10 The
project comes across as an explicit challenge to a whole tradition of
thought that presupposes that the expansion of the perceptible is politi-
cally and aesthetically desirable, a position foregrounded, for instance, by
Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus, the particular process through
which whatever has been suppressed by regimes of political consensus
comes into view. I have, in a different context, described dissensus as:
the force that enables new relations to emerge and that thus facilitates the
transformation, redistribution and reconfiguration of sense experience in
any given social entity. In this conception, politics is inevitably an aesthetic
modality, in that it can result in new ways of seeing, sensing and experienc-
ing the world. Inversely, art is inherently political, not because it sometimes
is explicitly ‘committed’ to a certain agenda, but because it can expose,
confront and oppose habitual beliefs and doxa through novel dispositions of
the sensible.11
The question is, would not an emphasis on the value of remaining invisible
be starkly at odds with the function that processes of dissensus would seem
to fulfill? Leaving aside, at least for now, the assumption that invisibility
also represents a particular distribution or reconfiguration of the sensible,
I want to begin by drawing attention to operations of visibility that are less
benign and that are not so much about issues of representation and the
reorganization of perception as about totalizing panoptic regimes in
cahoots with political ideologies that promote dehumanization.
10
Editorial, “(in)visibility,” Critical Studies, vol. 2, September 2016, http://www.critical-
studies.org.uk/uploads/2/6/0/7/26079602/critical_studies_v2d_-_editorial.pdf,
accessed October 26, 2016.
11
Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016, 85.
In the late 1990s, a space consortium with Russian and European part-
ners made plans to manufacture a type of satellites, stationed at an altitude
of 1700 kilometers, which would be equipped with reflectors to beam
sunlight back to earth. These mirror satellites, the program proposed,
would be able to illuminate vast areas with a degree of brightness almost
100 times more powerful than moonlight. Confronting intense opposi-
tion from scientists, environmentalists, and humanitarian groups, the plan
never materialized. In his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
(2013), Jonathan Crary sees this venture as one egregious manifestation
of what he terms “a contemporary imaginary in which a state of perma-
nent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global
exchange and circulation.”12 Historicizing this imaginary, Crary discusses
both Jeremy Bentham’s notorious structure in which prison space was
flooded with light to optimize observability as well as the feeling of being
continuously monitored and the introduction of urban street lights in the
late nineteenth century in order both to ward off potential threats lurking
in the shadows and, no less importantly, to extend the timeframe for con-
sumers. The satellite enterprise alluded to above is essentially an intensifi-
cation of this ominous politics of luminosity, or, in Crary’s terms, the
“institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumen-
talized and unending condition of visibility […] [a]n illuminated 24/7
world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of the
exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change.”13 Since
this imaginary works to destabilize a set of vital distinctions (between light
and dark, day and night, work and rest), sleep—perhaps the only remain-
ing uncommodified area of human life—is fast becoming its next casualty.
A 24/7 world is one that flattens subjectivity and unhinges our relation-
ship with temporality, making the past seem shallow and inconsequential.
According to the Hannah Arendt of The Human Condition (1958), which
Crary explicitly invokes in his own text, the cultivation of the self into a
singular being entails privacy and an abstention from the bright lights of
public life.14 When further describing this 24/7 world in which everything
is illuminated, Crary intriguingly adopts a very Rancièrean term. For
Crary, what we could call the 24/7 imaginary denotes “a zone of insensi-
bility [my emphasis], of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of
12
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, 2013, 5.
13
Ibid., 9.
14
Ibid., 21.
16 A. S. GRØNSTAD
experience.”15 On this reading, then, visibility is no longer considered

affirmatively, as a bringing into view of the previously marginalized, the
overlooked, or the suppressed, but becomes itself an instrument of repres-
sion in its eradication of difference, experience, and memory. A state of
perpetual and belligerent illumination advances what Teresa Brennan has
called bioderegulation, the unfavorable effects that nonstop labor, con-
sumerism and technological connectivity have on the human body in all its
precariousness.16
Glissant and the Value of Opacity

But the rule of visibility also has other repercussions. Particularly among
certain postcolonial thinkers and artists, the lucidity of official histories
and narratives is duplicitous, misrepresenting specific cultural experiences
through processes of abstraction and reduction. In the work of Cuban
installation artist Reynier Leyva Novo, for instance, opacity is deployed as
a deliberate aesthetic strategy in order to highlight the omissions of his-
tory. Novo’s works, according to Guillermina De Ferrari, “reverse the
process of erasure and political appropriation common to historical dis-
course in Cuba by appealing to rhetorical strategies that both imbue his-
tory with life and obscure it in one single gesture.”17 The writer most
closely associated with the philosophy of opacity is the Martinican critic,
poet, and novelist Édouard Glissant, who, in his Poetics of Relation (1990;
English translation 1997), pondered the nature of ethical relationships
through that concept. In one of the articles in his book, simply entitled
“Transparency and Opacity,” Glissant holds that transparency “no longer
seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected
the world in its own image.” Instead, he writes, “[t]here is opacity now at
the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations.”18
15
Ibid., 17.
16
Teresa Brennan, Globalization and its Terrors: Daily Life in the West, London: Routledge,
2003, 19–22.
17
Guillermina De Ferrari, “Opacity and Sensation in Reynier Leyva Novo’s Historical
Installations,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, 22, 2015,
https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/opacity-and-sensation-in-reynier-leyva-novos-historical-instal-
lations/, accessed October 28, 2016.
18
Édouard Glissant, “Transparency and Opacity,” in The Poetics of Relation [1990], trans.
Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 111. Glissant’s work occa-
This observation might prompt us to ask, why might clarity be a problem

or, more fundamentally, what is clarity?
Etymologically, clarity involves light, brightness, and its meaning is
more or less interchangeable with that of transparency. For one thing, clar-
ity—in a material sense—can be misleading, even perfidious. A statement
perfectly formed and unambiguously articulated can still be a lie, which is
an example that acutely challenges the supposed isomorphism of clarity
and truth. This awareness is basically a variation of the adage that appear-
ances can be deceptive. But there are also other, and perhaps better, rea-
sons to distrust the rhetoric of transparency, in particular with respect to
visual objects. An image, regardless of what it shows, performs an act of
sedimentation, a process not unlike that of the accumulated alluvium that
Glissant refers to. The image is generative, not reflective, and it can never
be really transparent in the first place. Even when we have no trouble rec-
ognizing the object inside its frame, the image has a constitutive thick-
ness—both material and semiotic—that cancels out any claim to
transparency. In his classic essay “The Unattainable Text,” Raymond
Bellour suggests that the film image is located “half-way between the
semi-transparency of written titles and dialogue and the more or less com-
plete opacity of music and noise.”19 Any image, whether vivid or fuzzy, is
the product of a particular technology and of a particular act of mediation;
that we have been taught, for instance, by Hollywood cinema, to ignore
this medial interference and look straight through it onto the object of the
image does not mean that it has somehow left behind its technological-
representational baggage.
But a key reason why opacity might be preferable to clarity, for Glissant,
has to do with ethics. His critique of the notion of transparency arises from
the acknowledgment that the colonial structures of social and economic
domination in the Caribbean and elsewhere had been naturalized to such
an extent that they had in fact become indiscernible. This state of affairs
required a novel methodology of resistance, an imaginative counter-
strategy, which Glissant found in what he referred to as the “stubborn
shadows,”20 modes of writing, often poetic in style, that privilege both an
sioned a special issue on the subject of opacity from the journal InVisible Culture in the
spring of 2015.
19
Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text,” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 15–27; 24.
20
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash,
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989, 4.
18 A. S. GRØNSTAD
expressive opacity and an opacity of expression. This method did not favor
opacity for its own sake, but was an antidote to the discursive regimes of
transparency. A problem with transparency is that it constitutes a politics
of representation that entails a modification of the identity of the other so
as to be amenable to Western models. A kind of otherness that is autono-
mous, unbounded, and ultimately untranslatable is not sufficiently palat-
able for dominant mainstream culture. Alterity needs to be made
acceptable, which in practice means it must somehow symbolically kow-
tow to discursive expectations, an alteration the consequence of which is a
depreciation of the specificity of the other. Using transparency as an instru-
ment, mainstream culture’s encounters with alterity habitually convert
cultural difference into sameness. This process can probably only be
opposed by insisting on the irreducibility of the other’s identity, hence
Glissant’s endorsement of opacity.
There are also other philosophers who have approached the challenges
that alterity presents in ways not too dissimilar from that of Glissant. In To
Be Two (1998), for instance, Luce Irigaray frames the relation between the
subject and its other in a manner that resembles the theory of opacity, even
though she does not use that word:
Looking at the other, respecting the invisible in him, opens a black or blind-
ing void in the universe. Beginning from this limit, inappropriable by my
gaze, the world is recreated… We can remain together if you do not become
entirely perceptible to me, if part of you stays in the night.21
Moreover, the structure of the relations accentuated in his theory clearly

recalls the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, although Glissant makes no
mention of the continental thinker in his own work. In Totality and
Infinity, for example, Levinas famously understands ethics as “this calling
into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other.”22 The
statement implies a troublesome tension between, on the one hand, the
stability and intactness of the self and, on the other, the opaque identity of
the Other. The process of essentializing the other seems to be a precondi-
tion for the preservation of the unity of the self. Reducing the other’s
particularity is in a certain sense the collateral damage that this process
21
Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique Rhodes & Marco F. Cocito-Monoc, New York:
Routledge, 2001, 8.
22
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso
Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001, 43.
inflicts on the arbitration of intersubjectivity. The dilemma is this: to know

the other requires transparency. But the effect of transparency is always
necessarily filtered through one’s subjectivity, and the substantive content
of the transparent originates in what is already known by the self. Using
this knowledge in the transaction with the other—and here the other
could be a text or a phenomenon just as well as a person or a group—the
self cannot help but translate the otherness of the other into the idiolect of
the known. This process establishes a certain kind of connection and
makes the other “readable,” but it also diminishes the particularity of the
other’s identity.
Levinas did not write much on aesthetics, but in an early, provocative
article he touches upon something that might help connect his deeply
idiosyncratic philosophy of ethics to the realm of art and possibly even
opacity. In “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), he understands the aesthetic
encounter as a “violent freezing of relations rather than an opening
towards ethics.”23 As opposed to real life, the work of art is existentially
constrained in the sense that it is circumscribed. No matter how unruly it
otherwise might be, the work is a bounded entity that possesses finality
and ontological discreteness. It is this state of being finished and complete
that, for Levinas, introduces a problematic element of stasis into the world
of the work, a sense of equilibrium and stillness that compromises its ethi-
cal potential. Moreover, Levinas seems to suggest that the image also has
the power to bewitch and ensnare its viewers, which is a more pervasive
and well-known indictment of artistic works in general. If our encounter
with the artwork promises both seduction and definiteness, it can hardly
be a catalyst for ethical experience. But Levinas’s rather glum view of aes-
thetics in this article might be offset by his later concepts of complete and
incomplete art, in which the latter notion may be able to transcend this
perceived and prohibitive fixity of the work. Among the examples he offers
of incomplete art, there is the work of the Algerian painter Jean-Michel
Atlan, also a member of the CoBrA group, of the French sculptor and
painter Sacha Sosno, and of the French painter Charles Lapicque. I will
assume that the family resemblance between the concept of incomplete art
and opaque images is evident enough.
23
Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” 165.
CHAPTER 2
On the Concept of Opacity in Art

and Theory
As we have seen above, the value of opacity may be limned across several
domains. Sometimes its impact is such that it makes us question hege-
monic narratives; here, the effect of opacity is starkly political, as in the
work of Novo and others. On other occasions, the opaque image serves to
stimulate our imagination, in that the quality of indistinctness forces us
imaginatively to fill in what is indiscernible or missing. In those cases the
value of opacity is cognitive. Above all, however, because it protects not
only privacy but also the irreducibility of the subject, the significance of
opacity involves an ethical dimension. Broken art refracts a sense of the
inherent precariousness of our lives and helps cultivate an ethical relation
to the world and its persistent otherness. In this, too, visual opacity estab-
lishes a bond with the notion of the precarious. Material and sensory
imperfections suggest susceptibility, the state of being vulnerable to out-
side forces, to incompleteness, or to ephemerality.
But what exactly is the poetics of opacity? Below I will try to make a few
distinctions that hopefully serve to provide an overview of its conceptual
reach, after which I will turn toward a discussion of artistic traditions and
critical/theoretical genealogies as these pertain to the matter at hand.
When is an image or sound opaque, and what forms of opacity exist in our
audiovisual cultures? What kinds of cultural meaning attach to opaque
images? While there may be other ways of organizing this particular field
of visual culture, I propose in what follows to delineate four different
senses of an aesthetics of opacity. The first comprises images that in some

22 A. S. GRØNSTAD
way or other have been materially damaged, either deliberately through

imaginative manipulation or organically through exposure to the relent-
less forces of time and environment. The latter process is described in
William Gaddis’s first novel The Recognitions (1955) as inherent vice, defi-
ciencies that have evolved over time in works of art.1 Exposure to the
implacable labor of time may eat away at not only the work’s fleshy sub-
stance but also its semantics; signs and meanings that intertextually accrue
to the work throughout its life span may cumulatively inscribe a new con-
tent that shrouds what was there before, making the work ambiguous,
messy, and perhaps polyphonic. That, too, is a form of opacity. A second
form of opacity pertains to artistic works whose properties are deliberately
inscrutable, informationally sparse, or contentless. Model instances in this
vein would be the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg (1951) and
John Cage’s 4.33 (1952), but, as Craig Dworkin has shown, a distinct
aesthetic ecology exists in art, literature, and music of works that are blank
or erased.2 Sometimes images are also subject to external forces other than
the erosion of time or the intentional actions of the artist. This third sense
of an aesthetics of opacity involves visual representations that have been
vandalized and exposed to acts of iconoclasm, the results of which might
be partial illegibility.3 But an aesthetics of opacity is not limited to the
material or textural dimension of the image. In order to deal with the
1
William Gaddis, The Recognitions, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955, 949.
2
See Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2003, and No Medium, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
3
Examples of the iconoclastic gesture in art are surely legion. One powerful example is the
exhibition Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962, shown at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago between February and June 2013 and featuring works by art-
ists such as Gustav Metzger, Kazuo Shiraga, Alberto Burri, Lee Bontecou, and John Latham.
Another and quite different example are the so-called building cuts of Gordon Matta-Clark,
in which the artist made sculptural installations out of derelict houses by cleaving them in
two with a chainsaw. Although its context is obviously dissimilar, the vandalization of art-
works represents another instance of iconoclasm in the field of aesthetics. For further read-
ing, see Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French
Revolution, London: Reaktion Books, 1997; Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An
Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000; Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in
Science, Religion and Art, Karlsruhe: ZKM MIT Press, 2002; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do
Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005
(particularly chapter 6, “Offending Images”); and James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm:
Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam, London:
I. B. Tauris, 2013. Art and iconoclasm is too comprehensive a subject to be considered in the
2 ON THE CONCEPT OF OPACITY IN ART AND THEORY 23
phenomenon in a more substantial way, one that is not unhelpfully nar-

rowed down to a question of image physiology alone, we need also to
consider what I will refer to as narrative forms of opacity. These are cases
in which the indecipherability of the work is shaped not by strictly material
forces but more broadly by the deployment of various formal or stylistic
figurations. A case in point are films that, in the words of Jeffrey Sconce,
are “either formally challenging or potentially objectionable in terms of
content,” often in the service of ends that are ultimately political.4
Art and Illegibility

While this study explores only a few select in-depth cases, examples of an
aesthetics of opacity are legion across the visual culture of (post)moder-
nity. For photographically based media, the technical causes of indistinct
imagery are many: decomposing film stock, lens flares, motion blur, light
leaks, unfocused lenses, scratched emulsion, post-production manipula-
tion, filming through spatial obstructions, and darkening the frame, to
name some. The genre of experimental cinema has historically been a fer-
tile field for testing the creative potential of medial obscurity. In Andy
Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), according to one critic the film with
“the shallowest depth of field of any movie ever made”5—we get a pro-
tracted out-of-focus close-up of what might be Edie Sedgwick’s face, pos-
sibly an error on the director’s part or set off by a defective lens. More
recently, Cory Arcangel’s looping and soundless video work Untitled
(After Lucifer) (2006) gradually compresses the Beatles’s legendary 1964
Ed Sullivan performance so as to make the recording progressively illegi-
ble. Another, quite different visual culture object is repurposed in Rebecca
Baron and Douglas Goodwin’s Lossless #2 (2008), which subjects Maya
Deren and Alexander Hammid’s ageless Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) to
a process of digital disruption that threatens the decipherability of the
image. The digital technique of datamoshing is utilized in Nicolas Provost’s
video projection Long Live the New Flesh (2009), which mutates found
footage from horror movies. Compression and other forms of digital
context of this study, and for reasons of space and focus I have decided to explore here the
other senses of an aesthetics of opacity.
4
Jeffrey Sconce, “Indecipherable Films: Teaching Gummo,” Cinema Journal, 47.1 (Fall
2007): 112–115; 112.
5
J. Hoberman, “Always On,” Film Comment, 50.5 (2014), 62–66; 64.
24 A. S. GRØNSTAD
kneading proliferate in the visual art practices of the twenty-first century,

seen, for instance, in the work of the American artist Takeshi Murata
(Monster Movie, 2005), the German photographer Thomas Ruff (JPEGS,
2009), the Kuwaiti-born filmmaker Basma Alsharif (Home Movies Gaza,
2013), the aforementioned American multimedia artist Cory Arcangel
(On Compression/Lakes, 2014), and scores of others.
But the poetics of opacity also materializes in other ways. Consider
Gustav Metzger’s sculptural installation Historic Photographs at the New
Museum in 2011, which deliberately and physically obstructs our access to
a series of iconic photographs. Consider also Janet Hamlin’s Sketching
Guantanamo (2013), a book of drawings from the military base where the
artist was a witness to the courtroom proceedings. Prohibiting photogra-
phy from the military trails at Guantanamo, US government officials
would occasionally demand that the sketches be deliberately smudged,
thus creating yet another kind of opacity. Other cases abound. In Lindsay
Seers’s mysterious film installation Nowhere Less Now (2012), a sense of
opacity overwhelms the dense work both narratively and materially.
Alexandre Larose’s gauzy, oneiric brouillard—passage # 14 (2014)—show-
ing the filmmaker walking down a shoreline path—generates a hazy,
impressionistic, and vaguely preternatural image from multiple superim-
positions on a roll of 35 mm film. Rabih Mroué’s performance-lecture at
Documenta 13, The Pixelated Revolution (2012), displays footage from
the Syrian revolution while Mroué addresses the images, videos, and text
projected behind him. Noting an aesthetic correspondence between the
images of violence captured on mobile phones and the Dogme 95 mani-
festo, Mroué creates a grid in order to analyze the wealth of visual data,
magnifying images until they bleed into abstraction.
An aesthetics of opacity is not restricted to the media of film, video, and
digital art alone. Both literature and sound media might produce moments
of illegibility as a poetic device. Even the art of album sleeves has its signifi-
cant contributions, seen, for instance, in Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds
(1972), whose cover features an out-of-focus film still of a person in a tree
or in the washed-out image for Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase
(2005). R.E.M.’s iconic kudzu weeds on the cover of Murmur (1983),
while optically sharp, also invites associations to abstruseness through its
juxtaposition of the enigmatic vines and the album’s expressive title. It is
also worth pointing out that, empirically, the connection between art and
opacity extends far beyond the realms of degraded celluloid and low-
definition digital image files. Admittedly, there appears to be a powerful
identification in contemporary film and media theory between the con-

cept (non-transparent or unclear images) and the particular case (specific
instances of materially debased analogue or digital images). By force of its
prominence in the art sphere and, no less importantly, the critical conver-
sations generated around it, the latter material needs further consider-
ation. Hence, I will examine some of the key positions in this field before
delving deeper into the concept of aesthetic opacity and what it might entail.
Opacity in Criticism
A touchstone for the emergent critical literature on low-definition and
indistinct images is the German filmmaker, artist, and writer Hito Steyerl’s
essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” published in e-flux in November
2009. Steyerl identifies the eponymous object as a binary numeric entity,
usually a ripped AVI or JPG, a frequently copied file whose decline is
caused by infinite acts of transmission, by digital wear and tear. The poor
image is “a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an
itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connec-
tions, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and
pasted into other channels of distribution.”6 Yet, it could be that these
forms of visual mutilation, vastly unalike though they are, might provide
us with an entry point through which to consider the precarious imaging
practices of experimental artists like Bill Morrison, Peter Delpeut, Pat
O’Neill, and Ernie Gehr (the latter of whom I will return to in more detail
in subsequent chapters). That point is the fetish of transparency. Resolution
and sharpness, as Steyerl points out, are the most valued image properties;
there is a sense in which a high-resolution image looks more “mimetic”
than its low-resolution counterpart. Intriguingly, Steyerl—referencing
Juan García Espinosa’s Third Cinema Manifesto “For an Imperfect
Cinema”—links the ambitions toward ever greater resolution (and thus
transparency) to what she describes as “the neoliberal radicalization of the
concept of culture as commodity” and to “the commercialization of cin-
ema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of indepen-
dent filmmaking.”7
6
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux, 11 (2009), http://www.e-flux.
com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
7
Ibid.
26 A. S. GRØNSTAD
What is particularly noteworthy about the connection Steyerl makes is

the unmistakable politicization of a feature, or condition, conventionally
thought to be technological or formal in nature. Clarity or transparency is
bound up with commodified culture; for Espinosa, for instance, so-called
“technically and artistically masterful” cinema tends to be even reaction-
ary.8 Critics like Steyerl and Espinosa posit a fascinating bifurcation in
which markedly dissimilar political, cultural, and even ethical values are
being ascribed to what are essentially different aesthetic properties. What
is routinely perceived as a matter of technological enhancement might in
fact better be understood as a divergence on the level of form that in turn
may index a different ethical content. In the electronics business, for
example, the technological and the formal frequently seem conflated, as
the media admiration for the 4K TV unveiled at the Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas would seem to confirm. This correlation between an
aesthetics of opacity and ethics is also more than hinted at in Bill Nichols’s
theory of axiographics. What he refers to as “the accidental gaze”—whose
stylistic parameters are informed by elements such as blurry focus, erratic
cinematography, dire sound, and volatile framing—gets specifically linked
to an “ethics of curiosity.”9 The affirmative relation between ethics and
visual deficiencies is thus something that has been perceived independently
by widely different theorists; even Adorno, in a rare film-related essay,
argues that artefacts which “have not completely mastered their tech-
nique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and acci-
dental, have a liberating quality.”10 I shall return to the question of ethics
and opaque form below.
Noise
One telling and frequently invoked metaphor for both the materiality and
the effect of fuzzy images is that of noise. Often felt to be an annoyance,
noise can also proffer the pleasure of transgression and non-conformity, as
8
Juan García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, 20
(1979): 24–26. The essay was originally written in 1969 and its first appearance in English
translation was in 1971.
9
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991, 83.
10
Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German
Critique, 24–25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 199–205; 199.
some scholars have pointed out.11 In the standard information theory of

someone like Claude Shannon, noise is the enemy of efficient data trans-
mission, an unwelcome disruption of the signal sent between two stations
in a technical system. But the possibility of the signal or message being
subject to interference is always there, because, if we follow Michel Serres’s
argument, noise is the “transcendental” background that precedes the
construction of the system.12 According to Goddard, Halligan, and
Hegarty, noise constitutes its own logic of operation:
what any system necessarily excludes as noise are all the levels of organiza-
tion above and below it that include its own conditions of possibility, hence
the informational account of noise as a lack of organization being a state of
fundamental distortion. Noise is indeed static or interference but not that of
an unorganized chaos so much as patterns of organization alien to the
norms of a specific system—that which Serres refers to as ‘the parasite.’ (3)
Noise, furthermore, can be more than the material interference with an

informational signal. Considered in not just a technical but in a wider
social sense, noise can also evolve into a discrete aesthetic genre, as with
noise rock, for example. At an early point in their history, established
musical genres such as jazz, punk, and electronica were sometimes per-
ceived as noise too. In certain contexts, foreign languages might also be
regarded as noise; one time, while working on a text in a coffee shop
somewhere in the Bay Area, I was face timing with my mother back in
Norway when an older woman approached me and irately told me to stop
talking. I was speaking in a low voice, and I had already observed that
people were chatting on their phones almost daily in this particular café,
so the only explanation I could think of for her resentfulness was that I was
using a language she did not understand and thus experienced as noise.
Critics like Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty allow that noise aesthetics
can also be textual and visual, and the study of noise as applicable to other
media has been undertaken by among others Arild Fetveit. In his article
“Medium-Specific Noise,” Fetveit draws on musicology (John Cage,
Brian Eno) and communication theory (Shannon, Abraham Moles) to
make a case for the conceptual validity of the titular term. Approaching
11
Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty, “Introduction,” Reverberations:
The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, eds. Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and
Paul Hegarty, London: Continuum, 2012, 1.
12
Serres as paraphrased by Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty, 3.
28 A. S. GRØNSTAD
the phenomenon of noise from a comparative angle, he defines medium-

specific noise as an aesthetic that deliberately utilizes “noises associated
with particular media… as expressive devices.”13 Rather than eliminating
such noise, the practitioners of this aesthetic harness it to achieve artistic
ends. “In the service of this aesthetic,” Fetveit argues, “technologies are
developed to enhance and artificially produce such medium-specific noises
and malfunctions.”14 In fleshing out his theory, Fetveit also reaches back
historically to consider favorable approaches to noise, such as that of
Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who deemed noise not as a disruption but
as “inharmonious sound.”15
The Aesthetic and Philosophical Significance

of Low Definition
Until around 2016 the critical preoccupation with low-definition or

debased images was rather sporadic. A more concerted effort materialized
with the symposium in June 2016 on “Indefinite Visions” at London’s
Whitechapel Gallery.16 Organized by Allan Cameron and Richard Misek,
the event was committed to a persistent examination of the subject of
illegible images and later resulted in an anthology with the same title. In
one of the articles featured in this book, Erika Balsom provides an incisive
account of the widespread resistance to high definition—to cinema’s
13
Arild Fetveit, “Medium-Specific Noise,” in Thinking Media Aesthetics, ed. Liv Hausken,
London: Peter Lang, 2013, 189–215; 189.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., 192. The literature on noise, from Michel Serres to Joseph Klett and Alison
Gerber, is too vast to review here. For the purposes of this study, critical appraisals of the
mutually constitutive relation between signal and noise are less significant than the knowl-
edge that material defects might be productively exploited to accomplish aesthetic effects
that have philosophical implications. See Michel Serres, Le Parasite, Paris: Grasset, 1980, and
Joseph Klett and Alison Gerber, “The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as
Performance,” in Cultural Sociology, 8.3 (2014): 275–290.
16
See the following website, http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/indefinite-
visions/, accessed October 10, 2017. At the time of writing, the journal NECSUS: European
Journal of Media Studies issued a call for papers on a similar theme for an edition to be pub-
lished in 2018. “For this special section in NECSUS,” the guest editors Francesco Casetti
and Antonio Somaini write, “we call for contributions that analyse the current cultural mean-
ings and the various aesthetic, economic, epistemological, and political implications of high
and low definition and resolution in a wide variety of visual and audiovisual media.” See
https://necsus-ejms.org/necsus-spring-2018_resolution/, accessed October 13, 2017.
capacity to reproduce a faithful image of the external world—in significant

enclaves of classical film theory. Influential theorists such as Ricciotto
Canudo, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, and Rudolf Arnheim
questioned the medium’s propensity for visual transparency, fearing that
the mimetic precision of machine vision would curtail film’s eligibility as a
form of art.17 From the point of view of film philosophy, pictorial exacti-
tude thus became something to be resisted. As Lucy Bowditch has shown,
similar if possibly less severe sentiments were not uncommon among nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century theoreticians of photography such as
Elizabeth Eastlake, Julia Margaret Cameron, Peter Henry Emerson,
Frederick Evans, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Stieglitz, who all in dif-
ferent ways championed what Bowditch refers to as the “partially invisible
image.”18
The quandary for these critics is imitation. Photography’s facility for
indiscriminate replication of whatever is in front of the lens contravenes
the expressive and the subjective aspects that, even throughout Realism,
were viewed as intrinsic to artistic practice. Charles Baudelaire’s indict-
ment of copying in his famous Salon essay opposes it to imagination,19 a
stance resurfacing half a century later in Canudo’s essay “The Birth of the
Sixth Art” (1911). Cinema, he writes, is “not yet an art, because it lacks
the freedom of choice peculiar to plastic interpretation, conditioned as it
is to being the copy of a subject, the condition that prevents photography
from becoming an art.”20 As already alluded to, other film theorists of the
time shared Canudo’s conviction. Gance dreamed of an allegorical form of
cinema, Dulac favored suggestiveness over the mimetic, and Epstein
17
Erika Balsom, “100 Years of Low Definition,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the
Attractions of Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 74.
18
Lucy Bowditch, “The Power of Partial Invisibility: Reframing Positions on 19th and
Early 20th Century Photography,” in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, eds.
Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, 2018. For other
studies of photographic practices that gravitate toward alternatives to full mimetic visibility,
see Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2013, and Ernst Van Alphen, Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-
Practices, London: Valiz, 2018.
19
Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859: texte de la Revue française, Paris: H. Champion,
2006. See also Timothy Raser, Baudelaire and Photography: Finding the Painter of Modern
Life, Cambridge: Legenda, 2015.
20
Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art” [1911], Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media, 13 (1980): 3–7; 5.
30 A. S. GRØNSTAD
aintained that film could not be reduced to mere imitation.21 His some-
m
what elusive notion of photogénie names just this medium-specific property
that enables film to transcend the aesthetic dead end of the copy.
In what ways, then, could a “hot” medium like cinema, with its mon-
tage, grand scale, and striking iconicity, overcome the limitations of its
own attributes to become an art form on par with music, poetry, and
painting?22 One answer would be that it needs to cool down, and anything
that diminishes its mimetic authority and leaves more to be completed by
the viewer might go some way in accomplishing this. Sharpness had to be
rejected as an aesthetic norm. In the ideas of the film theorists of the
1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, then, there is a notable privileging of techniques
that advance opacity, although that particular term might not have been
frequently used at the time. Stylistic effects such as superimposition (in
Viktor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, 1921) and multiple exposures
(in Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928) compromise the trans-
parency of the photographic image and open up a space for expressive
subjectivity. Low-definition practices also underscore the mediated status
of the image, effectively sabotaging the endeavor to give us direct and
unmediated access to an extra-representational signified, evidently a mis-
guided ambition in the first place. For Canudo, and also for Arnheim—
who observes that film is already fundamentally different from the real due
to its framing, two-dimensionality, and lack of color (but who also
acknowledges the significance of low-definition elements such as blurry
focus and superimposition)—low definition serves four different func-
tions: it channels subjective experience, attests artistic intentionality,
21
See Balsom, 78.
22
In his epochal Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan makes
a conceptual (and highly relative and contextual) distinction between media loaded with
sensory data, like photography, film, and radio (high definition or hot media), and media
poorer in such information, like cartoons and television (low definition or cool media). The
latter requires more audience participation because they are less informationally saturated
than hot media. As Balsom points out, drawing upon Francesco Casetti’s work, McLuhan
appears indebted to the theories of Epstein and Béla Balázs. Importantly, it is film’s constitu-
ent iconicity that makes it a hot medium. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, and Balsom, 76. For a consideration of
hot and cool media in the context of contemporary image technologies, particularly the
resurgence of 3D, see Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, “The Conflict Between High
Definition and Low Definition in Contemporary Cinema,” Convergence: The International
Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 19.4 (2013): 415–422.
captures a sense of cinematic specificity, and thwarts mimeticism.23 Above

all, low-definition practices as conceived by Canudo, Epstein, Arnheim,
and others protect the autonomy of cinema from both physical reality and
from the other arts.24
In contemporary visual culture low-definition images are, Balsom
argues, less associated with medium specificity and more with circulation
(when images travel across platforms and networks, digital compression
causes lower definition).25 She notes that, ironically, “markers of media-
tion become signifiers of immediacy, taken to be more direct and true than
the promised transparency of high definition.”26 While in the 1920s low
definition produced authenticity effects related to the prevailing of human
consciousness over the operations of technology,27 today low definition
produces authenticity effects related to the absence of staging in the refer-
ential universe. This shift notwithstanding, the study of the historically
variable meanings of low definition—whether linked to notions of artistic
autonomy, medium specificity, authenticity, or dissemination—has focused
mainly on technological-materialist issues. Indispensable as this research
has been for a better understanding of the nature of low definition, it has
largely shied away from examining the wider cultural, philosophical, psy-
chological, and phenomenological ramifications of opacity as a unique
form of visual communication.
One notable exception is Laura Marks’s essay “Loving a Disappearing
Image,” which relates the “diminished visibility” of some experimental
films and videos from the 1990s to the experience of illness, loss of corpo-
real coherence, and death.28 Some contributions hint at possible interpre-
tations of the aesthetic affordances of low and high definition, which are
left unpursued, as when Balsom submits that a high-definition image
23
Balsom, 83–84.
24
Ibid., 81.
25
Ibid., 84.
26
Ibid., 85.
27
One of Theodor Adorno’s remarks on the phonograph provides just one example of the
philosophical valorization of low definition (and its association with authenticity) in the era
of classical film theory. “As the recordings become more perfect in terms of plasticity and
volume,” he writes, “the subtlety of color and the authenticity of vocal sound declines as if
the singer were being distanced more and more from the apparatus.” See Theodor
W. Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, 55 (Winter
1990): 48–55; 48.
28
Laura Marks, “Loving a Disappearing Image,” in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory
Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 91–112; 91.
32 A. S. GRØNSTAD
potentially could lay bare “an illusory transparency deemed to be ideologi-

cal and, at the limit, unethical.”29 What I would like to propose here is that
the chiefly materialist appreciation of low definition be supplemented by
work that subsumes it under a more general theory of opacity. What I
mean by this is that, first, low-definition and degraded images should be
considered as just one species—albeit an especially significant one—in a
larger ecology of non-transparent visualities and, second, the cultural
meanings of such an ecology need to be investigated in greater depth.
What might images that pose a perceptual challenge tell us about things
like representation and mediation? Can opaque images speak to us of dif-
ferent epistemologies? What is the affective charge of opacity? What ethi-
cal vistas do opaque images help open up? On what terms is the relation
between transparency and opacity in art being negotiated? How has film
and media theory after Canudo, Epstein, and Arnheim dealt with this
relation?
Cinema Between Clarity and Opacity

As technologies, media and art forms, photography, and film have often
been considered a perceptual prosthetic, an enhancement of natural vision,
the phenomenological possibilities of which seem endless. Unsurprisingly,
and as hinted at above, a cult of visibility has accrued to these media, evi-
dent, for example, in the didactic preference for optimally transparent
staging and lighting practices in the Hollywood and porn industries, as
well as in Jean-Louis Comolli’s influential notion of the “frenzy of the
visible.”30 But, as Martine Beugnet has pointed out, the processes of filmic
mediation need not ensure “more accurate” forms of perception. “[F]or
all its photographic objectivity,” Beugnet writes, “cinematographic vision
allows for the indefinite to surface.”31 Relying on Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz’s critique of Descartes’s conception of knowledge and on
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s conjoining of artistic creation and sen-
sory perception, Beugnet makes the case that Leibniz’s notion of “clear
29
Balsom, 85.
30
Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa
de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980, 122.
31
Martine Beugnet, “Introduction,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of
Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2017, 2. See also Martine Beugnet, L’attrait du flou, Crisnée: Yellow
Now, 2017.
but confused” to describe other kinds of knowledge formations than that

permitted by rational-scientific models is also applicable to the cinematic
apparatus.32 Leibniz’s own example, when it comes to a clear but confused
perception, is the roar of the sea. We can hear and identify the sound while
at the same time being unable to perceive it as originating in any one par-
ticular wave. The constitutive indeterminacy of a world in constant flux
means that perception is always piecemeal and partial. Since consciousness
itself is subject to the temporal process and its inevitable transmutations,
it, too, hovers between the temporary stabilizations of form and interstitial
amorphousness. Baumgarten, who was influenced by Leibniz’s
philosophy,33 suggested that art has a special affinity for the indistinct and
the indeterminate. Cinema, with its power to capture both simultaneity
and duration, is especially positioned to produce images that are clear yet
indistinct. For example, an image generated by the cinematographic pro-
cess might be empirically clear even if we fail to identify the referent. Vice
versa, we may easily identify the referent of a given image without being
able to discern all the different components that collectively make up this
referent.
But film is not only a medium of mimetic capture; it is also a medium
of formal effects that work to modify and amend our experience of the
events recorded. In the silent era, techniques such as superimposition, fil-
ters, internal defocusing, and the manipulation of speed served to amplify
the “confusion of details,” while the appearance of sound subsequently
marginalized such practices. To support efficient communication and sto-
rytelling, a lexicon of aesthetic norms that reinforced optimal clarity
became dominant. The advent of electronic and digital media technolo-
gies, in turn, has likely inspired the suppression of the indefinite, whose
negative associations to the defective and nonsensical have lingered on.
Moreover, the often smaller screen of digital media promotes a form of
viewing which absorbs the full image at one go, allowing less opportunity
for scanning it for information not immediately available. Add to that the
material difference between the capriciousness of the analogue image and
the smooth flatness of the digital,34 and one can see why the latter may
32
Ibid.
33
Eric Watkins, “On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten,
and the Pre-Critical Kant, in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Volume 3, eds. Daniel
Garber and Steven Nadler, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, 261–314.
34
As among others Stephen Prince has pointed out, celluloid film has malleable grain that
may cause a decrease in sharpness despite film having higher resolution. Balsom makes a use-
34 A. S. GRØNSTAD
seem less amenable to a philosophy of the “clear but confused” (but as we

shall see, the relation between digital technology and opacity is more com-
plex than that). In the evolution of visual technologies, progress means
improved readability, and high definition is the norm:
though we have arguably never known a broader range of possibilities in

moving image capture and treatment, today’s mainstream aesthetic of the
moving image privileges that which is controlled, stable and instantly ‘read-
able…’ the creative exploration of cinema’s ability to convey reality’s inher-
ent instability and confusion tends to be safely grounded in narrative or
generic rationales (which include the incorporation of obscured, shaky,
blurred images as a token of authenticity) or attached to clearly signposted
sensational effects.35
One of the reasons why perfect clarity does not necessarily constitute an
unproblematic ideal is that it leaves no room for the imagination, for the
creative activities of the viewer. Citing as examples thinkers from Leonardo
Da Vinci to Gaston Bachelard and Ernst Gombrich, Beugnet argues that
the semi-legible and incomplete image serves an important function as
inducement to the imagination.36
Transparency and Opacity in Post-classical Film

Theory, Philosophy, and Visual Culture
After classical film theory’s appraisal of low definition and of other aes-
thetic devices mobilized to rupture mimeticism—but before the endeav-
ors of Steyerl and others to analyze low-fi images in the digital era—theorists
and practitioners alike grappled with the notion of transparency as a politi-
cal and sometimes philosophical problem. Once the ontological specificity
and artistic integrity of film were secured, critics became increasingly con-
sumed with dissecting cinema as an institution and a dispositif. I will not
ful distinction between resolution and definition, in which the former is tied to quantitative
measures (the number of pixels in an image) and the latter to qualitative variables such as the
perception of clarity relative to a given norm. For instance, an indistinct image with low defi-
nition might still be presented in high resolution. See Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects
in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012,
85, and Balsom, 74.
35
Beugnet, 6.
36
Ibid., 7.
pretend to be able to cover the breadth of the work that either directly or
tangentially engages with questions of transparency in the period between
classical film theory and the digital era (which is also the era that sees the
emergence of film studies as an academic discipline); my more modest aim
here is rather to gesture toward a smaller cache of hopefully revealing
examples. In a certain sense, much of the so-called apparatus theory so
dominant in the 1970s revolved around the ways in which cinema as a
medium and praxis negotiated our access to the real. Whether their pri-
mary inflection was Marxist, psychoanalytic, or feminist, theorizations of
the film image in the tradition from the British journal Screen often pre-
suppose an underlying dimension of opacity in filmic representations. One
case in point is Jean-Paul Fargier’s statement that the ideology cinema
proffers is simply the impression of reality. “There is nothing on the
screen,” Fargier claims, “only reflections and shadows, and yet the first
idea that the audience gets is that reality is there, as it really is.”37 Fargier’s
overall concern in this article is the relation between cinema and politics
and how film might serve the proletarian cause. Intriguingly, and in a turn
that clearly predates the now critical commonplace—in the wake of Gilles
Deleuze’s film philosophy—of cinema as a mode of thought, Fargier sug-
gests that film could have not only an ideological function but a theoretical
one as well (my emphasis). On this account, “theoretical practice” (a term
Fargier borrows from Althusser) in fact represents the way out of ideolo-
gy.38 It is in the context of this discussion that the notion of transparency
appears. Claiming that the spectators disavow the presence of the screen
(“it opens like a window, it ‘is’ transparent”), Fargier argues that the resul-
tant chimera denotes “the very substance of the specific ideology secreted
by cinema.”39
In Fargier’s view, film history has hardly produced any theory films, but
he mentions the work of Eisenstein and Vertov as examples, although with
the caveat that their films are theoretical “in part only.”40 But film’s con-
ceptual relationship with representation, history, and visuality was an abid-
ing concern for some of the film artists of the time, notably the
Vertov-influenced Jean-Luc Godard. In the work of Guy Debord, more-
over, the principles of filmmaking itself were profoundly challenged, as
37
Jean-Paul Fargier, “Parenthesis or Indirect Route,” Screen, 12.2 (1971): 131–144; 136.
38
Ibid., 140.
39
Ibid., 137.
40
Ibid., 141.
36 A. S. GRØNSTAD
they also were in Espinosa’s manifesto and in the films of Glauber Rocha
and Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas at the time. Espinosa in par-
ticular articulates adroitly the complicity of form and technology in the
construction of socio-political realities. “It is impossible,” he maintains,
“to question a given reality without questioning the particular genre you
select or inherit to depict that reality.”41 This consciousness of the image
as inscription—as projection rather than reflection—arguably became
more pronounced with the Screen theory of the 1970s.
The conceptualization of the film image as generative, and as engrav-
ing, was further elaborated by post-structuralist theorists such as Marie-
Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier. One of the most ambitious attempts to flesh
out a theory of film on the basis of a recognition of the opaque thickness
of the image was her Le Texte divisé (1981).42 The second part of the book
committed to a close reading of Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975),
the first half usefully appropriates aspects of the philosophy of Jacques
Derrida and the linguistic theory of Émile Benveniste in order to replace
the Saussurean notion of the sign with that of text or writing or, more
accurately, the special kind of writing known as cinécriture. Also indebted
to Eisenstein’s comparison of montage to the Japanese ideogram, Ropars
focuses on the filmic act of enunciation, on the process of writing images,
and Derrida’s concepts of difference and espacement enable her to pursue
this project. From the point of view of this theory, the fundamental
method of film is assemblage, and meaning requires acts of juxtaposition,
or, in other words, a type of editing that generates both stability and dis-
ruption. With cinécriture, Peter Brunette points out, meaning “is a prod-
uct of the textual process itself, rather than a process of translation of a
previous signified through a collection of individually signifying words or
images.”43 It is not that writing cannot also be merely reflective, but rather
41
Quoted in Julianne Burton, ed., The Social Documentary in Latin America, Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, 69.
42
For one of the comparatively few engagements with Le Texte divisé in Anglo-American
film studies, see D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media,
Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. For work in a similar vein on filmic writing and
mimesis, see Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989; Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as
Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (1992):
43–73; and Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
43
Peter Brunette, “Toward a Deconstructive Theory of Film,” Studies in the Literary
Imagination, 19.1 (1986): 55–71; 67.
that particular forms of cinematic writing (those similar to pictographic or

hieroglyphic scripts) promote the generative function of aesthetic expres-
sion. But what, exactly, does that entail? If we recall Emile Benveniste’s
theory of enunciation, in which the sign is linked to naming and identifica-
tion and discourse to message and enunciation, we might realize that there
is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, the pre-existing entities
(words, images) available to us in a given cultural and historical context
and, on the other, their unique and highly specific linkage—or, if one pre-
fers, assemblage.44 Before activated as discourse or enunciation, these enti-
ties are reflective to the degree that they correspond to the phenomena to
which they have been attached by convention (and sometimes by iconic-
ity). But once they are being articulated in a given medium, say, verbal
language, photography, or film, an expressive thickness accrues, rendering
them opaque, conceptually if not always materially.45
For the paradigm of the hieroglyph so central, in various ways, to the
ideas of Ropars, Derrida, and Eisenstein, the notion of the figural or figur-
ality occupies a special position. What does it mean when, for Ropars, the
hieroglyph is both figural and conceptual? And how is the relationship
between figurality and opacity being regulated? In order to elucidate these
questions, it might be worthwhile to turn to two thinkers whose work is
roughly contemporaneous with that of Fargier, Ropars, and other “screen
theorists,” namely Louis Marin, Jean-François Lyotard. The former’s
work is complex and spans several different phases, but more or less con-
sistent throughout is his concern with figuration. Starting out as a theore-
tician of language, Marin later came to be preoccupied with images and
visuality in a way not too dissimilar from that of the German Bildwissenschaft
tradition (although to my knowledge his work was never lumped in with
that research). Around 1980, Marin refined his theory of semiotics by
identifying two senses of representation, one revolving around the act of
substitution (where a sign comes to take the place of an absent sign, creat-
ing a presence effect) and the other implying a process of intensification
(where that which is brought into view is a kind of repetition). For Marin,
in the words of Agnès Guiderdoni, representation has “a double power:
44
Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami:
University of Miami Press, 1971.
45
To see how Ropars explores the difference between filmic and literary textuality, as well
as what she terms “the effect of language becoming opaque” in close readings of Hiroshima
Mon Amour (Alain Resnais 1959) and L’arrêt de mort (Maurice Blanchot 1948), see Marie-
Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Film Reader of the Text,” Diacritics, 15.1 (1985): 16–30; 28.
38 A. S. GRØNSTAD
one that makes something present in our imagination, and another that
constitutes its own legitimate and authorized subject.”46 Both these
aspects are at play in any given representation and “the tension between
them determines the signifying depth of the work.”47 The theory is also
applicable to any kind of aesthetic medium; Marin himself saw it as a kind
of methodology or analytical approach to a wide variety of art forms, from
literature, theatre, and performance to landscapes, cities, maps, and
architecture.
Informed by this constant tension between transitivity and reflexivity, in
which the latter is tied to the concept of the opaque, Marin’s method
involves four different phases of analysis. The first stage acknowledges the
importance of ekphrasis, assuming that images cannot be separated from
textuality, from language. Any image, therefore, is already a hybrid object.
The second phase concerns description and how to find a gateway into the
visual representation. The third step emphasizes the singularity and
uniqueness of the aesthetic work, shunning interpretive procedures that
might be reductive. Finally, the fourth stage of analysis tries to capture or
engage with the theoretical discourse produced by the work in question.
For Marin, works of art do not just present “meaning;” they are also capa-
ble of theory, albeit in a medium or form obviously different from philo-
sophical language. What is referred to as “the theoretical construct”—the
theoretical knowledge to be had from our interaction with artistic
images—is according to Guiderdoni located “mainly in the opacity of rep-
resentation, where it ‘exhibits’ itself as representing something and desig-
nates the conditions of its existence and the key to accessing its meaning.”48
Recall Fargier’s emphasis on film’s “theoretical function” here, which
seems close to Marin’s “theoretical construct.” Significantly, for Marin
visuality is not only what we see but is rather linked to his conceptions of
spatiality (he frequently uses spatial terms like “gap,” “hinge,” “thresh-
old,” “liminality,” and “edge” in his analyses) and of figurability. In what
Guiderdoni refers to as Marin’s “paradoxical model,” the word is a sign
marking a presence “but without any visible relation with what it repre-
sents,” whereas the thing (res) is the sign marking an absence “with a
46
Agnès Guiderdoni, “Louis Marin’s theories of representation: between text and image,
from visuality to figurability,” in Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader, eds. Nigel
Saint and Andy Stafford, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, 127–144; 132.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., 138.
v isible relation with what it represents.”49 Strangely, then, in this model

visibility relates to absence, while invisibility relates to presence. Notable is
also Marin’s use of the term figurability, which is not so much a theoretical
concept as a process or a “modality of actualization” (like virtuality and
potentiality), which denotes the way in which an image can be derived
from a text as well as how a text can emerge from an image.50
Figurality, of course, also features prominently in Lyotard’s early work,
where, as Martin Jay has shown, it is tied to opacity. Engaging with the
titular terms of Lyotard’s 1971 book, Jay considers that the first one, dis-
course, indicates transparency and “the domination of textuality over per-
ception” and “conceptual representation over prereflexive presentation.”51
Discourse is in the realm of logic and symbols and implies acts of com-
munication in which “the materiality of the signifiers is forgotten.”52 The
second term, figurality, is on the other hand that which “injects opacity”
into the domain of discourse.53 Careful to point out that figurality is not
the opposite of discourse, Jay describes its effect as a transgression of “the
limits of the knowable and the communicable, preventing the recupera-
tion of the incommensurable into one systematic order.”54 Does this
account sound familiar? The nature of the relations that Jay specifies reso-
nates, I think, both with Glissant’s poetics and Levinas’s unorthodox
emplacement of ethics before philosophy. But Lyotard’s reflections also
complicate the conceptual terrain covered above. As we have seen, for
Benveniste and his followers discourse belongs to the generative register,
pitted against the reflective capacities of the sign. With Lyotard, discourse
is situated in the realm of transparency and symbols, whereas figurality
denotes the irruption of opacity. So how do we reconcile these positions?
As a matter of fact, the tension between discourse and figurality serves
further to refine the theories of cinécriture advanced by Ropars and oth-
ers. The opposition between the mimeticism of the sign and the generativity
49
Ibid., 140.
50
Ibid., 141; 142.
51
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 564.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid. In a later interview, Lyotard himself discusses the discursive principle of readability
and the figural principle of unreadability; see Jean-François Lyotard, “Interview with
Georges Van Den Abbeele,” trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Diacritics, 14.3 (1984):
16–21; 17.
40 A. S. GRØNSTAD
of discourse is too crude to be sustainable, as it fails to discriminate suffi-

ciently between imitative and creative uses of discourse. Therefore, what is
needed is a descriptive tool that will facilitate just such a distinction, and
here is where the notion of figurality comes in. Etymologically, the term
figure conceived in a philosophical sense derives from the Latin figura
(from the Greek skhema), implying lines and shapes. In the late fourteenth
century, the word acquired the meaning of the visible form or appearance
of a person or object. While especially in its verb form the term is also
historically linked to representation, the importance of the inventive func-
tion of the line (for instance, in producing new space) and of the process
of molding something should not pass unnoticed.
The next step in the examination of opacity would then be to bridge
the gap between this undeniably abstract analysis and more particularized
materializations of figural processes. But film as a medium and institution
has historically worked against figurality. Feature films as well as documen-
taries have been obsessed with transparency, and this fixation has left little
room for the kind of figurality considered by philosophers such as Marin
and Lyotard. The amelioration of visibility in modern technological media
and science has a palpably positivist foundation that, surprisingly, is scarcely
highlighted even in the writings of the “apparatus” theorists of the 1970s.
A rare exception is Trinh Minh-ha’s critique of orthodox documentary
cinema in her essay “Documentary Is/Not a Name” (1990). Concerned
with the conflation of truth with fact and meaning, she argues that non-
fiction filmmaking is always manipulative by nature and that its sanctioned
techniques—the long take, shooting in real time, handheld camera, wide-
angle shots (which by convention are regarded as more neutral than mon-
tage and close-ups)—court invisibility as a condition for their rendering of
meaning as truth. In filming, for example, any deviation from the standard
24 frames per second is perceived as overt manipulation and hence spuri-
ous.55 More unobtrusive forms of manipulation, on the other hand, will
come across as truth to the undiscerning viewer because they conceal the
activity of mediation. The below passage is worth quoting at length, as it
emphasizes the degree to which, in mainstream practices, film technology
and form are rigged to enhance the politics of visibility and positivism even
as they go to great lengths to mask the source or cause of this visibility:
55
Trinh Minh-ha, “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 76–98; 86.
The real world: so real that the Real becomes the one basic referent—pure,
concrete, fixed, visible, all-too-visible. The result is the advent of a whole
aesthetic of objectivity and the development of comprehensive technologies
of truth capable of promoting what is right and what is wrong in the world
an, by extension, what is ‘honest’ and what is ‘manipulative’ in documen-
tary. This involves an extensive and relentless pursuit of naturalism across
the elements of cinematic technology. Indispensable to this cinema of the
authentic image and spoken word are, for example, the directional micro-
phone (localizing and restricting in its process of selecting sound for pur-
poses of decipherability) and the Nagra portable tape-recorder (unrivaled
for its maximally faithful ability to document.56
Trinh Minh-ha’s advocacy of greater reflexivity in the attempt to capture

what she terms “reality on the move” is not too far removed from the con-
cepts of Fargier and Marin (respectively, “theoretical function” and “theo-
retical construct”).57 Unfortunately, she avers, the relationship between
theory and practice too easily get “caught in the net of a positivist think-
ing” whose driving force is the yearning for totalizing answers.58 Her main
worry is that, in the absence of medial (self)-reflexivity, the gap between
the image and the real gets erased. Reifying the idea of the social in docu-
mentary practice, for instance, and exalting it as “an ideal of transparency”59
risks just such a troublesome identification of reality with that particular
form of representation that is determined by the politics of transparency.
Trinh Minh-ha’s apprehension of the corrosive effects of a too credu-
lous investment in transparent mediation resurfaces with even darker
undertones in Paul Virilio’s analysis of contemporary visuality. Implicitly
sharing Crary’s pessimistic view of repressive forms of illumination,
Virilio—in his third conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, the founder of
Semiotext(e)—considers a phenomenon that he calls “the optically
correct.”60 According to Virilio, the visual arts have largely failed appropri-
ately to represent or engage with the problems of the twentieth century.
He maintains that we now confront “the reconstruction of the phenom-
enology of perception according to the machine” and that—in part thanks
56
Ibid., 80.
57
Ibid., 89.
58
Ibid., 78.
59
Ibid., 85.
60
Sylvère Lotringer & Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art, trans. Michael Taormina,
New York: Semiotext(e), 2005, 61.
42 A. S. GRØNSTAD
to this failure of the visual arts—we “are moving from a civilization of the
image to a civilization of optics.”61 In an ocular regime defined by what he
calls “a newspeak of the eyes,” we have more reason than ever before to
remain cautious about the rhetoric of transparency and the enshrinement
of technologies of exponential brightness.
A civilization of optics could readily be one in which machine vision,
more than the work of individual and autonomous image-makers, regu-
lates our ecologies of representation. The unbridled ascension of modes of
visualization that render transparency an existentially inescapable condi-
tion could, as Crary, Virilio, and others have suggested, be injurious both
ethically, politically, and even epistemologically. That there is a distinction
between realms of clarity, say between optical and rational/moral, and
that the former does not automatically translate into the latter, is an idea
somewhat infrequently voiced, but Jay is one critic who has made this
point. In his analysis of the use of the blur as a philosophical metaphor, he
points out that there are limits to our visual perspicacity and that the exis-
tence of a given focus is predicated upon the exclusion of something else.62
While philosophy traditionally has valued lucidity, Jay observes that mod-
ern or contemporary approaches have embraced “vagueness and fuzzy
logic” in order to talk about “modes of reasoning that escape the impera-
tive to work with crisply defined categories and firm conceptual
boundaries.”63 Vagueness, it would come to seem, “can produce a kind of
clarity all of its own.”64 The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that
truth is not that straightforwardly isolable. In some pragmatist philoso-
phy, vagueness has been considered an asset, given that the truth of a
phenomenon exists along a spectrum between 0 and 1.65 Second, it is
hardly feasible to maintain the same focus, the same level of clarity, in even
contiguous spaces of an image or, by extension, of an experience, event, or
discourse. To illustrate this, Jay brings up the not uncommon method-
ological conundrum in literary analysis of keeping the materiality of the
61
Ibid., 72.
62
Martin Jay, “Genres of Blur,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of
Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2017, 90–102; 91. Jay refers to a couple of striking questions posed by the
nineteenth-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron: “‘what is focus’” and
“‘who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus’?” In Jay, 93.
63
Ibid., 95–96.
64
Ibid., 99.
65
Ibid., 96.
text and its potentially unbounded contextuality in equally sharp focus at

the same time.66 The idea that vagueness need not be inimical to knowl-
edge can also be found along other avenues of media theory. John Durham
Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds (2015), for instance, nurtures the possibil-
ity that vagueness may have some epistemological purchase.67
Any analysis of the relation between transparency and opacity should
also problematize the technological teleology that informs the optical
regime that Virilio finds so alarming. Advances in technology and their
socio-cultural context are indissoluble; the former do not have any special
authority independently of their wider political ecology. That the machine
is social before it is technical is a verity well understood by another theorist
associated with the “apparatus school.” Comolli, in the same article that
introduces the concept “frenzy of the visible,” argues that “technological
perfectibility” is not an autonomous motor in the development of cinema
and that historical change depends upon what one, drawing on Cornelius
Castoriadis, could call a social imaginary:68
the historical variation of cinematic techniques, their appearance-

disappearance, their phases of convergence, their periods of dominance and
decline seem to me to depend not on a rational-linear order of technological
perfectibility or an autonomous instance of scientific ‘progress,’ but much
rather on the offsettings, adjustments, arrangements carried out by a social
configuration in order to represent itself, that is, at once to grasp itself, iden-
tify itself and itself produce itself in its representations.69
On Comolli’s reading, social imaginaries and media technologies lock into

a mutually constitutive relation in which the technological is not a free
agent but a material resource in service of whatever forms cultural desire
takes at any given historical moment. More urgent than the shifting
empirical properties of high-definition screens themselves, then, is a criti-
cal appraisal of the kind of cultural psychology to which these properties
are made to respond.
66
Ibid., 97.
67
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
68
Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007, 123.
69
Comolli, 121.
44 A. S. GRØNSTAD
When it comes to high and low definition—transparency and opacity—

that psychology has tended to play itself out as a longing for a direct and
unmediated access to the referent of the image. With the onslaught in the
2010s of virtual reality systems like Oculus Rift, this longing seems to have
intensified. In the field of new media, the dynamics of transparency and
opacity has famously been translated into that of immediacy and hyperme-
diacy. In their now classic book Remediation (1999), J. David Bolter and
Richard Grusin allege that painting, photography, and VR aim “to achieve
immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act
of mediation.”70 With reference to Clement Greenberg, Bolter and Grusin
suggest that what they call the “paradigm of transparency” was culturally
central until modernism, after which the preoccupation with the artwork’s
materiality and surface and with the act of mediation signaled a turn
toward hypermediacy, or opacity.71 While immediacy is the effect that
arises from the erasure or suppression of mediality, hypermediacy implies
its persistent and return. Some of the examples that Bolter and Grusin
invoke are the films about media and mediation that emerged in the
mid-1990s, such as Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone 1994) and The
Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway 1996), which are found to introduce “a
moderate degree of hypermediacy and self-acknowledgement.”72 In this
narrative, transparency and opacity are cast as undulating forces.
Hypermediacy, Bolter and Grusin maintain, “always reemerges in every
era, no matter how rigorously technologies of transparency may try to
exclude it.”73 But a problem with this account is that the empirical cases to
which the qualities of either immediacy or hypermediacy get attributed
appear a little intuitive. The wild profusion of optical formats in Natural
Born Killers (Super 8, 16 mm, 35 mm, Polaroids, Beta videotape, color,
black and white, slow motion, flash cuts, animation)—indicative, surely, of
the possibilities of an emergent digital cinema—is contrasted with the sup-
posedly cleaner style of classical Hollywood films of the analog era. The
trouble with this comparison is that invisible editing, while working to veil
the process of suture, is no less a system of mediation than Stone’s poetics
of excess. All cinematic images, the philosopher Berys Gaut reminds us,
70
J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, 11.
71
Ibid., 38.
72
Ibid., 154.
73
Ibid., 84.
are opaque.74 Some images and films are better than others at hiding their
marks of mediation, but that does not necessarily make them conceptually
different. The distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy is there-
fore exaggerated at best. Experience sans mediation—the dream of the
virtual reality devotees—is an ill-conceived notion in the first place, since
mediation precedes experience. As John Durham Peters shows in The
Marvelous Clouds (2015), the world we inhabit is already mediated by all
sorts of phenomena.75 The kind of immediacy, or transparency, that Bolter
and Grusin consider could thus be said to be illusory to begin with.
A potentially more fruitful way of treating the connection between
mediality and transparency may be found in the work of some of the pro-
ponents of German Bildwissenschaft. Gottfried Boehm’s notion of “iconic
difference,” for instance, is an attempt at describing the properties and
mechanisms that make images ontologically distinctive from whatever
they may represent in the external world. On Boehm’s image theory,
rather than their similarity to the real, it is the tensions inherent in images
that generate their meaning. The imaginary that exists in the image is
fundamentally different from the real.76 Boehm has also talked about
iconic difference as a quality that “has to do with historically and anthro-
pologically transformed differences between a continuum—ground, sur-
face—and what is shown inside this continuum.” Such a difference, he
continues, is “constituted by elements—for example, signs, objects, fig-
ures or figurations—and has to do with contrasts.”77 In its insistence on
the differential aspect of the content of the image, Boehm’s term comes
close to the idea of the constitutive opacity of all culturally manufactured
signs. But where in this scenario does transparency factor in? One possible
clue might be provided by Hans Belting’s analysis of the relationship
between image, medium, and the imagination:
The image always has a mental quality, the medium always a material one,
even if they both form a single entity in our perception. The presence of the
74
Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010, 97.
75
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
76
Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens, Berlin: Berlin
University Press, 2007.
77
Gottfried Boehm as quoted in What is an Image? Eds. James Elkins and Maja Naef,
University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, 36–37.
46 A. S. GRØNSTAD
image, however, entails a deception, for the image is not present the same
way its medium is present. It needs the act of animation by which our imagi-
nation draws it from its medium. In the process, the opaque medium
becomes the transparent conduit for its image. The ambiguity of presence
and absence extends even to the medium in which the image is born, for in
reality it is not the medium but the spectator who engenders the image
within his or her self78
According to this proposition, the medium seems to belong to the sphere

of opacity and materiality, and the image to that of transparency and
immateriality. The medium is matter, the image is imagination. But the
phrase “the opaque medium becomes the transparent conduit for its
image” is confusing. Taken at face value it seems to suggest, at best, that
the processual dimension of mediation is such that the medium evolves
from a state of opacity to one of transparency thanks to the image it incar-
nates. But what Belting also says here is that the existence of the image is
contingent upon an act of corporeal reception and realization by the
viewer. Useful and inescapable as the distinction between medium and
image is, it is difficult to see how one can have a medium without any
specific content. The technological apparatus and the syntax of cinematic
construction (such as analytical editing) are clearly indispensable to the
medium of film, but so are the images that this apparatus spawns. The
relation between medium and image thus seems more reciprocal and inti-
mate than Belting’s theory would have us believe. If I were to speculate
what Belting has in mind when he claims that the medium becomes a
“transparent conduit for its image,” it is that the force of mimesis, under-
stood as an aesthetic para-convention, is so powerfully present that it com-
pletely overwhelms and suppresses the mediality of the medium. The
iconicity of the image (and here we have to grant that we are talking about
a culturally and historically determined type of image, rather than the
Image) makes the medium invisible, in a process that is quite similar to
Bolter and Grusin’s notion of immediacy.
The idea that the medium is closer than the image to a state of opacity
makes some sense, particularly in the context of low-definition images,
where challenges to transparency typically are caused by irruptions of the
medial, such as putrefying celluloid or the digital corrosion of the jpeg file.
78
Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 20.
But neither the immediacy-hypermediacy dialectic nor Belting’s concep-

tualization of the medium-image-body troika is able to provide anything
more than a partial account of opacity. What needs to be further addressed
is the presence of opacity in the seemingly transparent image and the
degree to which the act of cinécriture is always generative rather than
reflective. The introduction of empirically new aesthetic figurations into
the world comes with an element of the opaque (in a conceptual if not in
a material sense), as these figurations do not have any pre-existing and cor-
respondent equivalents “out there.” My previously referenced notion of
the amimetic represents one way of comprehending the nature of the pro-
cess that figurativity enables; producing images is not about replicating
signs that already exist, not even when the images in question are entan-
gled in iconicity (as in forms of realism), but rather about the subjective
enunciation of a certain expressive and rhetorical content. A theory of the
amimetic might appear to be a post-representational position but could
perhaps better be described as a stance that is generally skeptical of the
claim that art is primarily representational in the first place.
If the discussion about transparency and opacity in the aesthetic realms
were merely a question of ontology, it would hardly have a wider purchase.
But, to which the allusion to among other things Crary’s critique of the
contemporary imaginary of “permanent illumination” attests, the discus-
sion also matters on a broader cultural and even political level. Mimetic
transparency and amimetic opacity come with different sets of values. For
example, in his work from the mid-1990s, Tom Cohen conveys a relatively
early acknowledgment of the possible collusion of mimeticism in the
sphere of reading and interpretation with a conservative politics. “How
much has a mimetic bias,” he asks in the beginning of his study, “to the
traditions of interpretation constituted a conservative politics of its own…
?”79 One of Cohen’s concerns is the backlash against textualist approaches
in the wake of post-structuralism and the concurrent ascendancy of orien-
tations such as new historicism, cultural studies, and identity politics,
which he considers “regressive” in its embrace of the “mimetic ideology
that determines the arguments that support traditionalist humanism.”80
Cohen, who brings up the notion of post-humanism in his critique, avers
that mimetic theories of reading commodify humanism and stifle “figural
79
Tom Cohen, Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994, 1.
80
Ibid., 2.
48 A. S. GRØNSTAD
logic,”81 an idiom which I take to mean the materiality of the text and its
potential opacity.
One of the points I want to argue here is that low-definition and other
variants of opaque images function like tropes, in that they make visible,
and italicize, the inherent opacity of all images. But despite the numerous
studies that over the last few decades have sought to emphasize less naïve
conceptualizations of the visual and its relation to the world, the positivis-
tic trust in mimetic clarity is resilient. There thus appears to be a gap
between technophile desire and much academic criticism with respect to
the mimetic. In the introduction to the book Precarious Visualities (2008),
Christine Ross addresses the “crisis of perceptual faith in images” and sug-
gests that it is “our link to images” that has become “more and more
precarious.”82 This link has come under scrutiny and has been tested by
the work of several critics of visual culture and of adjacent fields. Following
on from the work on the act of looking and the gaze in the film theory of
the 1970s, art historians and visual culture scholars in the 1980s and
onward provided accounts that historicized visual experience and that,
again in the words of Ross, were “critical of models of vision that position
the viewing subject in terms of unity, unhistoricized universalism, pure
consciousness, and pure opticality.”83 A key contribution among these
studies is Michael Leja’s Looking Askance (2004), which addresses the
growing skepticism about seeing that emerged in the early twentieth cen-
tury.84 Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting (1983) refined our under-
standing of the gaze and its historical and cultural inflections, and Jonathan
Crary in studies such as Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions
of Perception (2000) examined how vision and perception were consti-
tuted through an intricate ensemble of discourses from philosophy, sci-
ence, aesthetics, and other fields.85 Furthermore, feminist critics like Laura
81
Ibid., 262.
82
Christine Ross, “Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and
Visual Culture,” Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary
Art and Visual Culture, eds. Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux & Christine Ross,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, 6.
83
Ibid., 4.
84
Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
85
See Norman Bryson, Vison and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity
in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: October Books, 1990; and Jonathan Crary,
Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, Rey Chow,

and bell hooks contributed all in their diverse ways imperative insights to
the research on the interrelations of vision, gender, and representation.
What unites these otherwise disparate projects is their shared assumption
that vision is not a disinterested biological phenomenon but rather some-
thing governed by culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.
The analysis of images is worth little if we fail to take into account the
always culturally situated practices of looking, so the work of the above
theoreticians constitutes a not insignificant part of the intellectual back-
ground for the study of the transparency-opacity dynamics. Other critics
have focused on an additional aspect of the visual that potentially negates
the transparency of the image, which is its embodied and capricious nature.
The corporal turn that began in the 1990s gravitated toward elements that
destabilized the coherence of both the subject and the image, such as per-
formativity, alterability and change, illness and finitude, biotechnological
subjectivity, and failures of identification. Some of these aspects are found
in the aesthetic practices of artists like Stelarc, Orlan, Cindy Sherman,
David Wojnarowicz, Mariko Mori, Félix González-Torres, and Derek
Jarman. The critical reorientation that this artistic and theoretical work
represents recognizes the indispensable context of both embodiment and
the boundedness and imperfections of vision. This is a context that further
undermines the claims of an untroubled, positivist mimeticism. Accepting
the reality of the fallibility of vision leads to a set of aesthetic practices that
produce what Ross calls “precarious attachments:”
to look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity,

and place; to perceive a representation that keeps oscillating between visibil-
ity and invisibility; to experience screens that blur the distinction between
viewer’s sense of self as ‘self’ and the represented ‘other’; to be interpellated
as a spectator by screen-images that have ceased (even virtually) to mirror,
resemble, or refer in that their power lies exclusively in their simulating, hal-
lucinating, or generating function; to relate to an image that entails a per-
turbation of sight through the contradictory valorization of other senses; to
be exposed—as a spectacle and through surveillance devices—to the gaze of
new figures of authority, unanticipated Others: all these aesthetic strategies,
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2000.
50 A. S. GRØNSTAD
which are examined here, concern a spectator whose seeing activity is being
embodied through precarious attachments.86
On Ross’s reading, the notion of the precarious has several key properties,
one of which is explicitly linked to a disturbance of vision. Some of the
practices of contemporary visual culture incite a type of perceptual activity
that “lacks in security, certainty, and optimality.”87 Most of the artworks
that I ponder below exhibit this disposition, from Gehr’s ghostly films and
videos to Akomfrah’s layered essay films and Paglen’s subversive landscape
photography. In the context of an aesthetics of uncertainty,88 the experi-
ence of insufficient visibility can be further amplified by other facets of the
precarious, such as what Ross sees as forms of duplicity as well as a break
with the frontality of the image.89 These properties, while not uncon-
nected, are less pertinent for the current theorization of opacity. But the
property of “critical and aesthetic distance,” the fourth and final one that
Ross identifies as intrinsic to a concept of precarious art, resonates force-
fully with, for instance, the reflections on the notion of the amimetic
referred to earlier. Building on Jacques Rancière’s argument, pursued in
Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009),90 that contemporary art since the
1980s (and relational art in particular) has favored consensus over dissen-
tion, Ross maintains that difference is essential to aesthetics.91 Both
Rancière and Ross seem to envisage difference in the aesthetic field as a
rhetorical resource, firmly linked to the articulation of “opposition,
86
Ross, 7.
87
Ibid., 9.
88
The allusion to Janet Wolff’s work is intended. In her The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, she
considers among other things the ethical import of artistic strategies of indirection and
obliqueness. See Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008.
89
With the concept of duplicity Ross has in mind the double status of the photograph,
analyzed by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, as simultaneously both imprint and “image analogically
related to human vision.” See Ross, 10–11. See also Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’image précaire:
Du dispositif photographique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987. A break with frontality involves
some kind of aesthetically induced agitation of the coherence and self-sufficiency of the
image, a failure of the flat, vertical screen to unify the subject staring at the surface, so that
this subject may become aware of the multiple tacit relations that exist between the image
and its outside and beyond.
90
Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran, Cambridge, MA:
Polity Press, 2009. The book is an English translation of Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans
l’esthétique, Paris: Galilée, 2004.
91
Ross, 12.
olemics, [and] contradiction.”92 If the differentiality of art is diminished,

p
they argue, this will lessen its political charge. A foreclosure of art’s alterity
might also impede its capacity to invent alternative visions; as Ross remarks,
“the waning of aesthetic difference is a form of denegation not only of
social and cultural difference but also of art’s ability to provide futurity.”93
What is clear, however, is that there are two different categories of differ-
ence at work here. The rhetorical energy of aesthetic utterances, the criti-
cal acumen that may enable political persuasiveness, forms a prominent
part of their innate differentiality. But the possibility of voicing critical
opposition hinges crucially on another category of difference, which is
that of form. In order to be rhetorically different, works of art have to be
formally different. This is the meaning of Espinosa’s insight, referred to
above, that you cannot challenge a given reality “without questioning the
particular genre you select or inherit to depict that reality.” While neither
Rancière nor Ross might be too interested in the difference between these
two uses of the concept of aesthetic difference, the latter reveals how it is
important when she gives the declining fortunes of difference a specific
content. It is the durability of realism in mainstream cinema and new
media, she holds, that represents the main obstacle to a flourishing of aes-
thetic difference. New technologies tend to consolidate the business of
suture, achieving effects of “smoothness and continuity” through a set of
morphing techniques increasingly in use since the 1990s. Rather than
defying or contesting visual transparency, new media, in Ross’s view, “uses
the interface to service realism, providing a sense of reality as devoid of
gaps, contradictions, tensions, fantasy interruptions, or noise.”94
Indebted to the screen theory of the 1970s, this perspective also antici-
pates Hagi Kenaan’s conceptualization of the screen and the contempo-
rary gaze published a few years later. In her The Ethics of Visuality (2013),
Kenaan is deeply worried by what she perceives as a leveling of the screen.
Flat, frontal, and homogenous, the screen makes everything available to us
all the time. It erases all sense of temporal and spatial distance. The screen
has become a space where “all points of view take on identical form” and
where there is only one singular perspective, “without texture, no
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.
94
Ibid., 13.
52 A. S. GRØNSTAD
dimensions of contact, no back or side, without shaded areas, cracks,

tears.”95 What Kenaan calls “the rule of the frontal” is essentially the tech-
nological refinement of the belief in the transparent screen. This is a screen
molded on the paradigm of advertising, defined, as Kenaan sees it, by
“instantaneity, availability, superficiality, [and] forgetability.”96 Throughout
her argument she establishes an explicit link between frontality and ethics,
or rather its absence. The politics of transparency, of the frontal, causes an
infection in contemporary visuality that alienates us from ethical experi-
ence. Nothing if not a dire predicament, this state of affairs is due to this
screen’s clouding of different levels of reality as well as its deletion of
depth, time, and invisibility. The screen, Kenaan claims, “is the contents it
presents.”97 This could also serve as a description of the effects of transpar-
ency—the eradication of contexts and of all signs of mediation. Ultimately,
the model of transparency precludes or at the very least severely restricts
the freedom of looking. The implication for visual culture is an impending
reductionism, which Kenaan conveys in the following manner:
the homogeneity that the current condition imposes on the eye while mak-
ing the eye forget its own inherent resources: its freedom and concomitant
responsibility, its ability to be involved, its constant involvement, its ability
to be critical, to be intimate, to sense shame, to refuse. Not to mention the
possibility of not looking, of looking back, of looking beyond.98
Part of the problem with transparent images is that they leave too little for
the gaze to latch on to. The gaze needs some resistance, some friction, or
else it just bounces off the screen, back to its owner. The transparent image
might make us react, but reaction is not enough. We need images that
prompt reflection, that force us to think, and think critically and deeply. In
the final instance, the relation between transparency and opacity in the
visual field comes down to a question of epistemic value; the former might
provide information but only the latter offers new knowledge.
95
Hagi Kenaan, The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze, London:
I. B. Tauris, 2013, xvi; xvii.
96
Ibid., xviii; xvi. For a study of commodified visuality, see Peter Szendy, The Supermarket
of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images, trans. Jan Plug, New York: Fordham
97
Ibid., xvii.
98
Ibid., xviii.
CHAPTER 3
Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr
At the same as the future of celluloid-based filmmaking was becoming ever

more precarious, a new generation of experimentalists (for instance, Ben
Rivers, Rosa Barba, Tacita Dean, and Luke Fowler) explored the specific-
ity of the cinematic apparatus, often underscoring its discrete material
components. Moreover, the volatile conditions of the analog image have
been subjected to close scrutiny by artists such as Bill Morrison, Pat O’
Neill, and Ernie Gehr. That questions concerning the nature of the
medium should resurface in artistic works in the age of the post-cinematic
is hardly surprising;1 as John Guillory has pointed out, “[t]he full
1
There is now a bulging literature about the past and future of cinema studies. See, for
instance, Dudley Andrew, “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,”
PMLA, 115.3: (2000), 341–351; Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History,
Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age, London: BFI, 2001; Dixon, Wheeler Winston
(2001); Jon Lewis, ed., The End of Cinema as We Know It, New York: New York University
Press, 2001; Lisa Cartwright, “Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in the Era
of Convergence,” Journal of Visual Culture, 1.1 (2002): 7–23; Jonathan Rosenbaum &
Adrian Martin, eds, Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of world Cinephilia, London: BFI,
2003; Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art
Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005; Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and
History, or the Wind in the Trees, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006; Dana Polan,
Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007; Peter Matthews, “The End of an Era: A Cinephile’s Lament,” Sight
and Sound, 17.10 (2007): 16–19; D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; Lee Grieveson & Haidee Wasson, eds, Inventing Film
Studies, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; Asbjørn Grønstad, “‘No One Goes to the

54 A. S. GRØNSTAD
significance of the medium as such is always difficult to see in advance of

remediation, as with the remediation of writing by print or painting by
photography.”2 As historically contingent materialities are on the wane,
we may, as film theorists or film philosophers, gain a better vantage point
from which to pose certain problems of mediality, first among them, in
this context, the one of opacity.3
In this chapter, I examine the strange and optically regenerative prac-
tices by which materially impaired images exploit their own opacity to
attain a new modality of existing as a visual artifact. If we think about
Francesco Casetti’s classification in The Lumière Galaxy (2015) of the cin-
ema into three major forms—cinemas of dispersion, adhesion, and aware-
ness, respectively—the type of films discussed below might fall into the
latter camp. A cinema of awareness, Casetti argues, “lowers its level of
sensory appeal as a critical stance.”4 Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), a film
made up of found archival footage in different stages of erosion, fixates on
the moment when the image is about to turn unreadable. A hymn to
decomposing celluloid, Decasia materializes the effects of fading vision
while also at the same time, perhaps inadvertently, aestheticizing the forces
of decay. We glimpse, among many other things and objects, parachutes
descending from a broken sky, a pugilist boxing into empty space, and
ethereal camel figures ambling across a surreal desert. Morrison’s repur-
posing of film in various phases of dissolution represents, I will argue, a
particular kind of precarious aesthetics capable of producing new affective
Movies Anymore:’ Cinema and Visual Studies in the Digital Era,” Kinema: A Journal for
Film and Audiovisual Media, 30 (Fall 2008): 5–16; Gertrud Koch, “Carnivore or
Chameleon: The Fate of Cinema Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009), 918–928;
and Dudley Andrew, “The Core and Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (Summer
2009), 879–915.
2
John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry, 36, Winter 2010, 346.
3
The research for this chapter was undertaken under the aegis of the project “The Power
of the Precarious Aesthetic” (2013–2015) directed by Arild Fetveit in the Department of
Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. Parts of it have
been presented as papers given at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in
Chicago in March 2013 and at the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies con-
ference in Prague in June 2013. I am grateful for all comments from my colleagues in the
project and other attendees.
4
Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words For the Cinema to Come,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 11.
3 BOUNDARIES OF DISCERNIBILITY: ERNIE GEHR 55
registers while also conveying in rather explicit terms what Paolo Cherchi
Usai sees as our “deluded” desire for permanence.5
Looking at images that are damaged, barely readable, or otherwise
opaque in the most literal sense seems to be a felicitous enough starting
point for what is mostly a theoretical study of the rhetoric of opacity. All
images are, in various ways and to different degrees, immersed in opacity,
but I will argue that we have yet to acknowledge the full extent of this
impenetrability, this dormant murkiness. The broken materiality of decom-
posing images also holds a particular purchase as an aesthetic address that
may enable a different form of affective experience. Decasia is a found
footage film, in execution and sensibility not so dissimilar from Peter
Delpeut’s collage work Lyrical Nitrate (1991). Director Bill Morrison, a
former student of the experimental animator Robert Breer, culled the
material from the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research
Collections—as well as the Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern
Art, George Eastman House, and the Cinematheque Suisse. His moldy
assemblage borrowed from travelogues, melodramas, newsreels, the final
work became a sixty-seven-minute black-and-white montage piece. While
some parts of the eroding film stock was processed and altered by comput-
ers (for every original frame, two or three frames were step printed, effec-
tively slowing down the images), there was no attempt artificially to speed
up the process of decay itself. Of the several hundred reference prints
Morrison scrutinized, ranging in time from 1914 to 1954, only two films
have as far as I know hitherto been properly identified: The Last Egyptian
(J. Farrell MacDonald 1914, written, produced, and based on a novel by
L. Frank Baum) and Truthful Tulliver (William Hart, 1916). Not much
has been said about this cinema of decay, at least that I have come across,
and it represents a type of visual degradation that is of its own order, in the
sense that this is in some way about temporality’s own iconoclasm. This
makes films like Decasia, Lyrical Nitrate, and The Decay of Fiction differ-
ent from other instances of damaged images in modern visual culture,
such as the veritable attacks carried out on the picture plane in gestural
abstraction, where the artists turned the destruction of the image into a
5
Paolo Cherchi Usai, P. C., The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the
Digital Dark Age, London: BFI, 2001, 129.
56 A. S. GRØNSTAD
purposeful mode of aesthetic expression;6 they are also of an order differ-

ent from those images discussed by Hito Steyerl.
But her consideration of “the poor image”—of optic imperfection from
a technical-aesthetic point of view—also prompts some reflections that
extend to the films of Morrison and others. One is that the technological
hierarchy of good versus bad image quality (in short, transparency and
opacity) can be fundamentally misleading when talking about the cultural
and epistemological value of images. We would do better to refigure the
terms of the debate according to the specificity of different aesthetic con-
stellations. Another is that poor images—degenerating, abstruse, and
almost illegible—make visible the more conceptual and transcendental
conditions of opacity that might be ontologically constitutive of the image
in the first place. The rich and dense patina of “visual noise” that con-
sumes the poor image is thus construable as a kind of decrepit allegory;
one critic, in fact, has proposed that the decayed footage of Morrison’s
film functions as “medium and metaphor” and that his works “elegize the
avant-garde tradition even as they make the case for its continued
relevance.”7 A film like Decasia also gestures toward what Kazimir
Malevich termed “cinema as such.” In his essays from the mid-1920s,
Malevich showed that he had high hopes for the new art form. “One
would expect the cinema,” he writes, “to overturn the whole of imitative
culture, and, of course, it will be overthrown when abstractionists with
their new flash of consciousness get into the cinema.”8 This remark, evi-
dently, encapsulates the time-honored conflict between mimetic and
abstract art, between what Malevich referred to as “imitative” cinema and
“cinema as such.” The teleological destiny of film as a medium seems to
be the latter; as Schambelan notes in her review of Decasia, “[a]ll film, if
left to its own devices, will eventually become cinema as such.”9
With its cornucopia of decontextualized segments from so many films—
as well as with its obvious linguistic nod to Walt Disney’s Fantasia
(1940)—Decasia is however not necessarily wholly non-narrative and
abstract. It certainly does not conform to anything even remotely resem-
bling the stylistic and narrative transparency of most conventional
6
See Paul Schimmel, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949–1962, Los Angeles: The
Museum of Contemporary Art/Skira Rizzoli, 2012.
7
Elizabeth Schambelan, “Bill Morrison,” Artforum 42.9 (2004): 210.
8
Kazimir Malevich, “The Artist and Cinema,” Essays on Art, 235.
9
Schambelan.
filmmaking, but in its very opacity it still murmurs its fragile tales popu-
lated by ephemeral protagonists and spectral apparitions, the film perhaps
a phantom double of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1998).
This sense of a work which transmutes its own opacity into a meditation
on film is also affirmed by the director’s own comments about the process
of making it:
I was seeking out instances of decay set against a narrative backdrop, for
example, of valiant struggle, or thwarted love, or birth, or submersion, or
rescue, or one of the other themes I was trying to interweave. And never
complete decay: I was always seeking out instances where the image was still
putting up a struggle, fighting off the inexorability of its demise but not yet
having succumbed. And things could get very frustrating. Sometimes I’d
come upon instances of spectacular decay but the underlying image was of
no particular interest. Worse was when there was a great evocative image but
no decay.10
The sad, scary, and enigmatic beauty of Decasia may thus hint at a narra-
tive, but one materialized in rather than through its form. There is nothing
at all eccentric or unusual about this narrative, which concerns the subject
of obsolescence, the archive, and the precarious state of cultural memory.
According to Morrison, he wanted the spectator “to feel an aching sense
that time was passing and that it was too beautiful to hold on to.”11 The
moment and circumstance of the film’s release also suggest an oblique
relation to what Hal Foster, drawing on Thomas Hirschhorn, has described
as precarious art. The gestation of Decasia harks back to The Europaischer
Musikkmonat’s commissioning of Michael Gordon (of Bang on a Can),
described as Morrison’s “acoustic twin,” to compose a symphony to be
performed by the Basel Sinfonietta in November 2001.12 The Ridge
Theatre company in New York (with whom Morrison worked) was then
asked to provide a visual accompaniment; the theme of decay was
Morrison’s own proposal. The two artists worked separately for the most
part, Gordon on his decaying symphony, Morrison in the archives. In
November 2001 the work premiered as an intermedial performance in
Basel, the film cut to Gordon’s atonal and rather minimalist score,
10
Lawrence Weschler, “Sublime Decay,” New York Times, December 22, 2002.
11
Dave Heaton, “Portrait of Decay: Bill Morrison on Decasia,” Erasing Clouds, 13 (2003),
http://www.erasingclouds.com/02april.html, accessed on June 12, 2013.
12
Weschler.
58 A. S. GRØNSTAD
erformed by a fifty-five-piece orchestra while slides of visual decay were

p
being projected. It was the live recording of this performance that became
the soundtrack for the film. During the show, however, a frame got stuck
in the projector, setting the image ablaze to smolder in real time. Evincing
a temporal contiguity with the events of 9/11, the premiere of Decasia,
with its eruptive glitches, further imbues the film with a sense of material
and existential vulnerability.
What Hal Foster has termed the “mimesis of the precarious” does not
characterize Morrison’s project,13 one salient difference being that Decasia
infuses the effects of the precarious into its very materiality, in the process
creating a work that is anything but formless. If we are to understand the
nature of this aesthetic, we might, in the final instance, be well advised to
look beyond both Steyerl’s notion of the poor image and Foster’s accen-
tuation of the formlessness of precarious art. One of the most immediate
impressions one forms when watching Decasia is that the warped figura-
tions of the film’s images invoke a sense of the ghostly, an effect Morrison’s
work shares with some of experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr’s recent vid-
eos, something I will return to below. For the Aby Warburg of the unfin-
ished Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1928), compiled around the same time as
Malevich’s essays on “cinema as such,” images contain pagan energies
which linger on through their posthumous lives as phantasms waiting to
be summoned. This explains Warburg’s idea of art history as a story of
ghosts and of the art historian as necromancer. These reflections later get
developed by Giorgio Agamben, who writes that
[t]he images that constitute our memory tend incessantly to rigidify into
specters in the course of their (collective and individual) historical transmis-
sion: the task is hence to bring them back to life. Images are alive, but
because they are made of time and memory their life is always already
Nachleben, after-life; it is always already threatened and in the process of
taking on a spectral form.14
For Agamben, cinema is neither a technology nor an aesthetics or a mate-

rial medium, but rather a method or praxis charged with releasing the
image from its “spectral destiny.”15 Cinema is that process which brings
13
Hal Foster, “Precarious,” Artforum, 48.4 (2009); 207–209.
14
Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs,” Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, eds.
Jacques Khalip & Robert Mitchell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 66.
15
Ibid.
life to images, which unleashes their unlived histories. A film like Decasia—
which so eloquently foregrounds its own opacity—could be seen to
embody that Warburgian potentiality.
That images are organic things made of chemicals, and time is also
borne out by Morrison’s later film Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016).
Based on the unearthing in 1978 of 553 reels of nitrate films from the
1910s and 1920s, Dawson City centers on processes of decay and the
instability of the film medium while at the same time providing a narrative
about the titular city from its late nineteenth-century origin as a gold rush
boom town. The features and newsreels, believed to be lost forever, were
found at the bottom of a derelict swimming pool, preserved by the refrig-
erate Yukon temperatures. When in 1978 the reels were brought out into
the sweltering summer heat, the sudden meteorological change caused the
emulsion to melt in places, an effect archivists refer to as “the Dawson
flutter.” Subject to the forces of impermanence, as was also the makeshift
Dawson City, the salvaged albeit damaged nitrate reels have, through
Morrison’s work, in a sense been freed from their own spectral destiny,
accruing new historical and cultural meanings not in spite of but because
of their opacity.
A similarly fecund convergence of opacity and spectrality occurs in the
work of Ernie Gehr, another American experimental filmmaker of a slightly
older generation than Morrison. In the remainder of this chapter I want,
first, to consider the materialization of opacity in some of his films and
videos and, then, to contextualize his use of vitiated images with reference
to the notion of an aesthetic imaginary, of which the spectral forms an
especially expressive element. Gehr’s oeuvre represents a beguiling case, as
does his philosophical remarks on film as a medium. David Schwartz has
noted how, in Gehr’s projects, “every element of the cinematic apparatus
is called into question and becomes a source of artistic energy.”16 This
ceaselessly inquiring stance is also intact in his program notes for a
1971 show:
[F]ilm is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect
on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or por-
trayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a
16
David Schwartz, “Ernie Gehr at the Turn of the Century,” in Serene Intensity: The Films
of Ernie Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 2009, 3.
60 A. S. GRØNSTAD
variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a

given space17
That film is not really representational, counter-intuitive as the claim may

at first seem, is an observation that I have explored at length elsewhere.18
In my book Transfigurations (2008) I propose the term amimetic to
describe an ontological condition at odds with the principle of transpar-
ency that routinely informs much film criticism and theory. Gehr’s work in
film and video supports and accentuates this claim that film is not a repre-
sentation but a real thing, and his stylistic mobilization of visually imper-
fect and indistinct imagery could be considered a first acknowledgment of
the inherent opacity of all images. Decades before it became common-
place to talk about film as a form of thought, moreover,19 Gehr demon-
strates the capacity of his chosen medium to perform the work of
philosophy. In his analysis of the pulsating Serene Velocity (1970), Gehr’s
most widely known film to date, Noël Carroll picks up on precisely this
aspect, asserting that the film represents “a celluloid counterpart to a phil-
osophical thought experiment designed to advance the conceptual point
that an essential feature of film is movement.”20 Gehr’s method, or tech-
nique, entails to a significant extent a reworking of the film image through
a set of optical and chemical processes: arithmetical editing, zooms, super-
impositions, abstractive lenses, re-photography, reversed or slowed down
motion, rack focusing, and swish panning. As Tom Gunning sees it, these
techniques are more than just stylistic trademarks. Rather, they function as
“basic structuring devices, whose effects on the image and the viewer are
interrogated by the film.”21 The result comes close to Gehr’s own encap-
sulation of the essence of filmicity quoted above. We have no choice but
17
Ernie Gehr, “Program Notes,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr, New York:
American Museum of the Moving Image, 2009, 17.
18
See Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American
Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.
19
See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989, 168; and Éric Alliez, “Midday,
Midnight: The Emergence of Cine-Thinking,” trans. Patricia Dailey, The Brain is the Screen:
Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
2000, 293.
20
Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64.1 (2006): 173–185; 182.
21
Tom Gunning, “Placing the Films of Ernie Gehr,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie
Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 2009, 11.
to focus on these devices, Gunning writes, because “we can not [sic] sim-
ply see through them to something else… For most filmmakers and film
viewers film has become something one simply looks through in order to
get at either a dramatic story or documentary evidence.”22 Gunning’s
description of Gehr’s practice is in fact the poetics of opacity in a nutshell,
a poetics configured by processes of “deautomatization.” His are images
that need figuring out. In Reverberation (1969) the image we look at is
just barely discernible. In History (1970), Gehr places a piece of black
fabric in front of a lens-less movie camera. A light is used to illuminate the
textile, and what we see is nothing but swirls of dye from color film and
grains of black and white. In Field (1970) the image shows something that
is elusive at best, and in the aforementioned Serene Velocity, “seeing is
stretched to the breaking point between contradictory poles of stillness
and motion, flatness and depth, abstraction and representation,” to bor-
row Gunning’s words again.23 Gehr’s work seems consistently preoccu-
pied with an analysis of the phenomenon of visual opacity, and it is perhaps
symptomatic of this enduring inclination that one of his early films is called
Transparency (1970).
But how, one wonders, does this marked fascination with the material-
ity of film and the limits of human perception, with apparatical self-
referentiality and an almost sensual form of structuralist rigor, compute
with the evidentiary potential of the image, what André Bazin once called
“the irrational power of the photograph?”24 When we are confronted with
an aesthetic practice that allows us actually to see the image as image and
not as a transparent window into some kind of diegetic environment, by
what parameters do we appraise the reality and the value of that at which
we are looking? What is the currency of the image, epistemologically
speaking? What kind of document, if any, is an image that exists, precari-
ously one might say, on the fringes of the discernible? One answer could
be that such images are a reminder that the relative uncommunicativeness
which surrounds them is as a matter of fact not too foreign to other, less
obviously opaque images either. Consider, for instance, Raymond Bellour’s
argument that filmic images are what he calls “unattainable,”25 impossible
22
Ibid.
23
Gunning, 9.
24
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema 1, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967, 14
25
Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text,” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 19–27.
62 A. S. GRØNSTAD
to paraphrase, quote, or ultimately decode (and the insertion of video clips

in electronic articles or the pausing of an image played back on a DVD or
Blue-Ray, among other things, do not really change anything, since this is
merely a matter of transferring the image between different technological
platforms). When we look at any perfectly lucid, graphically un-impaired
image, do we necessarily always know what we see? Another answer might
be that, because these “uncertain images,” to use Dudley Andrew’s
phrase,26 engender rather than represent a world, their status as signifying
objects have been altered. They are not fictions one step removed from the
spectator’s reality but exist in fact within the same experiential horizon.
Yet another answer is that Gehr’s distorted, disorienting, and occasionally
hypnotic aesthetics of constraint invokes a sense of the spectral. How
could it not, with its intangible figures, ethereal mood, deformed urban
spaces, and characteristic omission of human presence in the shot.
Gehr’s life and work have also often been shrouded in a veil of enigmas.
Consider, for instance, his “oblique autobiography,” his well-known res-
ervations with regard to sharing personal information, and the resolutely
anti-psychological and abstract style of his films and videos. An artist more
interested in capturing the delicate changes of objects and spaces than in
showing characters and action, Gehr’s body of work has typically been
described as “oblique” and “mysterious.” These attributes also pertain to
some of his most recent video works—for instance, Abracadabra (2009),
Auto-Collider XV and Auto-Collider XVI (2011), and Work in Progress
(2012), which seem on some level to be conceptualizations of the relation
between the ghostly and the opaque. Gehr, who has taught a course on
phantasmagoria at Harvard University, has ever since early films like
Morning (1968), Transparency (1969), and Serene Velocity (1970) betrayed
a rare sensitivity to the texture of surfaces, the modulations of light, the
play of color, and the importance of scale. More often than not, his art
seems poised on the edge of the visible world. Yet, the impenetrability of
Gehr’s images also tends to generate a sense of the apparitional, in that his
formal obfuscations of mundane spaces (say, a busy urban street) bring out
an almost otherworldly presence. For example, in Abracadabra—a digital
reconfiguration of four early silent films reminiscent of the stereoscope
loop—Gehr assembles semi-transparent images of boys playing outside a
26
Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 13.
department store, which he effortlessly transmutes into cinematic ghosts.

In Work in Progress, he exploits the elusiveness of the video surface in
reconstituting an informationally dense urban street as a spectral tableau.
Of Essex Street Marked (2004), the critic J. Hoberman has even used the
term “ghosts” about the presence of elderly shoppers at the eponymous
marked.27 Thus, even on the very margin of legibility, or maybe because of
it, Gehr’s images appear capable of conjuring phantasmagoric spaces. But,
as we have seen, he is not the only artist to forge a connection between
spectrality and the opaque; a similar association is inarguably at work in
Decasia and The Decay of Fiction.
While likewise invested in matters of temporality, Gehr’s cinema is more
about duration and continuity than the instant and the fragment. The art-
ist himself has referred to his method in terms of a “meditative ecstasy,”28
a strangely incongruous juxtaposition that nevertheless captures the for-
mal uniqueness of his work. According to some of the rather scant criti-
cism that has grown up around his filmography, this meditative propensity,
in part inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s intensities of tonal dissonance,
enabled Gehr to create “a completely new visual look for the New
American Cinema.”29 In Wheeler Dixon’s view, many contemporary
examples of a precarious aesthetic, from MTV to various DIY and YouTube
practices, are indebted to the 1960s avant-garde cinema of which Gehr
was a crucial part. Ultimately, the filmmaker’s gravitation toward forms of
ghostly opacity might be conceived as a search for what Emerson called
“the manifold meaning of every sensuous fact.”30 Whether translucent or
muddy, shiny as the 4K TV or indeterminate as decaying celluloid, images
are incisions into the flow of life, to borrow Sarah Kember and Joanna
Zylinska’s expression,31 that have a certain thickness to them, an all-too-
often unacknowledged density. It is this material density that makes art
27
J. Hoberman, “Metro Pictures: J. Hoberman on Ernie Gehr,” Artforum, 43.6
(2005): 41.
28
Filmmakers’ Cooperative, Filmmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 6, New York: New
American Cinema Group, 1975, 198.
29
Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American
Experimental Cinema, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, 66.
30
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays, 1844. In P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down:
Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008, 200.
31
Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process,
64 A. S. GRØNSTAD
fundamentally different from other genres of representation; the kind of

imaginary that works of art articulate is not predominantly social, cultural,
or political, but aesthetic. The accrual of texture that defines visual art
militates against the idea that it is a reflection of something external. To
paraphrase Gehr’s statement—film is not artifice, not an imitation, but a
real thing.
To clarify what I mean by a specifically aesthetic imaginary, consider
George Wesley Bellow’s celebrated painting Forty-Two Kids (1907). In the
picture, the water that the eponymous children are preparing to swim in is
a sickly, blackish green. Mostly poor immigrants from the Lower East
Side, they appear happily unaware of the extreme pollution in the East
River. At the time this painting was made, the waste from six million peo-
ple was channeled directly into the water, along with dead animals and
industrial debris. The city’s authorities were baffled that its inhabitants
would endure these reprehensible conditions without objection, but the
desire to live in the city outweighed the concern for fundamental sanitary
issues. As Nicholas Mirzoeff points out, the image of the city got in the
way of its material, physical realities, causing a distorted view of one’s
immediate environment through an anaestheticization of the senses.32
Bellows, a classmate of Edward Hopper, specialized in urban scenes,
depictions of early twentieth-century New York street life rendered in
bold and gritty strokes that emphasized the textural and the haptic. Forty-
Two Kids could be seen in the context of his “urban studies,” which, if
taken together, form a stylistically coherent vision of city space. Negating
anesthesia, Bellow’s work produces an example of just such an aesthetic
imaginary alluded to above.33 In what follows, I want to explore the con-
cept further through an engagement not with Bellows’s urban studies but
rather with those of Ernie Gehr.
Imaginaries now proliferate in our scholarly literature, and the term
already has a conceptually stratified history. For Jean-Paul Sartre, who, it
32
Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World, London: Penguin, 2015.
33
I have previously written about the concept of an aesthetic imaginary, albeit without
providing a precise definition. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “Here is a Picture of No Country: The
Image between Fiction and Politics in Eric Baudelaire’s Lost Letters to Max,” in Socioaesthetics:
Ambience—Imaginary, eds. Anders Michelsen & Frederik Tygstrup, Leiden: Brill, 2015. In
a different essay, I also link the idea of the aesthetic imaginary to a kind of non-media-specific
space of creativity. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “Refigurations of Walden: Notes on Contagious
Mediation,” in Literature in Contemporary Media Culture, eds. Sarah J. Paulson & Anders
Skare Malvik, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016.
could be argued, is the progenitor of the modern understanding of the

word, the imaginary is intimately linked to and possibly even co-constitu-
tive of human freedom.34 Unlike perception, which is always necessarily
deficient and restricted, the faculty that is our imagination is boundless.
On this account, moreover, the powers and substance of cognition and
imagination organize the world for us, an assumption the ramifications of
which were probed further by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
Here, the imaginary comes to form part of a triad that also includes the
order of the real and of the symbolic.35 Lacan’s concern is the construction
of the subject’s identity, a process for which the role of the imaginary is
crucial. In what is referred to as the mirror stage, the individual perceives
itself as a coherent and discrete subject, but this is an act of misrecogni-
tion. Louis Althusser’s interpretation of ideology as “an imaginary relation
to real relations” in turn draws its inspiration from Lacan’s work.36
Theories such as those of Lacan and Althusser quickly found their way into
film theory, throughout the 1970s a burgeoning field that to a large extent
defined the emergence of film studies as a new academic discipline. The
imprint of Lacanian and Althusserian models of thought in this domain
was perhaps most explicit in the work of Christian Metz, whose influential
book Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier states that what
defines cinema is “not the imaginary that it may happen to represent” but
rather “the imaginary that it is from the start.”37 The cinema experience is
founded on this strange paradox, that the objects that flicker before us on
the screen, no matter how vivid, are not really there. But their absence is
precisely what makes cinema as a medium of expression possible in the
first place.
Metz’s ideas about the cinematic apparatus and the spectator posi-
tion—and the privileged place of the imaginary in them—were
34
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination
[1940], London: Routledge, 2004.
35
See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977.
36
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, introd. Frederic Jameson, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm,
accessed March 29, 2017.
37
Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster & Alfred Guzzetti, London, Macmillan, 1982, 44.
66 A. S. GRØNSTAD
momentous in much screen philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s.

Inestimable as the Lacanian, Althusserian, and Metzian influences on
cinema studies were, however, their intellectual framework came under
attack as the climates of theory shifted in the 1990s and onward. This is
a well-known story that does not need to be repeated here.38 More
urgent for the current discussion is the reappraisal of Lacan’s and
Althusser’s imaginary as “a category of reflection” that is “incapable of
producing anything new or socially unmarked.”39 This is in contradis-
tinction to the generative potential that the imaginary may also possess.
The backdrop for this distinction between mirroring and propagative
functions of the imaginary is the American Studies collection The
Imaginary and Its Worlds (2013), whose point of departure is globaliza-
tion and the turn toward transnational studies and the conceptual chal-
lenges posed by the notion of the imaginary for this research.40 Taking
their cue from the idea of a radical imagination suggested by, among
others, David Graeber, Anthony Bogues, and Robin G. Kelley, the edi-
tors Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz comprehend the
imaginary as “the political act of thinking into existence alternative
worlds that have not yet been granted social sanctioning or recognition”
(vii). Yet, the imaginary is not detachable from the real. As a matter of
fact, it is that which mediates the real, thus also contributing to its mod-
eling. For Bieger, Saldívar, and Voelz, imaginaries serve two different
purposes, in that they are “generative processes that bring forth what
does not yet have a social correlative,” but their function is also “to fix,
delimit, and reproduce collectively organized subjectivity.”41 While
Lacan’s and Althusser’s grasp of the concept pertains to the latter func-
tion, that of the Greek-French philosopher and social theorist Cornelius
Castoriadis envisions a more creative role for the imaginary. In his book
38
See, for instance, Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing
Film Studies, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
39
Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar & Johannes Voelz, “The Imaginary and Its Worlds,” The
Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, eds. Laura Bieger,
Ramón Saldívar & Johannes Voelz, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013, xiv.
40
Bieger, Saldivar & Voelz, vii.
41
Ibid., xi.
The Imaginary Institution of Society, published in French at the apex of

Lacanian inflected Screen Theory in 1975, Castoriadis ties the notion of
the imaginary unequivocally to figurality:
[t]he Imaginary of which I am speaking is not an image of. It is the unceas-

ing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation
of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a
question of something. What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are
its works.42
It is not difficult to see the appeal of such a conceptualization of the imagi-

nary for the sphere of artistic expression. Where the work of Charles
Taylor on the imaginary appears to consider images and narratives as mere
by-products of ideas first articulated in philosophy,43 Castoriadis’s imagi-
nary shows a clear affinity with the poetic realm. As Bieger, Saldívar, and
Voelz point out, Taylor’s understanding of the imaginary, on the other
hand—openly indebted as it is to Benedict Anderson’s prominent
Imagined Communities (1983)44—is “derivative” in its implication that
philosophy precedes art and fiction, as it were.
The ongoing bifurcation of the imaginary as an intellectual construct
persists into post-millennial theorizing, with a horde of different avatars,
from Paul Giles’s transatlantic imaginary (2002) to Marguerite La Caze’s
analytic imaginary (2002), Michele Le Doeuff’s philosophical imaginary
(2003), Anneke Smelik’s scientific imaginary (2010), Ann V. Murphy’s
philosophical imaginary (in relation to violence) (2012), Ramón Saldívar’s
transnational imaginary (2012), Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman’s
concentrationary imaginary, and, finally, Ranjan Ghosh’s aesthetic
42
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society [1975], trans. Kathleen
Blamey, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 3.
43
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
44
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983.
68 A. S. GRØNSTAD
imaginary (2015).45 The latter’s term, delineated as “entangled

figurations,”46 appeared the same year as my own, but I suspect they are
less related than their identical titles would imply.47 While my reading of
the aesthetic imaginary is sympathetic to Castoriadis’s generativist account,
it also connects with other and perhaps less mainstream sources. In a pas-
sage from the posthumous Figures of the Thinkable, published in French in
1999, Castoriadis again mentions the significance of artistic creation (pre-
sumably figures, forms, and images) for the imaginary:
I talk about the imaginary because the history of humanity is the history of
the human imaginary and its works (oeuvres). And I talk about the history
and works of the radical imaginary, which appears as soon as there is any
human collectivity. It is the instituting social imaginary that creates institu-
tions in general (the institutions as form) as well as the particular institutions
of each specific society, and the radical imagination of the singular
human being48
The emphasis on the generative rather than reflective capacity of the con-
cept notwithstanding, what is perhaps somewhat underappreciated here,
and even more so in Taylor’s construal of the imaginary, is a sense of the
45
Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary,
Durham: Duke University Press, 2002; Marguerite La Caze, The Analytic Imaginary, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2002; Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, London:
Continuum, 2003; Anneke Smelik, ed., The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture,
Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010; Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012; Ramón Saldívar, “Imagining Cultures:
The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America,” Journal of Transnational American
Studies, 4.2 (2012): 3–22; Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary
Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014 and
Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian
Terror in Popular Culture, London: I. B. Tauris, 2015; and Ranjan Ghosh, “The Figure that
Robert Frost’s Poetics Make: Singularity and Sanskrit Poetic Theory,” in Singularity and
Transnational Poetics, ed., Birgit Kaiser, London: Routledge, 2015, 134–154. Even though
it was published a little earlier, one might also add Lawrence Buell, The Environmental
Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
46
Ghosh, 134.
47
The essay that contains the phrase “aesthetic imaginary” (see no. 2 above) was first given
as a paper at the conference “What Images Do” at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
in Copenhagen in March 2014.
48
Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007, 123.
materiality and mediality of that which produces the imaginary. There is,
in the literature briefly alluded to above, a recurrence of terms such as nar-
rative, fiction, forms, images, and figures, but none of these are specific to
any particular medium. While I shall insist on the irreducibility of the
aesthetic, and of aesthetic experience, I will likewise insist on the irreduc-
ibility of any given art form—both phenomenologically, epistemologically,
and psychically. The work of Ernie Gehr eminently illustrates the mode of
operation of a medium-specific aesthetic imaginary.
But if I am determined to highlight the effect of mediality on the imag-
inary, why not call my constellation the filmic imaginary or the cinematic
imaginary? To answer this question in depth would likely require a sepa-
rate book; suffice it here to say that the aesthetic is always present and
operative in all the different artistic media, so that the specifically filmic
already embodies an aesthetic imaginary. It is also not entirely clear to me
if something like the aesthetic can actually exist without any tangible
empirical instantiations. When we talk about the aesthetic, we usually talk
about a particular medial configuration anyway, be it a novel, a musical
composition, a photograph, or a film. Besides, a filmic and a cinematic
imaginary have already been elaborated by, respectively, Anthony Vidler
(1993) and Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (2003).49 However we frame
the relationship between the medium-specific, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the aesthetic as a general category, it is hardly controversial to
suggest that the concept of the aesthetic seems constitutionally disinclined
toward any blunting of the senses. Unlike the anaesthetization that may
result from any given social imaginary, art is supposed to stimulate the
senses. Although the idea of an aesthetic imaginary is complex and lay-
ered, phenomenologically speaking it must be something that reconfig-
ures our perception of the external world, something that provides content
that is experientially different from the realms of the non-aesthetic.
Elsewhere I have argued that work capable of producing such content
might be imbued with “the power to steal back the real from the obfusca-
tions of ideology and politics.”50 A case in point is Eric Baudelaire’s essay
film Lost Letters to Max (2014), which renders the partially recognized
state of Abkhazia by the Black Sea as a specifically filmic and autonomous
49
See Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,”
Assemblage, 21 (1993): 44–59; and Jeffrey Shaw & Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The
Cinematic Imaginary After Film, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
50
Grønstad, “Here is a Picture of No Country,” 127.
70 A. S. GRØNSTAD
space unconcerned with the dictates of geopolitical classification.51 The

film concisely captures the significance of space for our readings of the
aesthetic imaginary.
But, in turning toward Gehr’s work, there are three thinkers that I
would like to claim are particularly relevant for my interpretation of the
aesthetic imaginary. The first is Gilles Deleuze, who contemplates the
imaginary in a text from the early 1970s. According to Deleuze, what
defines the imaginary are “games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed
identification and projection, always in the mode of the double.”52 This
reading of the term chimes well with the nature of the process of aesthetic
transformation that goes on both in Bellows’s paintings, in Baudelaire’s
documentary, and obviously in numerous other artistic works in which
spatiality is a vital matter. Deleuze’s observation aligns the imaginary more
firmly with the domain of aesthetics and also encapsulates the strange
sense of a barely appreciable defamiliarization that sometimes accompa-
nies the conversion of lived geographical places into artistic images.
Underscoring concepts such as “mirroring,” “duplication,” “identifica-
tion,” “projection,” and, not the least, “the double,” Deleuze assembles a
vocabulary that hints at the potential uncanniness at play in the aesthetic
depiction of real spaces.
The second thinker is the French philosopher, sociologist, and occa-
sional filmmaker Edgar Morin, who in 1956 published the important but
(until its belated English translation in 2005) somewhat overlooked book
The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man. Morin’s perspectives in this philo-
sophically rich study enable us to build a bridge between the imaginary
and the medium-specific properties of cinema. In a section that also com-
prises a quotation by François Ricci, Morin deploys the term imaginary in
quite an unconventional way: “The psyche of the cinema not only elabo-
rates our perception of the real, it also secretes the imaginary. Veritable
robot of the imaginary, the cinema ‘imagines for me, imagines in my place
and at the same time outside me, with an imagination that is more intense
and precise’.”53 According to Morin, the cinema, or its psyche—whatever
that is—functions to “secrete” the imaginary (one suspects that the term
51
Grønstad, “Refigurations,” 213.
52
Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” [1972], trans. Melissa
McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David
Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, 170–192.
53
Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man [1956], trans. Lorraine Mortimer,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 202. Morin here quotes from François
might be a pun on “the secret”); it is, so to speak, a machine that does the
imagining for us. It is also, due to the particular qualities of its apparatus,
a medium that sustains a curiously complex relation both with the imagi-
nary and the real. As Morin holds,
[t]he image is the strict reflection of reality, and its objectivity is contradic-
tory to imaginary extravagance. But at the very same time, this reflection is
a ‘double.’ The image is already imbued with subjective powers that displace
it, deform it, project it into fantasy and dream. The imaginary enchants the
image because the image is already a potential sorcerer. The imaginary pro-
liferates on the image like its own natural cancer. It crystallizes and deploys
human needs, but always in images.54
This duality of the cinematic image as at once objective/referential and

subjective/generative also preoccupies the third tinker I would like to
bring into this discussion. In his famous and extensively cited essay “The
Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin considers the
mechanics of photography—which constitutes the material base of cin-
ema—in terms of a process of conversion, or what he calls a “transference
of reality from the thing to its reproduction.”55 This procedure is not
strictly mimetic, because the capture of slices of reality by the cinemato-
graphic apparatus unavoidably transforms them into something else. The
key to making sense of this duality, or dialectics, is neither narrative nor
fiction or even image, but space. Cinema is a medium that unceasingly
renders external space into aesthetic space, an operation that exemplifies
Winfried Fluck’s observation that in order to acquire meaning “physical
space has to become mental or, more precisely, imaginary space.”56 Fluck
furthermore notes the salience of space as “a host for the transfer process
through which an object is constituted as aesthetic object.” Daniel
Ammeter’s film location documentary about Michelangelo Antonioni’s
1966 art film classic Blow-Up is a clever demonstration of this process of
Ricci, “Le Cinéma entre l’imagination et la realité,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 1.2
(1947): 162.
54
Edgar Morin quoted and translated by Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film,
Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 11.
55
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Volume
1 [1967], trans. Hugh Gray, introd. Jean Renoir, new introd. Dudley Andrew, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005, 14.
56
Winfried Fluck, “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object,” Space in America,
eds. Klaus Benesch & Kerstin Schmidt, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, 25–40; 25.
72 A. S. GRØNSTAD
transference. Juxtaposing images from that film with the corresponding

London locations forty-five years later, sometimes within the same frame,
Ammeter’s project—although temporally non-synchronized—manages to
impart a sense of the phenomenological effect of the aesthetic imaginary
on real locations.
The insights of Deleuze, Morin, and Bazin form a productive context,
I want to argue, for a study of the work of Ernie Gehr and its secretion of
an aesthetic imaginary. One of the eleven visionary avant-garde artists that
P. Adams Sitney considered worthy successors to Emerson’s poetics (along
with luminaries like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Hollis Frampton),57
Gehr has created a body of work that spans half a century of filmmaking.
Initially associated with the Structural Film movement of the 1960s and
1970s, known among other things for its foregrounding of form over
content, Gehr’s films and video works have over the years disclosed a par-
ticular interest in a set of recurring themes, sometimes interlinked and
sometimes not: the materiality of the medium, the circumvention of the
human figure, visual opacity, the field of vision, the perception of space,
urban sites, and the apparitional. Running through his oeuvre is also a
pronounced anti-psychological mood that, buttressed by the filmmaker’s
taciturn demeanor, has contributed to an impression of Gehr’s cinema as
oblique and enigmatic. But he is also an artist who continuously chal-
lenges the limits of his chosen medium and who, in the words of Gunning,
“reinvents” the practices of the avant-garde.58 Gehr’s aesthetic—equally
entrancing and mystifying, rigorous yet sensual, constricting yet invigorat-
ing—embodies a post-representational mode of image-making that in
existential terms is generative rather than reflective.
Gehr’s films and video works, as hinted at above, largely bear out his
philosophical remarks concerning film’s status as not an imitation but a
“real thing.” It could be argued that this shift, which ultimately is an onto-
logical one, makes the medium of cinema even spookier than it already is.
There is a certain sense of safety in representation as a phenomenological
modality. That something is of the order of imitation means that it is
somehow contained, that it is something that exists solely in an enclosed
world. If we start to consider aesthetic artifacts like paintings and movies
57
See P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of
Emerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
58
Tom Gunning, “Placing the Films of Ernie Gehr,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie
Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1999, 5.
as things, albeit pretty weird and special things, they get endowed with a
form of agency that they would not otherwise have and that seems tapped
into the province of the uncanny. Gehr’s penchant for graphically compro-
mised, opaque, or repurposed images—as well as his fascination with the
phantasmagorical—further accentuates this sense of the preternatural.
As already noted, Gehr has been famously reluctant to share autobio-
graphical details, but the story has it that he took up filmmaking more or
less by chance. One night he stumbled into the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque
on 42nd street in Manhattan in order to escape a nasty torrent. The film
he watched was either Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night (1958) or
Dog Star Man (1962). From the very beginning he seemed as attentive to
the cinematic environment—the projector’s light rays moving through
dust and smoke, the sharpness of the light outside after emerging from a
screening—as in the films themselves. From Ken Jacobs, one of the direc-
tors at the pivotally important Millennium Film Workshop, Gehr bor-
rowed an 8 mm camera and then went on to release eight films between
1968 and 1970 that quickly established his reputation beside contempo-
raries like George Landow, Paul Sharits, and the aforementioned Hollis
Frampton. Working with blurry, rephotographed images, pure film grain,
old found footage, and documentary material, Gehr the autodidact would
fashion a largely unprecedented filmic terrain. His fundamental distrust of
the medium’s capacity for emotional manipulation might in part explain
the relative absence of the human figure in his films and the attendant
appeal of space and architecture. But it would be incorrect to assume that
Gehr is chiefly a severe formalist. His work is driven by a desire to investi-
gate the infinite experiential richness of light and space, and the camera
functions as an instrument through which locations may be meditated
upon visually. His films, Gunning notes, make available “an almost ency-
clopedic range of spatial experiments in which the camera creates, investi-
gates, or records a space, particularly through a series of compositional
and, even more, mobile perspectives.”59 (7). The pulsating aesthetic of
Serene Velocity (1970)—the most famous of his early films and a work that
was named “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress in 2001 and
included in the National Film Registry—serves as a telling example of such
an experiment. Made on location in a corridor at what is now Binghamton
University (then Harpur College), the work was shot one frame at a time
and projected at sixteen frames per second. Embracing a parametric
59
Gunning, 7.
74 A. S. GRØNSTAD
approach,60 the filmmaker placed the camera on a tripod and selected four
different exposures to be alternated for every frame in series of four. When
a cycle was finished, Gehr modified the setting of the zoom lens. The
effect, Noël Carroll has observed, is that the lens moves forward and back-
ward “like the slide on a trombone.”61
In his later works, Gehr would increasingly move his studies of spatial-
ity from interior to exterior settings, prompting Gunning to anoint him as
the greatest chronicler of the city street.62 But Gehr’s projects are not city
symphonies in the tradition of, say, Walter Ruttmann or Dziga Vertov,
which monitor the various activities and goings-on that define life in the
city. Rather, Gehr’s films are mostly preoccupied with the street itself, with
crossings, transits, passages, and junctions. In Still (1969) the subject is
Lexington Avenue in New York, in Eureka (1974) San Francisco’s Market
Street at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in Signal—Germany
on the Air (1985) a nondescript intersection in West Berlin. Side/Walk/
Shuttle (1992), which Sitney praises as “the most inventive reformulation
of the world from a moving platform,”63 was shot clandestinely on a
16 mm Bolex camera in an outdoor glass elevator at the Fairmont Hotel
in San Francisco. What all these works have in common is, first, that they
appropriate the cityscape as autobiography (Gehr was born to German
Jewish émigrés, he lived in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s and in
San Francisco in the 1990s, where he taught at the San Francisco Art
Institute and at Berkeley). Second, they challenge or even reject the rheto-
ric of transparency. Our environment, the materials of film, the image, the
process of mediation—all of these phenomena or activities have a certain
density. They are all to some degree steeped in impenetrability. In his early
films in particular, Gehr would literalize the problem of vision and the
ongoing struggle with opacity, as the aforementioned films Reverberation
(1969), History (1970), and Field (1970) demonstrate. These are films in
which, as Gunning puts it, “seeing is stretched to the breaking point.”64 In
a sense, the mechanical aspects of filmmaking are brought as much to the
foreground as the things before the camera. Zooms, parametric editing,
60
For an introduction to parametric cinema, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction
Film, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, 274–310.
61
Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64.1 (2006): 173–185; 182.
62
Gunning, 8.
63
Sitney, 200.
64
Gunning, 9.
superimposition, re-photography, decelerated projection, rack focusing,

and swish panning, to name a few of the technical means through which
Gehr would achieve his optical transformation of space, are aesthetic oper-
ations that come between the viewer and the profilmic space. They are, in
a way, an aesthetic imaginary. Gehr’s poetics is thus one that repudiates
the popular view shared by filmmakers and audiences alike that film is just
a transparent window that regulates our access to a particular narrative
content or to some form of documentary evidence. This insight comes at
a cost, since Gehr seems all too aware, to cite Gunning, that “no act of
representation ever makes anything present again.”65
Over the years Gehr’s filmmaking has grown less abstract, but the sen-
suous cornucopia of the urban environment is an abiding concern, and the
emphasis on documenting its subtle changes remains. After the transition
to digital video in 2004, Gehr’s work seems to have become even more
ethereal, possibly as an effect of the feral plasticity of the medium. Films
such as Abracadabra (2009), Auto-Collider XV and Auto-Collider XVI
(2011), and Work in Progress (2012) divulge the same sensitivity to aes-
thetic materiality that characterizes his earlier pieces—the delicate modu-
lations of light, the fluctuations of color, the treatment of the texture and
granularity of the image—but they also exploit their own opacity to sug-
gest the appearance of something otherworldly. In Abracadabra, for
instance, Gehr digitally reprocesses four early semi-transparent silent films
showing, among other objects, young boys at play outside a department
store, a docking ship, some girls dancing, and a train ride. Looping, layer-
ing, and bisecting the images, the film bursts with kaleidoscopic color and
the strangest movements. At one point the image splits in two, with one
side turning into a mirrored reflection of the other. Conjuring the proto-
cinematic effect of the stereoscope, the two parts enact a kind of kinetic
dance. Such is the effect of estrangement in this film that the people on the
screen not only look like ghosts, we feel their ghostly presence as well. In
Work in Progress, Gehr makes use of the intangible quality of the video
surface to recompose a busy and empirically dense urban street as what I
in a previous essay have called a “spectral tableau.”66 Furthermore, in a
work called Photographic Phantoms (2013), Gehr assembles hundreds of
Ibid., 15.
65
Asbjørn Grønstad, “Impaired Images and the Boundaries of Discernibility,” in Theorizing

66
Images, eds. Žarko Paić & Krešimir Purgar, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2016, 242.
76 A. S. GRØNSTAD
amateur photographs from the 1890s to the 1930s, the result of years
combing through pictures at photo fairs and flea markets around the world.
Abundantly present in his artistic output, then, the notion of phanto-
mality—a term I borrow from Jacques Derrida67—may be seen to consti-
tute a semantic frame for the projection of the aesthetic imaginary in
Gehr’s cinema. This preoccupation with spectrality is not casual or subsid-
iary but connects Gehr’s work to an older art historical tradition—as we
have already seen—in which the image and the ghost keep close company.
We remember that for Warburg images possess a vitality preserved in their
subsequent lives; they are, in fact, dormant phantasms waiting to reappear
at some point in the future. Cinema might be considered the great re-
animator authorized to release the unlived histories of the photographic
image. Discussing what he sees as “the thoroughly spectral structure of
the cinematic image,” Derrida makes the speculative yet intriguing obser-
vation that film “needed to be invented to fulfill a certain desire for rela-
tion to ghosts.”68 To conclude, the aesthetic imaginary may have several
incarnations—and at any rate, it is a concept still very much in the making,
its undecidability being one of its epistemological strengths—here, my
intention has merely been to suggest that the twin operations in Gehr’s
work of spatial defamiliarization and spectralization constitute one possi-
ble manifestation of the aesthetic imaginary.
67
Antoine de Baecque & Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with
Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse, 37.1–2 (2015): 26.
68
de Baecque & Jousse, 26; 29.
CHAPTER 4
Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere

of the Image: John Akomfrah
Ernie Gehr’s spectral re-animation of scraps of old silent films produces a

form of opacity organized around the figure of the ruin. His filmmaking
practice thus inscribes itself into a longer and deeply melancholic artistic
tradition which foregrounds the poetic intensity of the fragment and of
various states of degeneration. In the field of art history, the ruin has its
own intellectual history. Until the seventeenth century, as Dylan Trigg has
shown in his study of art and decay, the ruin was mostly “an ornamental
motif,” but in the work of painters such as Salvator Rosa it was turned into
“a legitimate object of contemplation.”1 In his Democritus in Meditation
(1650), the eponymous pre-Socratic philosopher is immersed in moody
thought amidst the shortcomings of nature—skulls, bones, a dead eagle,
and fallen rocks. In this tradition, what Trigg refers to as “the aesthetic
consideration of decay” becomes a memento mori.2 Later, during
Romanticism and as artificial ruins appeared in European gardens, the ruin
came to suggest transcendental longing. In Caspar David Friedrich’s The
Polar Sea (1823–1824), for instance, the ruin functions allegorically.
Later, with Huysmans, Baudelaire, and the Symbolists the ruin was linked
to a sense of decadence and considered affirmatively. In Baudelaire, Trigg
holds, “decay as something expressive of a particular mood becomes an
1
Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason,
New York: Peter Lang, 2006, 104. For more on the subject of the ruin, see André Habib,
L’attrait de la ruine, Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now, 2011.
2
Ibid.

78 A. S. GRØNSTAD
object to be celebrated as an inherent part of the fragmentation of con-

sciousness and existence.”3 While the thematic accent of an aesthetics of
the ruin may vary across art history, its critical investment in temporality
and its organic processes persist. I would like to argue that the specifically
cinematic ruin, seen, for example, in the art of Gehr, is an object that emits
opacity. In this chapter, we will see that in the work of British filmmaker
John Akomfrah the trope of the ruin takes on a new guise, which is that of
intertextuality. In a historical context, then, the intertextual fragment
embodies another manifestation of the aesthetics of decay, of the ruin as
an object of philosophical contemplation. In a work like The Nine Muses
(2010), the ruin is no longer a natural or constructed object such as a
skull, a crumbling staircase, or an abandoned power station, but the splin-
ters of key literary and cultural texts.
For the Ghana-born Akomfrah, a founding member of the Black Audio
Film Collective (1982–1998) and director of the seminal Handsworth
Songs (1986), the cultural archive is neither a static nor transparent com-
pilation of artefacts but an epistemic resource that may be galvanized aes-
thetically to envision a different future. While working on Handsworth
Songs, Akomfrah had relied upon material from the archives that docu-
mented immigration to Britain from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Years
after the film had been completed the artist felt there was unfinished busi-
ness with regard to these collections. He wanted, in his own words, “to
see if we could help these images migrate from that world [of social prob-
lems] into another one where they start to speak for themselves.”4 In a
language that recalls some of the ideas concerning the life of images found
in Warburg and Agamben, Akomfrah notes that the archive exists both as
a warehouse of official memory and as a phantom “of other kinds of mem-
ories that weren’t taken up.”5 The fruits of these reflections were, first, the
single-screen installation Mnemosyne (2010), a gallery work commissioned
by the BBC (in cooperation with the Arts Council England) that assem-
bles archival images, new footage filmed in Liverpool and Alaska, ambient
music, poetry, and Greek mythology into a new and evocative constella-
tion of fragments. The next iteration of this project was the essay film or
experimental documentary The Nine Muses (also 2010), which features
the same heterogeneous cine-topography of images, sounds, and text. A
3
Ibid., 111.
4
Kieron Corless, “One From the Heart,” Sight and Sound, 22.2 (2012): 45.
5
Ibid.
4 ARCHIVAL GHOSTS, OR THE ELSEWHERE OF THE IMAGE: JOHN… 79
third installment of this piecemeal work, finally, was the exhibition bearing
the Derridean title of Hauntologies, shown at the Carroll/Fletcher gallery
in London in the fall of 2012.
Migration, displacement (geographic, social, and psychic), and the rec-
lamation of cultural memory in a postcolonial, globalized era are issues
that occupy a decisive place in these artworks. But their subject matter is
filtered through an emphatically dense and at times impenetrable transaes-
thetic collage founded upon the principle of the intertextual ruin and its
luxuriant opacity. The matrix of this assemblage is the titular figure, the
Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine muses. A
sister of Cronus and Oceanus, Mnemosyne gave birth to Clio (history),
Urania (astronomy), Calliope (epic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia
(comedy), Euterpe (music), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance),
and Erato (love). Mnemosyne accumulates the memory of everything,
even of that which is yet to come, and she has also gained the knowledge
of sources. But in Greek mythology memory is also crucially bound up
with a dialectics of seeing and blindness, to which the story of the androg-
ynous seer Tiresias attests. Happening upon the goddess Athena bathing,
Tiresias was blinded, yet also endowed with the gift of clairvoyance. The
prophet’s literal blindness occasions a more allegorical way of seeing, an
introspective gaze of imagination and memory. According to the literary
theorist Mikhail Iampolski, “[i]t is the vey darkness of memory that allows
visual images to come loose from their contexts, forming new combina-
tions, superimposing themselves on each other or finding hidden
similarities.”6 This sentence could almost be a description of the artistic
praxis which informs The Nine Muses, at least if we think in terms of not
only “visual images” but aesthetic fragments more generally. The thick
texture of allusions that make up the discursive fabric of the film encom-
passes, among other sources, the Bible, Homer, Sophocles, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, James
Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Schubert, Arvo Pärt, and Leontyne Price. These
references blend with archival images documenting aspects of migratory
experience, such as the arrival of Caribbean workers, dancing teenagers,
and factory labor. Alongside this material Akomfrah also interposes seg-
ments showing a wintery landscape, scenes shot in Alaska that serve to
6
Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998, 3.
80 A. S. GRØNSTAD
amplify the sense of alienation and destitution so common to the experi-

ence of migration.
Across an oeuvre that (at the time of writing) contains more than thirty
projects, Akomfrah has consistently and imaginatively mined a particular
theme as well as deployed a particular method: on the level of narrative,
the multifariousness of black diasporic experience, and on the level of
form, the complexities of various systems of mediation and representation.
An essential component of his practice, I suggest, is an aesthetics of opac-
ity, frequently connected with (although not exclusive to) the intertext
understood—in an allegorical sense—as a ruin (his first feature length film
Testament (1988) begins with Zbigniew Herbert’s evocative quotation
that “[i]f we lose the ruins, nothing will be left”). The racial tensions that
erupted into a riot in the Handsworth district of Birmingham in September
1985 is the subject of Akomfrah’s breakthrough work Handsworth Songs.
In the 1990s, he made a series of 16 mm films and videos about promi-
nent individuals and phenomena from recent history: Who Needs a Heart
(1991) portrays the British Black Panthers, Seven Songs for Malcolm X
(1993) focuses on the titular civil rights activist, The Last Angel of History
(1996) explores Afrofuturism, Dr. Martin Luther King: Days of Hope
(1998) documents the life of the minister and movement leader, Goldie:
When Saturn Returns (1998) depicts the life of the English drum and bass
innovator, and The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong (1999) chronicles
the career of the fabled musician and performer. In 2013, Akomfrah
released The Stuart Hall Project, his perspicacious tribute to the seminal
cultural studies icon, and in the years to follow he made a string of mostly
multi-channel works delving into historical events that have been perhaps
less culturally visible than the subjects portrayed previously. Tropikos
(2015), one of the few single-channel videos from this period, is an opu-
lent costume drama, set in the sixteenth century and filmed in Plymouth
and the Tamar Valley, that reenacts the encounters of the English with the
African “other” through colonization and the slave trade. That same year’s
three-channel installation Vertigo Sea ruminates on the historical impor-
tance of the oceans and considers as one of its topics the role of coloniza-
tion and slavery. The two-channel video installation Auto da Fé (2016),
likewise a period piece, charts a number of historical migrations caused by
religious oppression from the last four centuries, from the escape of the
Sephardic Jews from Brazil to Barbados in 1654 to the contemporary
flights from Mosul, Iraq. In the three-channel video installation Precarity
(2017) the subject matter is the inscrutable jazz musician Charles Joseph
“Buddy” Bolden, of whose work no recordings have persisted. Finally, the

three-channel installation Mimesis: African Soldier (2018) narrates the
story of the millions of undocumented Africans who served as soldiers and
workers on the European and African continents during the First
World War.
This most recent work exhibits many of the stylistic traits honed and
repeated over three decades: the synthesis of archival footage and newly
filmed material, non-chronological presentation, a profuse intertextuality,
the use of multiple screens and the resulting erosion of narrative focus,
and the density of the soundscape. These formal attributes could be seen
as Akomfrah’s practical response to his own interrogation of the politics of
representation that informs mainstream filmmaking. In their statement on
black independent cinema, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) prob-
lematizes the ways in which identity is being configured audiovisually and
proposes the following points of engagement. The first is to analyze how
the predominantly white cinema structures “racist ideas and images of
black people” as “self-evident truths.”7 The second is to create a space for
the discussion of the relevance of independent cinema aesthetics for black
filmmakers. Opening up the realm of filmmaking to anyone interested as
well as eliminating the distinction between audiences and producers is the
third aim of the BAFC’s statement. Key to understanding their project,
however, is unquestionably their keen sense of the layers and mechanisms
of representation; not content with simply revealing distortions of black
experience in cinema, the collective wants to understand the symbolic and
institutional processes that produce the “apparent transparency” and
“realism” of such representations.8 This sensitivity to representational
conventions and codes found ample expression in BAFC’s first projects,
the slide-tape texts Expeditions 1: Signs of Empire (1983) and Expeditions
2: Images of Nationality (1984), as well as in Handsworth Songs. What the
collective saw through was how the media coverage of the riots embodied
a circular kind of logic in that, in the words of Stoffel Debuysere, “events
are explained as symptoms and are given meaning by way of
7
John Akomfrah, “Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film
Collective,” Black Camera, 6.2 (2015): 58–60, 58.
8
Ibid, 59.
82 A. S. GRØNSTAD
interpretations that are always already there.”9 Debuysere argues that

Akomfrah’s film, as an antidote to this impasse,
makes use of the ambiguity that is at the heart of cinema: contrary to the
dominant modes of fiction film, which tend to attest to what is given as ‘real’
by conforming to the stereotypes of the social imaginary, or the traditional
documentary forms, which are attached to the search for certainty of knowl-
edge, the film takes apart the multiple meanings of images, captured through
the lenses of the BBC and other news-reel units, and repositions them in an
indeterminate space that exists in the gaps between the real and the fictional,
the historical and allegorical.10
Galvanized both by the 1981 London race riots and by the influence of
powerful intellectual orientations such as cultural studies (Stuart Hall),
semiotics, psychoanalysis (Louis Althusser), and feminism, the anti-
essentialist stance of the BAFC precipitated a new type of cinema, one that
retained the documentary tradition’s penchant for social critique but in a
decidedly experimental language. Unconfined by the rule of narrative, and
often melancholic, this type of filmmaking represented a breach with the
politics of negation that defined many of the modernist cinemas of the
preceding decades. As critics have pointed out, the plethora of materials
and modes that co-exist in Akomfrah’s films, “critique, dreams, aesthetics,
and politics,” does not aspire to undermine audience pleasure the way that
the tradition of negative aesthetics does.11 Rather than adhering to the
methods of modernist film, Akomfrah interrogates “the convergence
between race and the language and history of cinema.”12
In acting as “image-takers,” the participants in the Black Audio Film
Collective were what Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar term “inaugura-
tors of a cinecultural practice.”13 Their work mined and rearranged the
9
Stoffel Debuysere, “Signs of Struggle, Songs of Sorrow: Notes on the Politics of
Uncertainty in the Films of John Akomfrah,” Black Camera, 6.2 (2015): 61–75; 69.
10
Ibid., 70.
11
See Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-millennial
Art Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
12
David Marriott, “Bastard Allegories: Black British Independent Cinema,” Black Camera
7.1 (2015): 179–198; 180.
13
See Holly Corfield Carr, “John Akomfrah,” Frieze, March 18, 2016, https://frieze.
com/article/john-akomfrah, accessed March 4, 2019; Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar.
“Preface,” The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, eds. Kodwo
Eshun & Anjalika Sagar, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, 13.
colonial archive in order to find alternative stories of the past, stories that
could play a vital role in shaping more productive futures.14 This kind of
media archeological practice is ultimately another way of conducting epis-
temic work, of unearthing historical knowledge buried by the intervening
decades under the thick strata of authorized narratives. The turn toward
the archive, of which Akomfrah’s film is but one example, is compelled by
what Hal Foster terms an “archival impulse,” distinguished by an interest
in “obscure traces” more than in “absolute origins” as well as by a readi-
ness to connect with the past.15 What is at stake for this kind of artistic
research is the question of the trustworthiness of the archive and whether
it possesses “unsullied, unmediated” truth.16 One of the formal techniques
at work in The Nine Muses to engage critically with the archive is the
absence of a narrative voice. As the filmmaker himself explains it, “[i]f you
remove one of the key structuring devices from archival images, they sud-
denly allow themselves to be reinserted back into other narratives with
which you can ask new questions.”17 But Akomfrah’s project is not just or
perhaps even principally about giving shape to histories suppressed or for-
gotten by history. What also comes across in his work is a delicate aware-
ness of the byzantine networks of events and causes that comprise any
historical narrative. The director’s suggestive phrase “what happens in one
afternoon has decades in it,” offered when discussing the 1980s race riots
in the UK, illustrates this idea that any given historical event contains
within itself a multitude of preceding events.18
Such an understanding of temporality, and of history, lends itself well to
the notion of transtextuality that I have advanced elsewhere and that I
argue is a significant part of Akomfrah’s poetics.19 Marriott uses the idea
of “filiation” to explain the nature of the relation between Akomfrah’s
14
Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. “Preface,” The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the
Black Audio Film Collective, eds. Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar, Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2007, 13.
15
Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, 110 (Fall 2004): 5; 21.
16
Power, 62.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
In previous work I have tried to approach the particular aesthetics at work in The Nine
Muses through the intertwined concepts of reappropriation, transtextuality, and opacity. See
Asbjørn Grønstad, “John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses and the Ethics of Memory,” in
Exploring Text, Media, and Memory, eds. Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo & Sara Tanderup,
Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 93–113. See also Grønstad, Film and the Ethical
Imagination.
84 A. S. GRØNSTAD
work and the sources quoted therein. The “grammar” of black indepen-
dent cinema in the UK, he argues, is “interwoven entirely with citations,
references, echoes, specters, from a vast array of cultural references, ante-
cedent and contemporary.”20 Thus, the transtextual image provides a
space in which memory/history and potentiality/futurity converge. A
form of referentiality that not only quotes an older text but which also
anticipates its later possible quotation by texts that do not yet exist, the
transtextual is profoundly embroiled in a process of ceaseless becoming.
The archival image, which in a film like The Nine Muses enacts such a
transtextual optics, could be understood, as I have formerly put it, “as an
unfinished inscription, a unit of meaning stabilized only temporarily, and
that always awaits its own future reappropriation.”21 Co-existing inside the
same work, the practices of transtextuality and reappropriation—vigor-
ously aesthetic in nature—are also figurations of opacity. For one thing, to
approach the institution of the archive in the manner of The Nine Muses
suggests that the documents therein were never all that transparent in the
first place. Moreover, by sidestepping the suturing device of the clarifying
voice-over—and not to mention by being inserted into fluidly heteroge-
neous assemblages—the already muddy images retrieved from the mute
archive become even denser. Finally, if these images are perennially “unfin-
ished,” they attain an additional state of temporally induced (in contradis-
tinction to the spatial forms of opacity discussed in connection with low
definition) opacity that will never be overcome.
The recontextualized archival footage, the uncommunicativeness of the
landscape and of the recurring Rückenfigur, and the nomadic literary allu-
sions together generate a cinematic expression that gives aesthetic sub-
stance to the Glissantian notion of opacity. The Caribbean thinker’s work
is a particularly pertinent intellectual context for Akomfrah’s film, given its
examination of diasporic subjectivity and postcolonial lives. As we have
seen above, opacity elicits a positive value in Glissant’s philosophy, as it
ensures the individual’s ontological and phenomenological irreducibility.
Transparency, on the other hand, incites recognizability and sameness,
qualities that enable reductionism. With this structure in mind, it is not
surprising that the concept of opacity has been adopted especially by dia-
sporic artists. Anjalika Sagar, of The Otolith Group, has explicitly cited
20
Marriott, 196.
21
Grønstad, “John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses,” 105.
Glissant and framed opacity in terms of “the right to a singularity.”22 The

ensemble’s Nervus Rerum (2008), a film about the Jenin refugee camp in
the Palestinian Occupied Territories, shuns the documentary style of dra-
matic realism in rendering the camp as an unequivocally bewildering space,
literary quotations from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Jean
Genet’s Prisoner of Love supplanting voice-over commentary and eyewit-
ness testimony. Nervus Rerum, as T. J. Demos observes, exudes “an
obscurity that frustrates knowledge and that assigns to the represented a
source of inknowability that is also… a sign of potentiality.”23 But for
Glissant, opacity is not identified with obscurity as much as with the integ-
rity of otherness. In both Nervus Rerum and The Nine Muses the opaque
never poses an obstacle for establishing a relationship with the Other but
functions instead as a catalyst for a space of intersubjective experience.
The “ethical and aesthetic dedication to opacity” that Demos sees as
intrinsic to the art of the Otolith Group also extends to Akomfrah’s artis-
tic practice. In The Nine Muses, the stylistic devices of reappropriation and
transtextuality stimulate what I elsewhere have called “opacity effects.”24
Both the archival footage and the transtextual allusions constitute shards
of meaning that appear to us as ruins, albeit symbolic rather than material.
In a later work, the three-screen installation The Airport (2016), the figure
of the ruin re-emerges more overtly. A derelict terminal near Athens,
Greece, is the setting for a somewhat bizarre assemblage; a spacesuit-clad
gentleman, a lounging chimpanzee, and ghostlike travelers hanging
around waiting for flights that are delayed interminably. Plants and weeds
stretch out purposelessly across the tarmac. Some people walk by, and
there is even an open bar in the departure hall, but no planes ever take off
or arrive. The general mood is one of inertia and paralysis. The Airport
cleverly subverts the notion of the terminal as a “non-place.”25 If such
spaces are defined by transience, Akomfrah’s spectral airport is in a sense
the opposite of a non-place. His characters can neither check out nor
leave. They are stuck inside the abandoned aviational ruins forever. What
they occupy is therefore not so much a non-place as a non-time.
22
Quoted in T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During
Global Crisis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, 155.
23
Demos, 145.
24
Grønstad, “John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses,” 110.
25
Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995.
86 A. S. GRØNSTAD
The Airport can easily be seen as a homage to two giants of late mod-
ernism in the cinema: Theo Angelopoulos and Stanley Kubrick. In fact, if
the former has any descendants among contemporary filmmakers,
Akomfrah might be one of the foremost candidates. Not only do his proj-
ects evince a prominent stylistic affinity with the cinema of Angelopoulos—
consider, for instance, Akomfrah’s interest in landscape, in the long take,
and in continuous movement between the characters, the camera, and
topographical space—but there is also a set of thematic resonances align-
ing the work of the two directors. Matters of history, memory, temporal-
ity, mythology, and migration loom large in Akomfrah’s multi-layered
poetics. In Tropikos, another project from 2016, he examines Britain’s role
in the slave trade, and in the diptych Auto Da Fé, from the same year, he
contemplates the nature of migration through the conceptual lens of reli-
gious persecution. Honing in on eight different historical case studies,
from the little-known story of the Sephardic Jews who escaped from
Catholic Brazil to Barbados in 1654 to contemporary migrations from
places such as Mali and Mosul, Akomfrah imaginatively explores the nature
of the state of displacement. I also want to consider another Angelopoulian
influence on Akomfrah’s aesthetic, one that involves a certain disruption
of the coherence of spatio-temporal vectors.
The mutability of time appears to be a central preoccupation for both
filmmakers, and in The Airport, characters from different historical eras
encounter one another within the same diegetic space. As we know, this
kind of erratic or impossible space reappears in Angelopoulos’s cinema, for
instance, in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998), consti-
tuting a formal figure that marks the intrusion of an unsettling irregularity
into the temporal architecture of the narrative. Is it possible that this fig-
ure could offer us a theoretical tool with which better to grasp the nature
of complexly organic conceptions of temporal and historical relationality?
What exactly is going on in these erratic spaces? Does time get truncated
or contracted? Is it the particularity of the connection between two his-
torically distinct events that gets thus spatialized? What I would like to
explore in the following is a set of largely philosophical phrases or proposi-
tions, articulated by the two filmmakers in question, that point toward a
vital opacity at the heart of the experience of time. The key utterance is
Akomfrah’s notion of “the elsewhere of the image,” which I in a different
context describe as “a kind of potentiality or latency that lies dormant
inside and that awaits a future reception or use.”26 But this also seems
related to a different statement that the British director has made, namely
the one cited above that “what happens in one afternoon has decades in
it.”27 In addition, there is Angelopoulos’s evocative remark, which he
made during an on-stage interview preceding a screening of The Beekeeper
in 2005, that “[e]verything that has existed will always exist.”28 Are these
propositions somehow correlated? Might the films help illuminate the
confounding quality of the statements? Finally, I would also like to suggest
that the anomalous time images in the cinemas of Angelopoulos and
Akomfrah might productively be tied to Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben’s idea of potentiality.
When we think of his work we often think of the copiously considered
Homo Sacer series and terms such as the state of exception, but Agamben
is also deeply preoccupied with questions concerning the archive, the par-
adigm, methodology, and a certain idiosyncratic understanding of the
Foucauldian dispositif. In his The Signature of All Things (2009), tellingly
subtitled On Method, Agamben ponders the possibility that there are unre-
alized—that is, essentially unlived—experiences that obliquely help give
form to each inhabited moment:
it is above all the unexperienced, rather than just the experienced, that gives
shape and consistency to the fabric of psychic personality and historical tra-
dition and ensures their continuity and consistency. And it does so in the
form of the phantasms, desires, and obsessive drives that ceaselessly push at
the threshold of consciousness (whether individual or collective).29
In the text “Nymphs,” as we recall, Agamben suggests that cinema may

not primarily be about technology or even aesthetics but constitutes rather
a method for freeing images from what he calls their “spectral destiny.”30
26
2016, 196.
27
Nina Power, “Counter-Media, Migration, Poetry: Interview with John Akomfrah,” Film
Quarterly, 65.2 (2011): 61.
28
Asbjørn Grønstad, “‘Nothing Ever Ends:’ Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration,” in
The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, eds. Angelos Koutsourakis & Mark Steven, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2015, LEGG TIL!
29
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, Brooklyn: Zone Books,
2009, 101.
30
Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs,” Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, eds.
Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 66.
88 A. S. GRØNSTAD
It is not a coincidence that this distinct perspective and these terms, coher-
ing around the incorporeal, evoke the work of Aby Warburg. In the
mid-1970s, Agamben spent a year at the Warburg Institute Library in
London, and his way of thinking about potentiality seems explicitly
informed by the notion of Nachleben with which Warburg is preoccupied
in his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1928). As we have already seen in the chap-
ter on Ernie Gehr, for Warburg images contain pagan energies preserved
as ghosts waiting to be re-awakened at a later time. Thus, for Agamben,
repetition—another vital term in his philosophy—comes to mean not a
reoccurrence of the same but rather “the possibility of what was.”31 One
could perhaps say that in Agamben’s use of the concept, repetition loses
its mimetic quality to acquire a creative dimension.
This Warburg-inflected philosophy of potentiality has proven fertile
outside its own domain and has quite recently spilled over into the field of
screen studies, significantly informing Janet Harbord’s study Ex-Centric
Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology (2016) as well as Henrik
Gustafsson’s and my own collection Agamben and Cinema: Ethics,
Biopolitics and the Moving Image (2014). Harbord develops a theory of
what she calls the “unlived history of cinema” firmly grounded in
Agamben’s philosophy.32 Also taking her cue from Foucault’s observation
that the logic by which a given system operates is divulged as much by
what it excludes as what it contains,33 Harbord states that ex-centric cin-
ema is the name given to “the matter around the cinema that we have,”
denoting a kind of invisible dispositif to be located “not only in the mar-
gins and ephemera of cinema, but in the direct light of the everyday as a
negative form.”34 On this view, unrealized possibilities have a tangible
effect on the real by indirectly giving shape to lived experience. For
Harbord, ex-centric cinema, an example of which would be the incomplete
31
Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” Guy Debord
and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Thomas McDonough, trans.
Brian Holmes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 316.
32
Janet Harbord, Ex-Centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology, New York:
Bloomsbury, 2016. 1.
33
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966;
1970], London: Routledge, 2005. There is in fact a passage in this book reminiscent of
Agamben’s notion of potentiality, when toward the end Foucault writes that “at any given
instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible
choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society,” 415.
34
Harbord, 2; 5.
film, represents a methodology in its own right.35Another example of this

“phenomenology of potentiality” that she provides is the register of patent
law that indexes a given history of yet-to-be-realized ideas.36
Harbord’s study contests a set of rather durable binaries, for instance,
those between past and present, actuality and potentiality, recording and
transmitting, and the cinema and other media. But despite the breadth of
its philosophical ambition, the notion of an unlived history of cinema—I
would like to claim—does not have to delimit itself to the area that
Harbord identifies as “the matter around the cinema that we have.” Where
she is concerned with an ex-centric cinema, my interest lies not so much
in the matter around cinema as the matter inside it, the potentiality of the
already captured and the already framed image. Perhaps we could call this,
with Akomfrah, the elsewhere of the image. The film image, or scene,
embodies at least three dimensions at once, all to do with temporality.
There is, first of all, the moment of our viewing the image, as well as its
specific placement within the architecture of the film as a whole. But the
image is also the unique material outcome of manifold and complex past
processes on the levels of production, imagination, history, aesthetics, to
name a few. Even when invisible or unnoticed, these processes are still in a
certain way a part of the image that we see. Akomfrah’s observation that
“what happens in one afternoon has decades in it” could thus also apply
to the relation between an image and what we might call its etiology.
Finally, the film image always awaits its future use. When watched by a
viewer, the image bleeds into the consciousness of that viewer, who might
use it toward ends that could never have been predicted by its makers. The
image therefore embodies a semantic surplus, or potentiality, a signifying
dimension that is both there and not there in the period of its gestation or
original use. In its recontextualization of the archival footage of postwar
immigration, The Nine Muses offers us an illustrative instance of this mech-
anism. This approach to cinematic archaeology, informed in no small part
by what I have elsewhere referred to as “a poetics of recombination,”37
might be considered in light of Warburg’s philosophy of spectrality as well
as Agamben’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the work of repetition. One
might here also recall Mark Fisher’s characterization of Handsworth Songs
35
Harbord, 14, 4.
36
Ibid., 3.
37
2016, 195.
90 A. S. GRØNSTAD
as “a study of hauntology, of the specter of race itself” as well as David

Marriott’s description of Akomfrah’s films as “ghost archives,” assem-
blages “whose readability or rationality do not always follow the rules of
narration, but serve a more spectral effect.”38 This is how Akomfrah
explains his own methodology: “I’m a born bricoleur. I love the way that
things that are otherwise discrete and self-contained start to suggest things
once they are forced into a dialogue with something else.”39 In enabling
the archival image’s escape from its historically defined and culturally
policed meanings, the filmmaker releases, so to speak, the “pagan ener-
gies” latent within it.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the aesthetic effort that goes
into bringing out this potentiality of the image is about making something
absent present, about (finally) realizing its unfulfilled psychic and episte-
mological promise. Even if the art historian acts like a necromancer, which
Warburg imagined, the resuscitated image is itself always on the brink of
slipping away. That images are spun from “time and memory,” which
Agamben asserts in “Nymphs,”40 is presumably a contention that would
resonate with filmmakers such as Angelopoulos and Akomfrah. But if that
is the case, the image hardly ever attains a state of existential stability.
Tantalizingly out of reach, it is either a ghost, a revived ghost, or a pres-
ence on its way to becoming a ghost. Perhaps, then, we need to refine our
conceptualization of “the elsewhere of the image,” to propose that the
image is in fact the elsewhere. The overwhelming immediacy of much
mainstream cinema might obfuscate this thesis, but it might become
clearer if we pause to examine a specific scene that would seem to fore-
ground this possibly constitutive unobtainability of the image. Much has
already been made critically of the kitschy painting that hangs in the pro-
tagonist’s oppressive hotel room in Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1991). A vital
component of the room, the picture shows a woman on a beach with her
back to the viewer, staring out toward the ocean, her right arm raised to
her forehead, the waves crashing against the shoreline. The man in the
room, an author (John Turturro) hired by a Hollywood studio to write a
screenplay, is enthralled by the image, gazing at it frequently. The e xistence
38
Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?”, Film Quarterly, 66.1 (2012): 16–24; 24,
Marriott, 189.
39
Lisson Gallery, “John Akomfrah,” http://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/john-
akomfrah, accessed February 15, 2017.
40
Agamben, “Nymphs,” 66.
of this painting seems narratively incongruous in a film that centers on,

among other things, the writing process, the high art/popular culture
divide, the common man, fascism, and slavery, as well as violent crime.
What is this particular image doing in the film? While a palpable enough
symbol of escape—the pristine blue sky and wide sea a stark contrast to the
writer’s confined, damp, and gloomy quarters—the painting also serves to
literalize that elusive location that is “the elsewhere of the image.” The
image is that which is not here. For the writer chained to his desk, strug-
gling with creative blockage, the painting is the only doorway onto the
outside world, but its interpellative force also blurs the distinction between
fantasy and reality in his mind. Later in the film, after a fire in the hotel,
the writer absconds to the beach, where he happens to run into a woman
who looks just like the sunbathing rückensfigur in the image on the wall
in his room. Having disconfirmed the writer’s question if she is in the
pictures, she strikes the exact same pose as the woman in the painting. In
a way, the writer has ended up inside his treasured image, only now it is no
longer an image but an intrinsic part of the diegetic flow of the film’s
narrative.
The experiential chasm between these two iterations of the rückens-
figur illustrates, I want to maintain, the fundamental unattainability of the
image, engulfed as it is in its own “elsewhere.” One could perhaps say that
Barton Fink, through its bracketing of the painting, even captures or
makes visible this very unattainability. The image is there to be watched,
scrutinized, desired, and pined for, yet it can never be fully possessed, and
we, the viewers, can never get to or reach the elsewhere that it so invitingly
and alluringly presents to us. But there is another and less apparent inter-
pretation of the notion of the elsewhere of the image, one that reunites
the overt spatiality of the term with a sense of the temporal. For could it
be that we are misguided to consider the elsewhere as always and necessar-
ily tied to a topos, a given place? What if the elsewhere could also refer to
a past or future point of time, a figuration of a historical as much as a
geographical strata? Such a theoretical move would allow us to discover
conceptual similarities between (1) Angelopoulos’s cinema of duration
(recall the voice-over from The Dust of Time: “I returned to where I let the
story slip into the past. Losing its clarity under the dust of time, and then,
unexpectedly, at some moment, it returns, like a dream. Nothing ever
ends”), (2) Akomfrah’s thesis that any event that occurs in history already
comprises multiple other events, and finally (3) Warburg and Agamben’s
emphasis on the powers of potentiality that reside within the image.
92 A. S. GRØNSTAD
With its finely wrought transtextual weave, Akomfrah’s work epito-

mizes what Glissant and the Antillean writers call épaisseur, the expressive
density or thickness of which opacity is made and which might operate as
an instrument of resistance. But pronouncements concerning the subver-
sive promise of opacity are easy enough to make. How more precisely,
Simek wonders, does this form of resistance work, and why would one
choose opacity over other avenues of dissent? Is opacity even beneficial in
a political context or is it, conversely, a barrier in the struggle against
global capitalism and neo-imperialism?41 In order to address these ques-
tions, Simek turns to Glissant’s colleague Patrick Chamoiseau’s notion of
a “poetic approach.” Writing in the mid-1990s, Chamoiseau notes that a
rationality that is fundamentally economic in nature has usurped other
domains of existence and foisted its own logic of operation upon them. A
result of this situation, for Chamoiseau, is that the poetic dimension that
is also a part of political life has been abandoned, one consequence of
which is that the craft of interpretation withers away. Without it, all infor-
mation and facts become subject to a narrowly economic process of con-
textualization. The poetic approach, which is to be sharply differentiated
from mere writing, is constitutionally immune to economic rationality,
and for Chamoiseau, Glissant, and other Antillean intellectuals it is crucial
that it be re-introduced into social and political discourses. The poetic is
of course also that communicative modality capable of gestating thickness,
opacity.42
As long as we refrain from essentializing or fetishizing opacity, it can be
productively harnessed toward political objectives. The “dizzying effect”
that opacity may have, Simek points out, “impels us to engage.”43 Opacity
can stimulate reading because it is indivisible from interpretation. That is,
interpretation of a text or a phenomenon denotes a process the outcome
of which is uncertain in advance of the activity. Unlike description, inter-
pretation does not just reiterate or paraphrase something already known
but brings new ideas, however infinitesimal, into the world. Without opac-
ity, there would be no need for interpretation in the first place. While the
poetic approach, as Simek remarks,44 might elicit demurrals from social
scientists concerned that the equivocality of the aesthetic and the
41
Simek, 367.
42
Ibid., 367–368.
43
Ibid., 369.
44
Ibid., 368.
e lusiveness of the ethical prove inadequate in the face of political chal-

lenges, it could also have a more demonstrable social and epistemic appli-
cation. Although a bit long-winded, the following quotation from Simek
is worth paying attention to:
As an impetus to open-ended interpretation, opacity counters the impulses

animating both colonialist reductions of the other to transparent, knowable
object, and contemporary neoliberal, technocratic applications of transpar-
ency. If colonialist hermeneutics at least assume there is an object to be
known (even if that object is easily interpreted), the eager turn to transpar-
ency today as a solution fit for all sorts of problems seems to stem in large
part, as a number of critics have observed, from a desire to evacuate inter-
pretation entirely. As Clare Birchall puts it, transparency ‘is presented as a
technical, rather than a political settlement,’ a solution that promises to
restore trust by obviating the need for other modes of disclosure, notably
‘narrative-interpretive forms of disclosure’ tainted as less perfect and moral
(2014, 77). Transparent governance, in the eyes of many international
agencies operating in development, is seen, as [Aradhana] Sharma similarly
notes, ‘not as an exercise in power, but as apolitical administration, which
can be improved through expert restructuring’ (2013, 309). Such
approaches tend to take transparency as an end in itself, coterminous with
the desired governance results, rather than a means, a technique that can be
put to different uses—in short, such approaches fail to see transparency as a
technique that becomes intelligible and operable only within a context that
must be read.45
In the picture that is being painted here, participation in hermeneutic

practices is seen as the adversary of an ideal of transparency defined in
terms of a reductive techno-administrative rationality. Politics, because it
presupposes meaning and knowledge, requires engagement with herme-
neutic activities like reading and interpretation. The poetic approach that
Chamoiseau promotes is therefore more enmeshed in the political than we
think it is. For this reason, questioning the worthwhileness of reading
could be injurious to the health of political processes. But, as Simek is
quick to address, if the poetic approach that opacity facilitates is to have a
political effect, the specific forms it takes matters.46 In short, opacity needs
to be made operational through suitable aesthetic approaches. An insis-
tence on absolute unknowability and irreducibility is quite forbidding and
45
Ibid., 370.
46
Ibid.
94 A. S. GRØNSTAD
may inhibit both the possibility of and desire for hermeneutic commit-
ment. One ought to keep in mind that opacity is not the obverse of trans-
parency; it is not the nothing to transparency’s something, but it is a
negation of transparency in an absolutist sense. That an image is opaque
does not mean that it does not have a content, that it resists interpretation,
or that we cannot make sense of it. But it does mean that it possesses what
Simek calls “a stubborn density,” a recalcitrant texture that necessitates
further analysis and contemplation.47
If we are to comprehend the rarely disputed sovereignty of the trans-
parent, of optimal clarity, we could go back to Enlightenment thinkers like
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham, who linked transparency to
the management of representative government. Visibility ensures that the
few who govern are held accountable to those governed by them. Closely
aligned with the notion of rational thought, transparency in this tradition
was practically methodological in nature, as it instituted a condition of
possibility for a praxis of governance based on rules and regulations that
were predictable and reproducible. The function of transparency in bol-
stering democratic structures lent it a lasting moral credibility, yet what
complicates the presumed preeminence of transparency in an historical as
much as a contemporary perspective is its complicity with a politics of
surveillance. As we recall, this attribute of transparency is what troubles
Jonathan Crary when he discusses the terror of a “world without shad-
ows.” As Simek puts it, “state actors throughout the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries also sought to ‘make the many visible to the few,’ to
control and shape the behavior of large masses of people through various
surveillance techniques and practices of knowing, often in the name of
rational thought and enlightened progress.”48 The naturalization of trans-
parency as self-evidently moral and secrecy as inherently objectionable has
been confronted and critiqued by among others Clare Birchall, who rec-
ommends that we rethink and disconnect these entrenched
associations.49
For Glissant, opacity is no less than a project of resistance, a set of strat-
egies that may be mobilized in specific socio-political situations. I have in
a previous chapter provided an account of Glissant’s position—in
47
Ibid., 372.
48
Simek, 365.
49
Clare Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left,” Theory, Culture &
Society, 28.7–8 (2011): 60–84; 66.
particular with reference to Levinas’s take on alterity—but to augment

Birchall’s argument, it might be felicitous to revisit some of the ideas from
Poetics of Relation. The main quarrel Glissant has with transparency is that
it underwrites Western models of universality, a legacy from the
Enlightenment. The epistemic forms engendered by this system were pos-
sessive in the sense that they sought to gather evidence and data that could
be put to colonialist ends. Inevitably, the process of understanding itself
relied on reductionism. “In order to understand and thus accept you,”
Glissant writes, “I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale pro-
viding me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I
have to reduce.”50 Confronted with difference, transparency provides a
self-absorbed optics that reflects back the universalist assumptions of the
onlooker. The knowledge about the Other is deployed to maintain impe-
rial domination. As a condition for a pragmatist-rationalist episteme built
on a deliberate reductionism, transparency in fact slides into the concept
of visuality itself as it has been theorized by Nicholas Mirzoeff. In his
monograph The Right to Look (2011), the visual culture scholar is preoc-
cupied with the colonialist underpinnings of the Scottish historian Thomas
Carlyle’s term visuality. Analyzing three historical manifestations of visual-
ity—the plantation, imperialism, and the military-industrial complex—
Mirzoeff argues that in each of these constellations power is naturalized
through techniques of classification, separation, and aestheticization.51
This kind of despotic visuality/transparency provokes counter-strategies,
what Mirzoeff calls “the right to look,” whereas for Glissant the method
of resistance is precisely opacity. Intriguingly, opacity may be considered as
a medium in itself, one that, according to Patrick Crowley, “resists the
light of (Western) understanding in order to preserve diversity and advance
exchanges based not upon hierarchy but upon networks that abolish the
primacy of any one center of understanding.”52
In the context of Akomfrah’s work, the notion of opacity might be
understood in at least three ways. First, the grievances that animated the
BAFC’s critique of the politics of representation back in the early 1980s
concerned the reductionist portrayals but also the relative invisibility of
50
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.
51
See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke
52
Patrick Crowley, “Édouard Glissant: Resistace and Opacité,” Romance Studies, 24.2
(2006): 105–115; 107.
96 A. S. GRØNSTAD
black experience in film production. From this point of view, Akomfrah’s

work is to some extent about surmounting a particular kind of non-
productive opacity. The conventional genre of social documentary, with
its colonialist provenance as well as favoring of what David Marriott terms
“sociological tropes of transparency, immediacy, authority, and authentic-
ity,” was ill equipped to confront this epistemic challenge.53 Second, the
archives so vital to Akomfrah’s projects are of course themselves steeped in
opacity, a discursive silence broken by the filmic resuscitation of the inar-
ticulate archival fragment. Third, and most importantly, the different yet
interlocked techniques of reappropriation and transtextuality generate,
along with some other stylistic features that I will consider below, a con-
ceptual form of opacity as an overall poetics in Akomfrah’s work. In bring-
ing this chapter to a close, I want to argue that this poetics—besides the
persistence across the filmography of the intertextual ruin—develops two
different metaphors of opacity: the dorsal and the oceanic.
I have discussed the former above. Suffice it here to say that there is
ample critical evidence to suggest that this particular art historical motif
may be taken to connote denseness and ambiguity. For George Banu, for
instance, the rückenfigur represents uncertainty.54 The way in which the
figure has been viewed as separate from his or her environment, and as a
double for the viewer, has been noted by Jeroen Verbeeck, who points out
that the device lets us “experience the scene” from the figure’s vantage
point.55 But the rückenfigur also serves to block our sightline, refusing us
visual information. It is difficult not to read the back turned against the
spectator in the fashion Akomfrah prefers as a demonstrative gesture, espe-
cially when it is repeated with slightly different variations across scenes and
works. The dorsal subject introduces a stubborn impenetrability, an
incommunicative presence that might seem to compromise the epistemo-
logical value of the scenes in which it is featured. But it also acts as a cata-
lyst, an opacity that potentially is capable of eliciting an imaginative
response from the viewer. The motif instantly ties Akomfrah’s films to an
art historical tradition. For the viewer well versed in the history of docu-
mentary cinema it might also, as Scott Birdwise has observed, reference a
scene in Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister’s short Listen to
53
Marriott, 191.
54
George Banu, L’Homme de pos: Peinture, Théatre, Paris: Adam Biro, 2001, 13–17.
55
Jeroen Verbeeck, “L’Homme de dos: The Politics of the Rear-view Figure in the Films
of John Akomfrah,” Black Camera, 6.2 (2015): 154–161; 161.
Britain (1942), in which some civilian-soldiers stare intently toward the

horizon, scanning it for evidence of enemy troops rather than savoring the
sunset.56 Once such a relation with aesthetic precursors has been estab-
lished, one could, as a next step, impute the possibility that the purposeful
deployment of the rückenfigur in Akomfrah’s work signifies a clean slate,
a symbolic turning away from certain histories of filmmaking. In an article
on the connections between the digital and the diasporic, the director
himself considers the implications of the discursive shackles, firstly, of a
specific legacy of black art and, secondly, of the hegemonic technological
and semantic history of cinema for a productive engagement with the poli-
tics of representation. What he calls “the tyranny of propriety” meant that
in order to achieve eminence, “black art needed to mimic, emulate and
reflect the conditions of excellence of black music” (the spiritual and later
on jazz).57 A transtextually stratified work such as The Nine Muses, brim-
ming with samples from the white western canon, could perhaps be con-
strued as one way of abandoning the oppressive weight of this legacy. But
in the same essay, Akomfrah also indicts the cinematic apparatus for its
racially biased materiality, ranging from the absence on the African conti-
nent of laboratories for processing film to the virtual invisibility of black
people in Jean-Luc Godard’s epochal Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–1998).
Celluloid film, Akomfrah contends, “had a political economy that many of
the eulogists or fetishes for it now seem not to take into account, that
inside the technology was inscribed a kind of power system that pretty
much mirrored the power relationships outside.”58 Here he seems to
imply that analog film is a racially compromised medium and that digital
cinema holds a utopian promise not only for future filmmaking but for
historiography as well. What he calls digitopia is the potential latent within
post-chemical film for deconstructing analog cinema’s truth regimes and
for producing “new modes, new relations, [and] new systems.”59 Alluding
to the biopolitical entanglements of early cinema (in which travelogues
56
Scott Birdwise, “Digipoetics and Biopoetics: Poetry and Image in Humphrey Jennings
and John Akomfrah ‘After’ Brexit,” Paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies Conference, Seattle, March 2019.
57
John Akomfrah, “Digitopia and the spectres of diaspora,” Journal of Media Practice,
11.1 (2010): 21–29; 22.
58
John Akomfrah, “John Akomfrah in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari,” in
Thea Ballard & Dana Kopel, John Akomfrah: Signs of Empire, New York: New Museum,
2018, 108–113; 112.
59
Akomfrah, “Digitopia,” 24–25.
98 A. S. GRØNSTAD
represented the black body as an object of “squeamish disquiet”),

Akomfrah envisions a new film history that does not begin with Georges
Méliès but with Jeremy Bentham. A history of cinema with no mention of
giants like Godard, he asserts, would “still be just as legitimate,” for the
reason that “the questions this new history would raise would be just as
pertinent and just a real.”60 In this context, the resolute posture of
Akomfrah’s rückenfigur accrues meaning as a quiet disruption of institu-
tional hierarchies of representation. The solitary wanderer is the artist
turning their back on ossified ways of seeing, gazing into an unfamiliar
future (Fig. 4.1).
Practically devoid of content, the rückenfigur is a silent surface that
screens out what we most want to see—the human face, the site of iden-
tity, and interaction. The pose occasions a semiotic blockage. Likewise, the
sea as conventionally rendered in the cinema is a surface underneath which
exist entire ecosystems often unavailable to the viewer.61 Throughout his
work, Akomfrah often gravitates toward the oceanic, an aesthetic attrac-
tion that might bespeak an interest in opaque matter. Some of his mid-to-
late twenty-tens works, notably Vertigo Sea and Mimesis: African Soldier,
draw on texts and incidents from the cultural history of the ocean to
address burning contemporary issues such as the refugee crisis. In the lat-
ter project, we see images of soldiers ambling on the beach looking for
their homeland, photographs, and other objects submerged in the water.
In this work, the ocean is suggestively portrayed as an intrinsic part of
Western imperialism and the slave trade. The memories of the soldiers,
Osei Bonsu remarks, “have become faded, deformed, abstracted as the
existential threat of the ocean rises.”62 The timeliness of Akomfrah’s vision
is no less pronounced in Vertigo Sea, a three-channel installation one of
whose nine intertitles reads “Oblique Tales on the Aquatic Sublime.” First
shown by Okwui Enwezor in his “All the World’s Futures” exhibition at
the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Vertigo Sea mixes footage from the
BBC’s Natural History Unit with new scenes shot on the Faroe Islands,
on the Isle of Skye, and on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. This
60
Ibid., 28.
61
There are obviously exceptions, from the work of Jacques Cousteau to Finding Nemo
(Andrew Stanton, 2003) and Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, 2012).
62
Osei Bonsu, “John Akomfrah Commemorates the Colonial Soldiers Who Fought for a
Cause that Was not Theirs,” Frieze, January 22, 2019, https://frieze.com/article/john-
akomfrah-commemorates-colonial-soldiers-who-fought-cause-was-not-theirs, accessed
March 4, 2019.
Fig. 4.1 Screengrab The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah)
material is accompanied by the voice of a Mediterranean refugee. True to

Akomfrah’s method, this “subdued cinepaean to the ocean” covers a lot of
ground both thematically and textually. Migrations, executions, the loom-
ing environmental disaster, the slave trade, nuclear testing, and the whal-
ing industry are all parts of this work, which also features transtextual
references to the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), a
freed African slave, abolitionist, and naval explorer; Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891); Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
(1851); Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927); Heathcote Williams’s
Whale Nation (1988); and, unattributed, Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea
is History” (1980). Ranging historically-geographically from fifteenth-
century Newfoundland to 1970s South Asia, Vertigo Sea has been
described as “metahistory” and as “a dense, philosophical meditation on
100 A. S. GRØNSTAD
eco-poetics and the posthuman condition.”63 The ocean is seen as a repos-

itory and a grave, a site of oblivion, and beneath the surface home to
innumerous narratives of violence and death that will never be known.64
The “oceanic feeling”—or, to use the director’s own phrase, “oceanic
ontologies”—that Vertigo Sea so vividly embodies is thus a complex phe-
nomenon; entwined within its scope are the genealogies of globalization,
stories of homelessness, lost identities, canonical literature, specters of
colonialism, and environmental transformation.65 But the ocean in Vertigo
Sea is also the emblem of an immense opacity.
When in January 1987 Salman Rushdie reacted dismissively to
Handsworth Songs in The Guardian,66 his misgivings targeted what he per-
ceived to be the film’s obliqueness. Coming to its defense, Stuart Hall
emphasized the strenuous labor on part of Akomfrah and the BAFC to
search for a new expressive modality in which to convey the type of experi-
ence that was their subject matter. In the more than three decades since
the release of Handsworth Songs, it has become increasingly evident that
this obliqueness constitutes an intrinsic part of Akomfrah’s approach, one
that aligns his projects with the aesthetics of uncertainty discussed by Janet
Wolff above.67 Regardless of whether this uncertainty comes in the shape
of intertextual slivers, recombined archival images, or visual tropes such as
the rückenfigur and the ocean, its central mechanism could perhaps be
captured by Agamben’s paraphrase of Paul Valéry: some forms of cinema
63
Erik Morse, “The Oceanic Ecologies of John Akomfrah,” ArtReview, January-February
2016, https://artreview.com/features/jan_feb_2016_feature_john_akomfrah/, accessed
March 4, 2019.
64
“The more I looked,” Akomfrah says in an interview about Vertigo Sea, “the more a
pattern emerged—political prisoners of Chilean solidarity dumped at sea; the FNL fighters in
Algeria taken by the French and dumped at sea; the Zong massacre, where hundreds of
African slaves were dumped at sea.” See Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Interview: John Akomfrah,”
The Guardian, January 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/
jan/07/john-akomfrah-vertical-sea-arnolfini-bristol-lisson-gallery-london-migration,
accessed March 27, 2019.
65
I borrow this Freudian term from Erika Balsom’s book An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and
the Sea, New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster, 2018; for “oceanic ontologies,” see Morse.
66
See Salman Rushdie, Stuart Hall & Darcus Howe, “The Handsworth Songs Letters,” in
Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 261–264.
67
Critics have noted the appearance of uncertainty in Akomfrah’s films. See, for instance,
Debuysere, who underscores the way in which images get decoupled from “old chains of
signification,” in the process testing the belief that the image contains a particular “whole-
someness” (68).
enact “a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning […] a power

of stoppage that works on the image itself, that pulls it away from the nar-
rative power to exhibit it as such.”68 The image thus liberated might just
be what the filmmaker has in mind when he talks about its inscrutable
“elsewhere.”
68
Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” [1995], Guy
Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough,
Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press, 2002, 317. Here I would like to point out that Scott
Birdwise was the first to note the pertinence of Agamben’s quotation for an understanding
of Akomfrah’s films.
CHAPTER 5
The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders
The remolding of the cultural archive is something Akomfrah shares with

many of his contemporaries, notable among them the American, Berlin-
based painter, photographer, and film and video artist Matt Saunders. In
this chapter, I want to situate his 2010 installation Passageworks within the
context of an art of opacity, showing how the work in its stratified materi-
ality recalls both Gehr’s poetics of spectrality and Akomfrah’s fascination
with transtextuality and its archival accent. A professor in the Department
of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Saunders is a
multimedia artist whose transaesthetic oeuvre is anchored in painting but
who works in a variety of media, including photography, prints, film,
video, animation, and installation. While boasting a highly idiosyncratic
approach to image-making, Saunders’s practice exhibits some affinities
with an orientation within contemporary art that has been described by
some in terms of “‘minor’” forms in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. The
archive from which artists like Saunders are free to draw is colossal: over a
century’s worth of cinema, roughly six decades of broadcast television,
and four decades of video experimentation. A textual resource unprece-
dented in scope, this archive constitutes, as critic Bruce Jenkins sees it, “an
aesthetic Tower of Babel, a veritable polyglot mash-up of appropriations,
citations, and homage.”1 One strain within this archival,
1
Bruce Jenkins, “Matt Saunders’s Secret-Flix,” in Matt Saunders, Parallel Plot [2010],
Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago/The University of Chicago
Press, 2013, 114–127; 115.

104 A. S. GRØNSTAD
database-enhanced poetics is the intertextual efforts of countless brico-

leurs. Another, perhaps less dominant, strain is the preoccupation with the
materiality of the archival contents and with objects that may have faded
from the cultural consciousness of the contemporary moment. As Tom
Gunning notes, film artists of the latter lineage were primarily powered
neither by conceptualism nor by addressing personal issues but by a com-
mon resistance to the hegemony of Structural Film.2 In Jenkins’s view,
Saunders’s work sits close to the generation of avant-garde filmmakers that
Gunning considers.
Before the invention of photographic cameras, one of the most wide-
spread methods for reproducing images was the cliché verre, whereby fig-
ures were painted, drawn, or etched onto a transparent surface (glass, thin
paper, and, later, film), whose image was then printed on a light sensitive
paper in some kind of darkroom. A fusion of painting/drawing and pho-
tography, the cliché verre was first taken up by early nineteenth-century
French painters, of whom Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is perhaps the best
known. In some of his work, Saunders revives what is essentially a trans-
medial tradition, producing handmade photographs by drawing the nega-
tive of found positives whose original negative was absent. His drawing is
then contact-printed to make a new image. Initially using black ink on
Mylar (a brand name for a BoPET polyester film), which yielded too
expectable results, Saunders then started applying silver ink and oil on
both sides of the Mylar film, a technique that causes a more unforeseeable
transfer of the image. As interviewer Josiah McElheny writes, these draw-
ings are not really contact prints “because the actual act of printing them”
generates a level of “physical instability.”3 One effect of this process is that
the image comes across as “aged, deteriorated, transformed.”4 Bearing a
superficial resemblance to the practice of painting from photographs asso-
ciated with artists such as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, Saunders’s
images conversely occasion the production of a photograph from a
drawing.
Stirred by cinema from the Weimar period as well as work by Andy
Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Saunders maneuvered his
2
Tom Gunning, “Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore, Klahr
and Solomon,” Motion Picture, 3.1–2 (1989–1990): 2.
3
Matt Saunders, Parallel Plot [2010], Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University
of Chicago/The University of Chicago Press, 2013, 99.
4
Ibid.
5 THE SHAPE OF THE SECRET: MATT SAUNDERS 105
image-making practice toward film and digital video. On the basis of short
fragments from some of his favorite movies, he made hundreds of draw-
ings that were subsequently scanned, resulting in a form of animation that
Jenkins considers a case of “minor cinema.”5 Relying on a technique
known as rotoscoping (applied, for instance, by Richard Linklater for his
Waking Life (2001)), Saunders manually sketches over live-action footage,
frame by frame, after which the drawings are transferred to digital video.
Every other image in this process is scanned in negative. What we see on
screen are twitchy, blotched shapes, often illegible or semi-legible, always
emerging and melting to a throbbing kind of rhythm. For the three-
channel looped video installation Passageworks (2010), Saunders re-
appropriates footage from widely disparate historical sources. The first film
in the triptych is Bulgarian director Zlatan Dudo’s Kuhle Wampe (1932),
co-written by Bertolt Brecht, a drama about a working-class family evicted
from their home and living in a camp for the unemployed on the outskirts
of Berlin. Playing the lead actress in this Great Depression–set narrative is
the later German television star Hertha Thiele, known for her participa-
tion in a few provocative stage plays and films during the Weimar era,
notably features with a pronounced lesbian-themed subtext such as
Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931) and Anna and Elizabeth
(Frank Wisbar, 1933). Perceived as a destabilizing performer by the Nazis,
she was barred from the national film industry and by 1937 had relocated
to Switzerland. Decades later, in the 1970s, she became a familiar face on
East German television, also attaining some measure of cult status after
being approached by Western feminists interested in her first film Mädchen
in Uniform.
Thiele also features in one of the other two films, which are longer and
more layered, albeit shown on smaller screens. While the images in the
first video display people on bicycles traversing Berlin’s blue-collar neigh-
borhoods looking for work, those in the second film center on Thiele
herself, presented in medium close-up with her tie and short coiffure. Her
character in Kuhle Wampe is Annie, the only member of her family with a
job. In Saunders’s segment, we see her looking at her off-screen brother,
who is one of the bicyclists from the first film. This part of Passageworks
includes a reference to another Annie, as seen in the late silent comedy
drama People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak & Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930), also
set in Berlin and based on a screenplay by Billy Wilder. The segment also
5
Jenkins, 118.
106 A. S. GRØNSTAD
incorporates material plucked from other branches of the audiovisual

archive. Bookending the shots of the two Annies are two reprocessed
excerpts from the British TV spy series Danger Man (1960–1967), as well
two shots from Aki Kaurismäki’s film Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana
(1994). In the first of these shots, Tatiana is seen in a hotel room watching
her inebriated lover, while in the second, a close-up, she relieves him of his
cigarette. The action here imitates a scene from Andy Warhol and Paul
Morrissey’s Trash (1970) in which the naked junkie played by Joe
Dallesandro falls asleep.
The third film in Saunders’s tripartite structure returns us to Tatiana
and her hand removing the cigarette, although this time the image has
turned more impalpable, giving way to a brief close-up shot of Danish-
born actress Asta Nielsen as she appears in a scene from Hamlet (Svend
Gade & Heinz Schall, 1921). Three mutations of this configuration ensue,
each one starting with Tatiana’s hands and the cigarette, producing toward
the end of these repetitions a somewhat sharper image of Nielsen before
the screen goes dark. Like the two other films, this segment, while even
more abstract graphically, shows in the words of Jenkins “remarkable vari-
ability in the legibility of the imagery,” a material capriciousness in no
small part due to the fluctuations of positive and negative.6 Noting the
influence of Abstract Expressionism and also of Roy Lichtenstein on
Saunders’s work, Jenkins rightly claims that “more evident in these
abstractions is his affection for the numerous forms of visual degradation
suffered over the course of time by celluloid cinema.”7 The filmmaker
himself refers to this state of decomposition as “the nebula of corrosion,”
the temporal consequences of materiality’s organic qualities, qualities that
are explored in a similar fashion in some of Ernie Gehr’s work, as we have
seen above.
Like that of Gehr, Saunders’s art seeks to transcend the boundaries of
the filmic, both in a technical-material, representational, and cultural
sense. His work probes the interstitial space between, on the one hand,
painting and drawing, and on the other, photography and film. Because he
creates a negative by hand, either drawing or painting onto Mylar, he
eschews the component habitually considered essential to photography—
the camera, with its viewfinder, lens, and shutter (although the process
does rely upon other elements of the technical apparatus such as
6
Jenkins, 120.
7
Ibid.
photographic paper, an enlarger, and a darkroom). The images that

emerge from this practice, as the examples from Passageworks described
above reveal, are hybrid forms that are neither fully figurative and photo-
graphic nor entirely painterly and abstract. What they contribute is a kind
of mongrel visuality. Likewise, representationally they hover between the
recognizable and the indecipherable. At the same time, a composition
such as Passageworks also broadens the scope of cinema’s cultural memory,
in that it reintroduces films, characters, actors, places, and plots mostly
forgotten, imbuing these with a poignant spectral power. The art of the
ruin, of the fragment—no less than in the work of Gehr and Akomfrah—
informs Saunders’s transmedial approach. This observation is supported
by the title of the triad, which appears to allude openly to Walter Benjamin’s
renowned Passagenwerk, his monumental study of the Parisian arcades,
begun in 1927 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1940. The
translators of The Arcades Project state that Benjamin’s aim was to write an
Urgeschichte, a historiography not of key events and people but of the
“‘refuse’” and “‘detritus’” of the past.8 Consisting of hundreds of notes,
sketches, and citations, Benjamin’s opus was one of fragments and “secret
affinities,” a palimpsestic text in which the wealth of literary and philo-
sophical quotations comes to overwhelm the montage approach favored
by Benjamin (Fig. 5.1).9
Both the urban and the architectural history of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk
and the film history of Saunders’s Passageworks come close to Harbord’s
idea of an ex-centric cinema, discussed in the chapter on Akomfrah above.
For Harbord, the Benjaminian notion of secret affinities appears intrinsic
to such a cinema, which remains invisible “until its negative form is cast as
a set of objects, networks, practices and iterations.”10 The compass of an
ex-centric cinema is not only “the margins and ephemera” but also “the
everyday as a negative form, as space as yet uncast.”11 Saunders’s attraction
to the objects at the fringes of cinematic history has been noted and docu-
mented by several critics. Saunders, a writer for Artforum points out, “is
drawn to the out-of-date: démodé interiors, expired publicity stills, and
8
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, “Translators’ Foreword,” in Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, ix.
9
Ibid., x.
10
Harbord, 1.
11
Ibid.
108 A. S. GRØNSTAD
Fig. 5.1 Frame from Passageworks (Matt Saunders)
stars whose moments have passed, if they had a moment to begin with.”12
The artist’s material is “obscure” in more than one sense, Jenkins notes, in
that it “not only emanates from fairly arcane sources” but also in that it is
“visually distressed and systematically drained of representational detail.”13
In a way, the opacity in Saunders’s films allegorizes objects that exist on
the cultural periphery: people, artifacts, and texts forgotten by the public
and left out of social memory. The pictorially indistinct is thus more than
a purely sensuous effect. It emulates the miasma of history, calling atten-
tion to that which is in fact there even though neglected and unseen. In
this, Saunders’s practice produces objects that are shrouded in a furtive
sensibility, that have one foot in the domain of the secret. As we shall see
in Chap. 7, the notion of the secret is infused with significance in the
sphere of art because it represents “the ideal aesthetic object.”14 By their
very nature, the unfamiliar and the strange challenge intellectual evalua-
tion. Turning away from the epistemological, the secret “opens the way
for a purely aesthetic response.”15
12
Lisa Turvey, “On Matt Saunders,” Artforum, 45.6 (2007): 278–279; 278.
13
Jenkins, 124.
14
Clare Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/
Politics, 83 (2014): 25–46; 29.
15
Ibid.
The secret as a critical term has already been invoked in discussions of

Saunders’s idiosyncratic work. For instance, in describing Passageworks,
Jenkins borrows the moniker secret-flix from underground filmmaker Jack
Smith to explain Saunders’s interest in the esoteric, “the forgotten, the
abject, [and] the critically disdained.”16 Closely linked to the appearance
of trash and camp as particular aesthetic styles, Smith shaped a cinematic
practice that today would easily be recognized as ecological, relying as it
did on the use of obsolete film stock, outfits culled from thrift stores,
improvised performances, and often non-professional actors. It is not
improbable that Saunders’s gravitation toward actresses long since faded
from public view is influenced by Smith’s own fondness for performers
such as the Latin American Maria Montez, star of several Hollywood B
movies, and Judy Canova, a once popular comedian and radio personality.
In Jenkins’s estimation, what these actresses share with someone like
Hertha Thiele are gestures and movements that tend toward “contest[ing]
the representational transparency of conventional cinema.”17 Another case
from Saunders’s works is his Borneo (Rose Hobart) series (2013–2014), in
which he hand-paints a negative from a frame out of surrealist Joseph
Cornell’s groundbreaking found-footage film Rose Hobart (1936), which,
in turn, compiles shots featuring the eponymous actress from George
Melford’s adventure movie East of Borneo (1931). Appearing in over forty
Hollywood features throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Hobart’s career
was prematurely cut short after she refused to cooperate with the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949. In Borneo (Rose
Hobart) # 5 (2013), Saunders resurrects the star from Melford’s B movie,
crafting what is effectively a portrait painting that shows Hobart opening
a curtain that is saturated with rich blues and purples, the right side of her
face completely in the dark, and with a ghostlike figure surfacing behind her.
The effect of Saunders’s image is reminiscent of that created by the
scene with the kids outside the department store in Gehr’s Abracadabra
and also of other passages from his films, as well as from Morrison’s
Decasia and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017). What these works articu-
late, I would like to suggest, is a peculiar form of spectral historicity, an
apparitional poetics that, somewhat ironically, draws upon the affordances
of an emphatically organic materiality to cause an experience of the other-
worldly. The persistence of matter reignites memory. This is not just any
16
Jenkins, 125.
17
Ibid., 123.
110 A. S. GRØNSTAD
matter; the materials involved engender a distinctly intermedial sensation.

Saunders calls some of his experiments “[b]lind dates between material
and film.”18 A wealthy array of physical ingredients and substances fur-
nishes these encounters, from oil paint, powdered granite, and casein on
polyester to silver ink, colored ink with black, India ink, toner from a laser
print, toner soaked in solvent, colored dye on plastic, inversion of black
ink on plastic, and digital color.19 “[M]obilizing a medium through the
misuse of its materials” is how Saunders himself describes the process:
We do let materials stand in for medium more than we like to admit—and I

think this is a thread worth grasping. Materials may be freer to move to
wander. They can be moved, miscast, and misused. They don’t simply exist
but have functions, as images, as appropriations. There is always a fabric that
holds them and qualities that bind them, yet off their own turf they fall into
a different light. It seems to me that the future of medium is increasingly
bound to mobility.20
This sense of flexibility does not merely pertain to the drift of materials
between media but also to the liquid state of the image itself and the
notion that its seizure can only be temporary. Seen from this perspective,
opacity gathers relevance beyond the realm of spatial configurations; the
passing of time also beclouds our experiences, memories, and images.
Implicated in the poetics of opacity are thus also the temporal dimension
and its vicissitudes.
Some critics have described the characters appearing in—or, perhaps,
rather through—Saunders’s images, be they Hertha Thiele, Rose Hobart,
or others, as “figures emerging as if captured in a murky limbo between
photography and painting.”21 The imbrication of different materials and
media that defines Saunders’s practice, I would like to point out, may
serve as a practical illustration of the more theoretical argument that I
make in Chap. 2 about the inherent non-transparency of the image. We
recall that Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s concept of cinécriture in Le
Texte divisé—images as a form of writing—prompts a rethinking of the
18
Matt Saunders, “Thread, Pixel, Grain,” in The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition,
eds. Isabelle Graw & Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016, 171–183; 175.
19
Ibid, 176–182.
20
Ibid., 174.
21
Vivian Sky Rehberg, “Matt Saunders,” Frieze, June 6, 2015, https://frieze.com/arti-
cle/matt-saunders, accessed April 9, 2019.
once prevailing position that the incorporeal image projected onto a flat
surface was like a window into a world that just happened to be there. But
the filmic frame is not a conduit to a particular representation; it is the
space of the figural, the space of writing understood as a generative rather
than a reflective act. The assemblage of signs that goes into creating an
image or a series of images is the process of figurality, of poetic inscription,
and it is this process that brings about the kind of semiotic sedimentation
that I have previously referred to in terms of “an expressive thickness.”22
All images are fabricated in one way or another. They have their own form
of density that is simultaneously material and conceptual. Saunders’s work
highlights the representational viscosity that renders all filmic figurations
opaque in some way, albeit in varying degrees. It is as if his stratified
images, suspended in their hybrid visuality, soil the transparent window
that on Fargier’s reading constitutes the real ideology of the screen.
Opaque images like those in Passageworks and the Borneo (Rose Hobart)
series also obstruct the rule of the frontal, if we might recall Kenaan’s term
discussed in Chap. 2. “On the screen,” she contends, “the depth dimen-
sion of the visual, the time of the visual, the invisible or the visual’s Other,
are annulled.”23 The productive work that graphic occlusion achieves in
these instances is the reinstatement of the qualities Kenaan is concerned
about—the depth (both material and hermeneutic) of any given visual
representation, the historical (and temporal) residues at work in the image,
and the alterity of the overlooked and forgotten. The transfiguration of
the actresses Thiele and Hobart in Saunders’s works establishes a relation
with the historical, it brings cultural figures back from oblivion, and it
performs these functions through materiality’s own “thick description.”
A striking feature across Saunders’s work is his interest in actors; often
actors who were once celebrities, as we have seen. In addition to Thiele,
Nielsen, and Hobart, others who make an appearance in his body of work
include Margit Carstensen, Winfried Glatzeder, Heidemarie Wenzel,
Hanna Schygulla, and Matti Pellonpää. In his inventive treatment of the
image of these actors, Saunders does not promulgate a construction of the
actor as a larger-than-life figure, as a star transcending all the characters
they have played. Rather, Saunders has stated that he purposely “conflate[s]
a life with a career,” so that Schygulla, for instance, is portrayed “as a
string of her roles, not her appearances at awards ceremonies, dinners, on
22
Insert page no. when known.
23
Kenaan, xvii.
112 A. S. GRØNSTAD
the street.”24 This curiosity about a composite persona, a subject who is

neither the actual person nor the star or the character, reproduces in a way
the medial undecidability that feeds into the artist’s material practices.
This aesthetics is one that conflates both media (painting and photogra-
phy/film) and performance (the multiple characters embodied by these
actors) to birth a distinctive expressiveness. It is tempting to read this
hovering between states of illegibility and legibility, and of concealment
and display, as an attempt to visualize a condition of secrecy. To invoke
Birchall’s claim that the secret epitomizes the supreme aesthetic object
because it can elicit a reaction unblemished by acts of cognition, we might
say that Saunders’s spectral post-celebrities allude to such a condition. His
16 mm dual-screen installation Double Matti (2006) might serve to eluci-
date this thesis further. Applying ink on Mylar, Saunders drew more than
a thousand pictures of Finnish actor Matti Pellonpää as he appears in Aki
Kaurismäki’s feature film Ariel (1988). On the screen to the left, the actor
is shown sleeping in a segment that is slow and indistinct, whereas on the
screen to the right, which is faster, Pellonpää is awake. Critic Lisa Turvey
offers a concise consideration of the way in which the installation conveys
a dialectics of surface and depth, transparency and opacity, and identity
and performance:
One feels him to be a knowable entity even as-and perhaps because-his fea-
tures slide in and out of legibility. The artist is drawn, here and elsewhere, to
those filmic instants in which actors betray the self behind the character,
which may account for the appeal of Fassbinder and Warhol, as well as for
the frequency of sleeping subjects. In representing these hiccups, and
emphasizing such slippage materially, Saunders succeeds in conveying some-
thing of the personality of those who are, by vocation, impersonators.25
What is conveyed here however is not so much any unknown information

about the actors, but rather their abiding unknowability, their secretive
state, which is given a material form. The secret, Birchall claims, aligns
with “the visible, presentable, or audible” and “tests […] its very limits.”26
Once a secret is revealed, it is no longer a secret. But if the secret as a con-
cept is framed differently, as not principally a hermeneutics but rather a
24
Matt Saunders, in Freeway Balconies, ed. Collier Schorr, Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim,
2008, 31.
25
Lisa Turvey, “On Matt Saunders,” Artforum, 45.6 (2007): 278–279.
26
Birchall, 29.
poetics, our dealings with it will revolve less around informational content
and more around sensation and affect. Due to its opaque fabric and insis-
tent materiality, Saunders’s art—not unlike that of Gehr—is particularly
amenable to organizing the secret as something eminently perceptible.
Images that are grainy, blurry, out-of-focus, fuzzy, or otherwise indistinct
generally lower the information value of a given work, which again invites
a phenomenological modality informed by the spectral and the secret.
It is doubtlessly no accident that the archive holds a special allure for
aestheticians of opacity such as Gehr, Akomfrah, and Saunders (not to
mention Godard, whose output is not considered here but whose render-
ing of the opaque would warrant a separate study). While the archive is
evidently the province of specialists and scholars, it can then also sustain
other kinds of inquiries. That artistic practices may in themselves consti-
tute research is not a new idea, and some of the work of these three film-
makers might fruitfully be regarded as a form of experimental research.
Barry Mauer has maintained that the twentieth-century avant-garde has
contributed to the expansion of research methods by utilizing media heu-
ristically as instruments of intellectual scrutiny. The most recognized his-
torical example of such aesthetics-driven research, Mauer argues, is André
Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924), which considers how then new
techniques of “writing” such as cut-ups and automatic writing may gener-
ate insights of an epistemological nature that are otherwise unattainable.27
Inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series (1977–1980),
Mauer introduces an approach to visual research in order to see how one
can obtain knowledge about media objects while at the same time acquir-
ing self-knowledge. A challenge to the position that interrogations of
visual objects and experience have to be rendered as “alphabetic text” to
count as research, Mauer’s method reveals a family resemblance to a range
of similar phenomena, from Mike Dibb and John Berger’s BBC television
series Ways of Seeing (1971) to the video essay genre and indeed the proj-
ects of Saunders, Akomfrah, and Gehr.
But why does one need to bring up the question of method in the con-
text of the arts of opacity in general and the notion of the secret in particu-
lar? As Marquard Smith reminds us, the term “research” comes from the
Old French word recercer, which means both to search and to search
27
Barry J. Mauer, “The Epistemology of Cindy Sherman: A Research Method for Media
and Cultural Studies,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 38.1
(2005): 93–113; 93.
114 A. S. GRØNSTAD
again. To do research requires that we look for something carefully.28

When Saunders revisits the cache of images of old and (at best) half-
remembered actresses, he is compelled to look at them with care. Above
all, he seems keenly attuned to the sheer physicality of the object, both the
pre-filmic actor and her cinematic engraving, as well as to the aesthetic
possibilities of decomposing and reconstituting this object. Take the image
of Hertha Thiele from the German black-and-white feature Frau
Lehmann’s Daughters (Carl Heinz Wolff, 1932), Hertha Thiele (Frau
Lehmann’s Daughters) #1 (2008), a silver gelatin print on fiber-based
paper. The face of the actress is mostly a grayish smear, the shape of her
head resembling an ice cream cone about to melt away. This compound
materiality contributes, as we have seen, to the image’s graphic opacity,
but the quality of being indistinct in turn heightens our awareness of its
material provenance. This is equally valid for other works in Saunders’s
oeuvre. For example, in the Ratlos/Indomitable series from his solo exhi-
bition Poems of Our Climate (Marian Goodman Gallery, London, 2018),
the artist pairs a series of large-scale etchings printed on the front and back
of each copper plate.29 The images quote another somewhat recondite
cultural object, Alexander Kluge’s fictional character and circus owner
Leni Peickert.
One characteristic of Saunders’s image-making practice that has gone
largely unremarked is his extraction of fragments from larger works and his
subsequent and almost talismanic re-assemblage of these fragments. The
unsung actresses are pried loose from their material, narrative, and histori-
cal contexts to become something else, something much stranger. In a
way, Saunders treats them as secrets; the Latin etymology of the term,
secernere, means “to set apart” and “to divide.” The separation of Thiele,
Nielsen, Hobart, and others from their past medial setting implies an act
of cutting into the dense weave of archived aesthetics to spotlight a certain
feature or inaugurate a new motif. As an artistic approach, the work of
cutting, synthesizing, and obfuscating constitutes a particular mode of
inquiry that I will argue is not too distant from the methods of much
humanities and social science research. Sean Cubitt has argued that what
he names anecdotal evidence represents a “viable” and “vital” alternative to
28
Marquard Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the
Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability,” Journal of Visual Culture, 12.3 (2013),
375–403.
29
The exhibition borrows its name from Wallace Stevens’s eponymous poem from 1942.
the methodologies of the hard sciences, contending that it is, in fact, “our
least superficial mode of inquiry.”30 An anecdotal approach to knowledge
production implies a thorough examination of the individual case, in all its
specificity, whether the case in question is some kind of text, or an object,
phenomenon, situation, or concept. The interrogation of the inimitable
case must however take place against some contextual horizon, and it also
needs to have “depth of revelation and breadth of motives.”31 Anecdotal
evidence is wholly commensurate with hermeneutics as a method; it is, in
fact, one of its fundamental forms. Hence, despite the privileged position
of the particular case—say, a novel, a film, or a philosophical concept—the
anecdotal method is not just concerned with describing its case as accu-
rately as possible. It also uses the specific instance as a heuristic upon which
more abstract phenomena and pronouncements might be built. According
to Cubitt, media studies should be especially invested in this approach,
since “anecdotal interpretation begins not at the level of meanings but at
the prior level of mediations—the materials, energies, and connections
comprising the event.”32 A project such as Passageworks exemplifies just
such an investigation of the materiality of the process of mediation, fore-
grounding its chemical instabilities and aesthetic malleability. As Saunders’s
drawn negatives are blown up, so in a sense is the opacity always virtually
embedded within the act of medial transmission.
A poetics of opacity is thus in the service of a larger epistemic assign-
ment that addresses the thickness of our experience. Cubitt cogently
explains the nature of this assignment in this lengthy excerpt:
The insistent materialism of the anecdotal method drags us over and over
back to the grit of actuality. In this it has several virtues lacking in other
social science and humanities methods. The anecdotal method makes it
impossible to ignore the excluded and the effects of exclusion. It forces us
to confront the materiality of people, things, and events, and therefore
makes us understand that in any event the human cannot be separated from
the technical, physical, or organic environments. In this regard anecdotalism
is an ecological approach and in that sense is anti-humanist. At the same
time, whenever the anecdote is recounted by a human the humanity of that
30
Sean Cubitt, “Anecdotal Evidence,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies,
Spring 2013, https://necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2013-the-green-issue/, accessed
May 29, 2019.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
116 A. S. GRØNSTAD
individual comes under the microscope, in all its diffuse porousness. The
anecdote makes us understand the multiple contexts operating in a text or
event, a technology or a technique, and in their observation; a process in
which it confronts the specific instance in which suffering occurs, happiness
is sacrificed, satisfaction dulled, wit blunted. It makes us face up to the cost
of a general Good and in that sense can regenerate our ideas of what we
might mean by the commons.33
More so than transparency, opacity directs our attention toward the mate-
riality of any given representation and, no less importantly, toward the
materiality of relations, whether of a social, political, or ecological order.
Works such as those of Saunders and of the other artists considered above
certainly embody an anecdotal mode of inquiry, but that is not all; they are
also in a way doubly anti-positivist in that they not only favor specificity
over typicality but also in that they deform their content, thus putting a
certain amount of phenomenological pressure on straightforward legibil-
ity. Passagenwerk and similar artworks underline what Giovanna Fossati
terms “the archival life” of media, their unavoidable recording of the
traces of their own mutability through time.34
Ibid.
33
Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film, Amsterdam: Amsterdam
34

CHAPTER 6
And Dark Within: David Lynch
In the cinema of both Ernie Gehr and John Akomfrah, graphic space is
configured so as to produce opacity effects. As we have seen, a sense of
spectrality and of the uncanny looms over both Abracadabra, to take just
one example from the former’s oeuvre, and The Nine Muses. If we fast-
forward to the work of Trevor Paglen and Zach Blas, which I will consider
in subsequent chapters, we will see that similar conjunctions of the opaque
and the ghostly reoccur, for example, in Paglen’s They Watch the Moon
(2010) and Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014). While I do
not in any way suggest that the poetics of opacity is ineluctably interwoven
with the spectral, the correlation is at least enticing enough to be worthy
of further pursuit. An elucidating ideational context for the spatial figura-
tions considered here is the notion of warped space as developed by
Anthony Vidler. After the Enlightenment fantasy of a transparent, rational
space came Romanticism’s conception of the terrifying sublime and mod-
ernism’s alienating megalopolises and distorted points of view. Modernity,
Vidler holds, encouraged an architecture and art whose spatial forms
became associated with “[f]ear, anxiety, estrangement, and their psycho-
logical counterparts, anxiety neuroses and phobias.”1 Artistically, the shat-
tering of the laws of Renaissance perspective found expression in what
Vidler calls “warpings of the normal,” an expressive feature of a range of
the—isms pervasive in the first half of the twentieth century—cubism,
1
Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture,

118 A. S. GRØNSTAD
dadaism, futurism, expressionism, and surrealism.2 The splintering of the

unified body, unhospitable urban architecture, nightmarish disorienta-
tion—these were some of the characteristics of the spatial aesthetics of
modernism. For Vidler, the psychological underpinnings of this aesthetic
are key. Warped space may be grasped as “a metaphor that includes all the
varieties of such forcing [psychological experience forcing aesthetic expres-
sions], the attempt, however vain, to permeate the formal with the
psychological.”3 From around the turn of the twentieth century, space
came to replace style as the pivot of research in art history, just as approaches
influenced by psychology were flourishing: Robert Vischer’s advancement
of the notion of Einfühlung and aesthetic sympathy, developed further by
the influential philosopher Theodor Lipps; Gottfried Semper’s anthropo-
logically informed theory of the four elements of architecture; August
Schmarsow’s concept of Körperempfindung; and Sigfried Giedion’s canon-
ical history of architectural space published as Space, Time and Architecture
in 1941, to name a few. The rise of spatial ideas filtered through the prism
of psychology roughly coincided with the various deformations of the
avant-garde movements and with an escalating sense of existential anxiety
articulated, for instance, in the work of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer,
and Walter Benjamin.
The space of the image is not the same kind of space with which Vidler
and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers alluded to
above are preoccupied. Architectural space obviously belongs to our
shared three-dimensional world, whereas photographic and filmic space—
as well as the space of painting and drawing—is two-dimensional and one
step removed from the empirical reality of buildings, monuments, and
landscapes. The concept of opacity as it is explored here is primarily tied to
the innumerable disruptions of the image plane, but there is no reason
why it could not also pertain to possible fractures and fissures in the space
“behind” the image space; that is, referential space, or even psychological
space. A striking contemporary instantiation of “warped space,” I would
like to suggest, is found in some of the work of David Lynch, particularly
his Inland Empire (2006), as well as episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return
(2017). Although remaining firmly within the domain of two-dimensional
“representational” space, Lynch’s images, I contend, not only rekindle the
cultural anxieties and psychological torment suffusing many of the
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., 2.
6 AND DARK WITHIN: DAVID LYNCH 119
modernist movements but also radiate another form of opacity that is

sharply dissimilar to those previously discussed. Inland Empire and epi-
sode 8, “Gotta Light,” inscribe opacity differently; they are works upon
which issues of spatial warping, architectural uncanniness, psychic agony,
and interpretive impenetrability all coalesce. Even if they on the whole do
not share the quality of being graphically indistinct, like low-definition
photographs or films, Lynch’s visual compositions nonetheless generate
their own obfuscations, which I propose to name, for reasons that will be
made clearer below, narrative opacity.
Instantly canonized as perhaps the greatest moment in television his-
tory—at least aesthetically—the eight installment of Twin Peaks: The
Return, which aired on June 25, 2017, is essentially an hour of uncom-
promising avant-garde cinema. One critic calls the work “horrifyingly
beautiful, thought-provoking and thought-annihilating,”4 while another
holds that “[t]here’s nothing to point to in the history of television that
helps describe exactly what this episode attempts.”5 In terms of storytell-
ing, it has been suggested, “clarity is beside the point, and perhaps
impossible.”6 The critical reception of the episode has however gravitated
toward the proposition that its thematic backbone is nothing less than the
origin of evil in the world, epitomized by the image of the mushroom
cloud from the first nuclear test site in White Sands, New Mexico.
Discharged on July 16, 1945, mere weeks before Fat Man was dropped on
Nagasaki, the operation known under the John Donne-inspired code
name of “Trinity” ushered in the atomic age. In Lynch’s episode, the
scene is accompanied by a segment from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody
to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and displays the same murky and gray
hues that also mark other parts of this chapter of the series. One critic
notes that the episode is “dusky” and “dim,” and hence “appropriate for
4
Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Eight Episode of Twin Peaks: The Return Is Horrifyingly
Beautiful,” Vulture, June 26, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/twin-peaks-the-
return-part-8-atom-bomb-flashback.html, accessed December 21, 2017.
5
Noel Murray, “Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 8: White Light White Heat,” New York
Times, June 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/arts/television/twin-
peaks-season-3-episode-8-recap.html, accessed December 21, 2017.
6
Corey Atad, “Last Night’s Terrifying Twin Peaks Will Be Remembered as One of the
Best Episodes of Television Ever,” Esquire, June 26, 2017, http://www.esquire.com/enter-
tainment/tv/a55877/twin-peaks-part-8-recap/, accessed December 21, 2017.
120 A. S. GRØNSTAD
a story about spiritual darkness,” although, he adds, “some things were

hard to make out.”7
In what follows, I would like to use the “Gotta Light” episode to help
me think through the notion of opacity from a fresh angle. My aims in this
chapter are both to find out what the term narrative opacity might mean
and to probe into the tangled interrelations of phenomena such as warped
spaces (graphic as well as narrative), opacity, spectrality, and ecological
precariousness. A guiding hypothesis, in this context, is that the fruits of
opacity are the televisual enunciation of realities and materialities beyond
our immediate perceptibility. The nebulousness of Lynch’s cosmology
challenges the total absorption of experience by empirical observation and
accentuates a state of epistemological unknowability. As some critics have
observed, the Lynchian image is “often on the verge of disappearing, or
becoming blurred and losing any fixed form.”8 The “dusky” and “dim”
features of the episode, in other words, allegorize a condition of bewilder-
ment, in which there are secrets, puzzles, and unknown or unformed
knowledge to grapple with. This kind of opaque poetics is less indebted to
Glissantian ethics and more aligned with a kind of epistemic mysticism,
but what it nonetheless shares with the forms of opacity found in Gehr,
Akomfrah, and Saunders is the resistance to the claims of a hollow
positivism.
Much of this book’s discussion of opacity and broken art has thus far
engaged with the graphic dimension, the image, and its surface. But do
these material phenomena—the blur, tainted emulsion, the lens flare, the
out-of-focus—translate into a narrative register? The most immediate
equivalence is perhaps the form of elision that is often part of the compo-
sitional fabric in art cinema. When Janet Bergstrom considers the role of
opacity in the cinema of Claire Denis, for example, it appears that she is
mostly talking about the director’s deployment of ellipsis as an aesthetic
technique.9 Furthermore, in one of the most influential treatises on narra-
tive theory and cinema, David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film
(1985), the existence of gaps and of ambiguity is seen as a significant
7
Jeff Jensen, “Twin Peaks recap: The Return Part 8,” Entertainment, June 26, 2017,
http://ew.com/recap/twin-peaks-season-3-episode-8/, accessed December 21, 2017.
8
Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses
[2010], New York: Routledge, 2015, 163.
9
Janet Bergstrom, “Opacity in the Films of Claire Denis,” in French Civilization and its
Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, eds. Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele,
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003, 69–101.
component of art cinema narration.10 The notion of narrative opacity,

then, seems close in meaning to the ellipsis, understood as a narrational
device. But in neo-formalist vocabularies, the elliptical assumes a role that
is principally functional, in that it denotes not so much the lack of knowl-
edge as the absence of information, information that—prior to the process
of narration—was already part of the hypothetical diegetic world. In this
narratological ecosystem, the ellipsis designates the information that has
not been selected for inclusion in the film’s syuzhet, to stick with
Bordwellian terminology. But in principle it might have been. The idea of
narrative opacity that I want to explore here is a somewhat different beast.
For one thing, it is not redactive; diegetic information is not withheld for
the purpose of creating curiosity, bewilderment, or frustration. The pres-
ence of opacity in a narrative like Inland Empire or the “Gotta Light”
episode does not index what is missing from the known but rather that
which belongs to the unknown or the only vaguely known. As Martha
Nochimson has argued, Lynch’s cinema, especially after Lost Highway
(1997), is turned toward an experience of “beyondness” that is indebted
to the Vedic tradition.11 What is narratively opaque in this filmic universe
is that which seeps through the diegesis from this other sphere. Some
would call it mysticism. But narrative opacity is also when, as in “Gotta
Light,” the progression of the story is overwhelmed or immobilized by
the graphic qualities of the work. This I shall return to below.
The anecdote of how Lynch, after starting out as a painter, took up
filmmaking is itself tinged with opacity. Appointed to produce a moving
painting, what the filmmaker refers to as “a sculptured screen,” Lynch
experimented with a second-hand Bolex camera that took single frames.
Not realizing that the take-up spool was cracked, he had inadvertently cre-
ated a work that, in his own words, was “one continuous blur.”12 The
description would not be entirely out of place when addressing the almost
five-minute-long scene in “Gotta Light” that shows the detonation of the
first nuclear bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico early
in the morning of July 16, 1945. Digitally reconceived, Lynch’s depiction
departs perspectivally from the original test footage, available to watch on
10
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985, 210; 212.
11
Martha B. Nochimson, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highay to Inland
Empire, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, xiv.
12
David Lynch interviewed in Justus Nieland, David Lynch, Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2012, 169.
122 A. S. GRØNSTAD
YouTube, in which the camera is positioned a couple of miles away from

the site. The “Gotta Light” shot offers a considerably more intimate view
of the blast, imitating, as Monique Rooney has suggested, a drone-eye
point of view as it approaches “the fermenting heart” of the atomic
cloud.13 About two minutes in, after a beginning that has the image
drenched in near darkness, followed by a long pan-in on the expanding
mushroom cloud, the next three minutes of screen time take us inside the
explosion. During this lengthy segment, conventional mimetic space yields
to a procession of lambent, pulsating orange and brown hues, white noise,
flickering particles, indecipherable shapes, psychedelic formations of
smoke, a disorienting blackness violently interrupted by fire and flames,
and figurations always emerging from and receding back into formless-
ness. Wholly singular in the history of television, the sequence is reminis-
cent of abstract cinema, certainly closer to the work of someone like Hans
Richter, Peter Kubelka, or the Ernie Gehr of Reverberation, History, and
Field than to anything else shown on Showtime, Netflix, or HBO
(Fig. 6.1).
In the remainder of this chapter, I want to approach Lynch’s poetics of
opacity with an eye both to its material components and to its conceptual
compass. My guiding hypothesis is that the “Gotta Light” episode in par-
ticular and The Return in general stage its occasionally dazzling weirdness
not as an end in itself but as a way of articulating, or at least alluding to,
interconnections and linkages that elude more conventional and transpar-
ent fictions. More specifically, I shall argue that the textual fabric of
Lynch’s televisual space provides a nexus onto which a set of disparate yet
stealthily affiliated phenomena converge: environmental vulnerability,
existential uncertainty, transformative materiality, metaphysics, and tech-
nologies of mediation. My reading of the episode will aim to show that
Lynch’s orchestration of this space embodies the knowledge that environ-
ments can be media too.14
By the time that Twin Peaks: The Return premiered on Showtime on
May 21, 2017, its creator was of course already associated with a certain
aptitude for opaqueness. From his early short animated film Six Men
13
Monique Rooney, “Air-object: on air media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin
Peaks: The Return, 2017)” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16.2 (2018):
123–143; 132.
14
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Fig. 6.1 Screengrab from Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)
Getting Sick (1966) through Eraserhead (1977) and the first run of Twin
Peaks on ABC (1990–1991) to his later features such as Mulholland Drive
(2001) and the aforementioned Inland Empire, Lynch has nurtured a
style of narration that sometimes leans toward the perplexing and the
impenetrable. This propensity is something that the expansive scholarly
literature around his work has also picked up on, as evidenced by titles
such as Todd McGowan’s Impossible David Lynch (2007), Eric G. Wilson’s
Strange World of David Lynch (2007), Greg Olson’s David Lynch:
Beautiful Dark (2008), Martha Nochimson’s David Lynch Swerves:
Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (2013), Dennis Lim’s
David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015), and the artist’s own
book for the exhibition of the same name, David Lynch: Between Two
Worlds (2015). When, after a twenty-five-year hiatus, Twin Peaks returned
in the spring of 2017 with both veteran and new cast members, it redou-
bled the original show’s trademark secretiveness. Featuring multiple plot
lines and with parts of the action taking place not just in the eponymous
town but also in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Philadelphia, and South Dakota,
The Return’s narrative is too convoluted to recount in any economic fash-
ion here. Then again, a detailed synopsis is not especially pertinent to the
124 A. S. GRØNSTAD
subject of my analysis. The overarching storyline involves Special Agent

Dale Cooper’s return to Twin Peaks, after being possessed by an evil twin
and after his paranormal metamorphosis into insurance guy Dougie Jones.
When Cooper finally wakes up from his trance-like stupor to become him-
self again in the show’s sixteenth and antepenultimate episode, his mission
is no longer to unravel the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder but rather to
thwart its occurrence.
The “Gotta Light” episode takes place roughly halfway through the
series and begins with Cooper’s doppelganger driving down the highway
at night with his double-crossing associate Ray Monroe, who after a dis-
pute over withheld information ends up shooting Cooper in the chest. So
far the chapter plays like a noir narrative. With Cooper dead on the ground,
however, the action shifts into a supernatural register. Emerging from a
copse of trees are the Woodsmen, a cluster of bearded and ragged phan-
toms, reminiscent of the frontiersmen of the American West, who, after
performing some kind of ritual, start digging into Cooper’s body and his
gunshot wounds. From his flesh they exhume an orb with the face of Killer
BOB, the evil spirit from the Black Lodge who possessed the character of
Leland Palmer in the first seasons. Being a witness to the whole spectacle,
Ray splits from the specters to make a call to someone named Jeffries.
Lynch then cuts to The Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, where the industrial
rock band Nine Inch Nails (lead by Trent Reznor, who worked with
Lynch on Lost Highway (1997)) is shown performing their song “She’s
Gone Away” from their 2016 EP Not the Actual Events. Containing lyrics
like “You dig in places till your fingers bleed/Spread the infection, where
you spill your seed,” the song seems thematically cohesive with the main
scenes that sandwich it. After cutting back to the resuscitated Cooper,
now cleansed of his evil spirit, the episode launches into its centerpiece,
the atomic blast taking place just before dawn on July 16 at Jornada del
Muerto/White Sands as part of the Manhattan Project. Through the use
of Penderecki’s dirge, memorably used in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick,
1980), The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991), Children of Men
(Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), and Lynch’s own Wild at Heart (1990) and
Inland Empire, Lynch infuses the sequence with a sense of despondency
that negates the military-industrial triumphalism of the historical event.
When the lengthy sequence of the explosion eventually fades, we are
outside a creepy convenience store/gas station, perhaps not entirely dis-
similar from ersatz towns like Survival City in Nevada that were built close
to the atomic test sites in the postwar years. Engulfed by smoke, the
building is suddenly surrounded by Woodsmen, possibly of the same kind

we saw earlier (in the original seasons of Twin Peaks, a character named the
Woodsman was among the beings from the Black Lodge that used to
gather above a convenience store), or alternatively ghosts from people
who perished in the detonation. Implausible as it may seem, from this
point on the episode only gets weirder. The so-called experiment secretes
an orb with the face of BOB. In what is conceivably the famous White
Lodge, a colossal citadel towering above an ultraviolet sea, Señorita Dido
sits on a sofa listening to a gramophone player, a huge black alarm bell
with electrodes some feet away from her. The black-and-white scene is
evocative of a silent movie atmosphere. Next the Giant enters the parlor.
He listens to the sound and the leaves to go upstairs to an old movie the-
atre, in which he watches the Trinity explosion, as well as images of the
Woodsmen and the BOB orb. Pausing the display, the Giant starts to levi-
tate, his mouth emitting golden morsels one of which is an orb with the
face of Laura Palmer. Señorita Dido has now also entered the auditorium
and receives the orb. She kisses it and sends it upward through a peculiar
tube system, which shoots it out onto the screen, now showing an image
of the globe.
In the episode’s final section the date is August 5, 1956. Hatching from
one of the dappled eggs shown earlier is a mutant creature, part beetle and
part toad. We then see a young couple walking home after a date from a
local joint that exhibits a conspicuous resemblance to the gas station/
convenience store besieged by the Woodsmen. From there Lynch cuts
back to the desert at night and the Woodsman (played by the noted
Abraham Lincoln impersonator Robert Broski), who staggers out in front
of a car, grimy-faced and unkempt, asking the driver for a light in a voice
that sounds both gruff and radioactive. A tense and insistent buzzing
sound accompanies the scene. Lured toward a local radio station, perhaps
by his electrified being responding to its signal, the Woodsman kills the
receptionist and takes charge of the control booth. Into the microphone
he recites the following words: “This is the water and this is the well/
Drink full and descend/The horse is the white of the eyes and dark
within.” He endlessly repeats these lines with slight intonational altera-
tions, and as these eerily incantatory sounds are relayed over the airwaves,
listeners—a waitress, a mechanic, and the teenage girl from the date—are
subject to narcoleptic spells. It is also during this dark recitation that the
mutant organism from the previous scene appears in the girl’s room and
126 A. S. GRØNSTAD
crawls into her open mouth. The episode concludes with the Woodman
leaving the KPJK radio station to the distant sound of a shrieking horse.
From a narrative point of view, opacity envelops virtually the entire
episode. Most of the events shown can hardly be said to belong to any
recognizable mimetic universe, and even one that does, the explosion, is
rendered in a formally experimental manner that departs substantially
from representational verisimilitude (the other exceptions are the drive in
the beginning, the music performance, and the date). The kind of opacity
encountered here, one suspects, cannot be alleviated by filling in informa-
tional gaps or by providing alternative narrative perspectives. It appears
that inscrutability is the very point of the narration. But just as the artful
deployment of opacity in the preceding cases that I have discussed can be
linked with a particular critical/ethical position, be it the indictment of a
colonializing positivism or the preservation of alterity, so can the forms of
opacity in “Gotta Light,” narrative as well as graphic, be analytically tied
to other issues; in my reading of the show, I want to suggest that the aes-
thetic architecture of the episode in question adumbrates ecocritical and
techno-environmental problems from which a host of biopolitical anxiet-
ies arise. While it may be true that Twin Peaks: The Return is “the most
avantgarde piece of mainstream television since the show’s initial run,” its
unfettered experimentalism is not solipsistic but engages, however
obliquely, with some of the most urgent issues of our day.15
That Lynch’s cosmology teems with narrative opacity is underscored
not only by the account of “Gotta Light” episode above but also by the
extent to which the series has triggered the fan base’s appetite for specula-
tion and riddle-solving.16 More often than not the audience has to deci-
pher practically everything they see, their attempted descriptions coming
across as much as interpretations as summaries. Some critics have con-
tended that the level of formal experimentation seen in that episode even
amounts to a transformation of the space of television. “The almost uni-
versal viewer reaction of astonishment to Part 8,” Donato Totaro writes,
“is an indication that Lynch was indeed testing the ‘limits’ of visual
15
Dan Martin, “Twin Peaks Recap: Episode Eight—The Most Mind-Melting, Majestic
Outing Yet,” The Guardian, June 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2017/jun/26/twin-peaks-recap-episode-eight-the-most-mind-melting-majestic-
outing-yet, accessed December 11, 2017.
16
See, for instance, Jake Pitre, “Fan Reactions to The Leftovers and Twin Peaks: The
Return,” Transformative Works and Cultures, 26 (2018), https://journal.transformative-
works.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1300/1570, accessed July 17, 2019.
representation.”17 While the presence of opaque form in Lynch’s work is

a pretty uncontroversial observation, what has received much less atten-
tion, however, is the curious co-existence of metaphysics and materiality in
this fictional world. On the one hand, the diegesis of The Return swarms
with supernatural entities, like the ashen, spidery apparitions, the orbs,
and the garmonbozia—”the fear and sorrow of human kind,” the rotten
corn related to black fire—consumed by Bob and other monsters from the
Black Lodge.18 Like in the work of Gehr and Saunders referred to above,
the Lynchian universe is one replete with spectral beings. On the other
hand, the show flaunts an obsession with technology, evident not only in
the epochal atomic blast but also in the prominent place given to figura-
tions of electricity. “Throughout The Return,” Monique Rooney writes,
“are images and sounds of electrical buzzing or sparking, telegraph lines
crisscrossing the sky, lightning striking the earth, power outlets awaiting
connection.” These spectacles, Rooney claims, “represent the telecom-
munications infrastructure of our time. Such aural and visual manifesta-
tions of an electrified, ever-humming atmosphere are trademark Lynch.”19
In addition, the show features a rich array of modern communication
technologies and devices, from digital screens and GPS to radio, televi-
sion, mobile phones, Skype, email, and text messaging. Episode 8, for
example, starts with Evil Cooper deactivating several tracking devices with
his phone and ends with the profoundly spooky and hypnotic poem recited
by the Woodsman and broadcast over the airwaves to detrimental effect.
On Rooney’s interpretation of the sequence, the Woodsman’s transmittal
“creates a suggestive link between technologies of atomic destruction, the
mainstream media’s dissemination of news since 1945 and the digital-era
climate of the contemporary period.”20 The organic synthesis of the super-
natural and the technological in Lynch’s art constitutes, I would like to
point out, an inimitable aesthetic imaginary with the creative power to
17
Donato Totaro, “Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8: The Western, Science-Fiction and the
BIG BOmB,” Offscreen, 21.11–12 (2017), https://offscreen.com/view/twin-peaks-the-
return-part-8-the-western-science-fiction-and-big-bomb, accessed July 15, 2019.
18
The appearance of specters and the suggestion that certain sites might be haunted makes
diegetic sense in the context of the displacement of Native American tribes in eastern
Washington State as the Manhattan Project commenced plutonium production in the area.
19
Monique Rooney, “Air-object: on air media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin
Peaks: The Return, 2017)” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16.2 (2018):
123–143; 136.
20
Ibid.
128 A. S. GRØNSTAD
organize two modes of opacity: the nebulous province of specters and the
irreducible thickness of the media object.21
The poetics of opacity represents a crucial element of the strangeness
that so unfailingly has come to define Lynch’s art. This strangeness is in a
sense a stylistically heightened manifestation of the defamiliarizing effect
inherent in the moving image as a medium. Likening film’s capacity for
worldmaking to that of Anthropocene humanity’s transformation of
nature, Jennifer Fay sees cinema as emblematic of “the aesthetic practice
of the Anthropocene.”22 Embedded in her theory is also a reference to
phantomality. Drawing on the work of Maxim Gorky, she points out that
the early silents were perceived as “ghostly animations” that “revive[d]
supernatural experience.”23 A consequence of the industrial revolution,
the monochromatic images of early cinema succeeded in making the famil-
iar strange, infusing the medium with a sense of the uncanny. If the history
of our media revolves fundamentally around “the productive possibility of
capturing what exists,” as Durham Peters has put it,24 we might say that
the indefinite and shapeless existence of supernatural energy is part of
what cinema, video, and television historically have tried to capture.25 It is
important to note that this cinema understood thus is not predominantly
a realist medium but a generator of artificial worlds. For Fay, the medium’s
relationship with artifice is not just a result of its inclination to produce
fictional stories but also extends to the very texture of film’s scenographic
affordances. Especially with the rise in the 1920s of sizeable indoor studios
such as the UFA city outside Berlin, cinema became an art of simulation
and fakery, its architecture increasingly composed of disposable structures
and phony environments. According to Fay, there is a “philosophical”
relation between what she refers to as “the histories, temporalities, and
aesthetics of human-driven climate change and the politics, environmen-
talism, and ethics of cinema.”26 The manufacture of artificial worlds is
21
For my conceptualization of the aesthetic imaginary, see Asbjørn Grønstad, “The
Aesthetic Imaginary and the Case of Ernie Gehr,” in Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, eds.
Lene Johannessen & Mark Ledbetter, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018, 3–15.
22
Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2018, 4.
23
Ibid., 3.
24
Durham Peters, 11.
25
This point chimes with Agamben’s reflections on the spectral dimension of cinema as
noted in the chapter on Ernie Gehr above.
26
Fay, 5.
something that the practice of filmmaking shares with the anthropocene

condition. Cinema also produces abnormal weather (one of Fay’s exam-
ples is Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and natural disasters (the
latter of which has occasioned a genre of its own), “willed and wanted
milieu[s],” as Fay calls it.27
An instructive case for the way in which anthropogenic ecologies are a
matter of intentional design are the mock towns built by the Atomic
Energy Commission after the Second World War in places like Nevada.
The nuclear test film became practically a genre onto its own, showing sets
meticulously modeled on the quintessential American small town being
blown up in order to analyze the effect of atomic power on the surround-
ings. One of the official test films is Operation Cue (1955), made by the
Federal Civil Defense Administration and narrated in part by reporter
June Collin. Featuring regular and “enhanced” residences, mannequins,
canned food, gas tanks, power lines, and transformers, the fifteen-minute-
long documentary unveils the detonation of a thirty-kiloton bomb as seen
by a group of journalists and military and civil defense observers from
“Media Hill” a couple of miles away. Panning 180 degrees away from the
hill, the camera captures the iconic image of a mushroom cloud, followed
by a montage of the impact the blast has on buildings and radio towers.
Using slow motion and high-speed cinematography as well as an overly
dramatic music score, the sequence attains an almost fictional quality, in
the process aestheticizing the experiment. The point of the exercise and
ensuing spectacle is to test the endurance of everyday objects as they are
exposed to radiation. As the male voice-over remarks, “[r]ows of manne-
quins were set up in the open, facing the blast. Each item of clothing and
each color had been carefully selected to give much needed survival infor-
mation.” Only twenty-four hours later were the observers permitted to
survey the test site and the damage the blast had wrought; they note that
“enhanced” houses were in better shape than regular ones and that gas
tanks were intact. What the film fails to mention is that the original bomb
failed and a second one had to be set off, the latter generating a radioactive
cloud that stretched across and polluted a vast area from Utah to Colorado
and the Great Plains. As Fay writes, “the results were themselves altered or
stage-managed to downplay the devastation of even this smaller bomb to
reinforce the Civil Defense’s script of nuclear preparedness (the necessity
of bomb shelters, good housekeeping, and an alertness to the news) and
27
Ibid., 4.
130 A. S. GRØNSTAD
the fiction of nuclear survival.”28 From the beginning, then, and long
before Lynch’s astounding re-imagining of the Trinity blast, the footage
of nuclear culture was already subject to aesthetic management.
A key difference between the depiction of the blast in, respectively, The
Return, Operation Cue, and the original takes of the actual Trinity foot-
age, is that the televisual fantasy roams into the explosion itself. By con-
trast, Operation Cue instantly cuts to the objects crushed by its force. As
for the Trinity footage, the camera lingers a little while on the immediate
aftermath of the detonation, giving some screen time to the billowing
smoke that arises. Enthrallingly, the sliding into non-figurative shapes in
Lynch’s segment reiterates the unrepresentability associated with atomic
eruption. About this particular form of opacity Akira Lippit has stated the
following:
There can be no authentic photography of atomic war because the bomb-

ings were themselves a form of total photography that exceeded the econo-
mies of representation, testing the very visibility of the visual. Only a negative
photography is possible in the atomic arena, a skiagraphy, a shadow photog-
raphy, the shadow of photography. By positing the spectator within the
frames of an annihilating image, an image of annihilation, but also the anni-
hilation of images, no one survives, nothing remains.29
In Lynch’s treatment of the blast the aesthetic imaginary supplants real-

ism, but it is a replacement that accepts the unshowability of the event,
favoring the optically indefinite over an impossible verisimilitude. In this,
The Return departs from the history of nuclear cinema which, as Fay
points out, has not only documented the blasts but rendered them as “aes-
thetic experiences” that in the process convert “the chaos of the fallout
into comprehensible narratives” and prepare audiences “to survive or
endure the culture of nuclearism.”30 While the “Gotta Light” episode cer-
tainly counts as an aesthetic experience, it is hardly in the business of
recounting a “comprehensible” narrative. In fact, the viewer has reason to
suspect that the show does the exact opposite, relaying an impenetrable
story that is concerned not with survival but with extinction.
28
Ibid., 62.
29
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005, 81. CHECK PAGE NO.
30
Fay, 17.
Approached as figure or metaphor, then, the opacity of Lynch’s aes-

thetic world could be found to index a future condition of diminished
semiosis, a deterioration of expressive capability in the context of an emer-
gent, deleterious eschatology. The Trinity detonation in the summer of
1945 has been seen by among others the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz as the
event to instigate the era of the Anthropocene. In “Gotta Light,” the
explosion does not only occupy a textually prominent position, but it also
signifies the discharge of evil into the world. Like other works in Lynch’s
catalogue, moreover, Twin Peaks: The Return is stylistically close to film
noir, a genre whose “negative environments” and “attachments to bad
living,” according to Fay, mark it as an “extinction narrative.”31 Noir as a
historical genre and a particular style suggests opacity in its very name. Its
preference for the dark is often graphically inscribed through the films’
abundant shadows and nocturnal city streets. The genre also embodies
narrative opacity; consider, for instance, the perplexing plot structure of
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). With its warped spaces, horrid acts
of violence, murky hues, and nods to film noir, is the “Gotta Light” epi-
sode, then, an extinction narrative, an addition from a perhaps unpre-
dicted source to what one might see as anthropocene televisuality? In this
installment the show comes close, but I would propose nonetheless that
the episode should not be reduced to a statement regarding nuclear apoc-
alypticism. Lynch’s reliance on graphic and narrative forms of opacity is a
material expression of the primary uncertainty that defines his cosmology.
There is an argument in the scholarship around Lynch’s cinema, associ-
ated first and foremost with Martha Nochimson’s work, that physics rather
than philosophy, psychology, or literature informs the modeling of the
films’ fictional worlds. An investment in a principle of boundlessness—an
enduring pursuit for philosophy and art from Lucretius through William
Blake and Edgar Allan Poe—is key here. Claiming that consciousness rep-
resents the director’s chief interest, Nochimson argues that Lynch sees
both mind and matter as infinite—and infinitely malleable—entities and
that this boundlessness is integral to reality. On her view, Lynch’s films
demonstrate “the figurative uses of the uncertain principle of modern
physics.”32 His is a cinema that “has never been realistic in a reductionist
sense; it has always sought the real through the poetic, utilizing images in
metaphoric ways to speak of what metaphors speak of: those liminal and
31
Ibid., 18.
32
Nochimson, 162.
132 A. S. GRØNSTAD
complex aspects of our lives that cannot be directly named.”33 If we sub-

scribe to this interpretation of poetic expressivity, the mode itself—poet-
ics—is one which keeps close company with the indefinite and the opaque.
As Nochimson frames the discussion, the object of poetic enunciation is
the unutterability of “liminal” experience. Such experience is necessarily
unavailable to conventionally mimetic representational practices but may
presumably be invoked by various modes of post-representational inscrip-
tions, of which opaque aesthetics constitutes one possibility. When one
critic claims that Lynch’s imagining of the nuclear detonation is indebted
to Willem de Kooning’s musings on the transformative qualities of atomic
light, the observation supports a reading of the scene as an example of
televisual opacity.34
If the graphic and narrative obfuscations of “Gotta Light” nurture the
uncertainty and boundlessness certain critics see as central to Lynch’s art,
could it be that the transparent image occasions a blockage of that sphere
of “beyondness” with which this filmmaker tries to engage? In other
words, can a fixed image of complete optical clarity, even a moving one,
produce a sense of the alternative realities, the parallel worlds—exterior as
well as interior—seen as possibilities by the Vedic tradition and modern
physics alike? Note that this is not an argument against the potential ambi-
guity of the transparent image or its semantic richness or even its occa-
sional abstruseness. The issue is neither the multiplicity of meaning
generated by visual expressions nor poststructuralist undecidability, but
rather the question of the existence of other realms of existence and con-
sciousness and their aesthetic communicability. To elucidate this point, let
me quote Mark Cousin’s description of Inland Empire, a film that, he
writes, “doesn’t move its people and world on so much as bolt annexes,
parallel worlds, onto them. It’s a film of tumours, rumours, humours,
outgrowths from a constant centre.”35 His comment would not have been
out of place if it had been made about Twin Peaks: The Return. What lies
beneath is by definition unknown, and opacity as an artistic approach can
be one way of calling attention to this unfamiliarity. Cousin’s statement
may align with Élie Faure’s concept of cineplastics, which denotes the
material malleability of cinema as a medium. In his work on Lynch, Justus
33
Ibid., 160.
34
Totaro.
35
Mark Cousins, “Still Life with Attitude,” Sight and Sound, 23.3 (2013): 17.
Nieland underscores the director’s fascination with plastic and pinpoints

the material’s “capacity for infinite transformation.”36
In an earlier work I introduced the idea of contagious mediation to
account for patterns of intertextual and transmedial influence as well as for
the ways in which media restructure our sense apparatus.37 Bringing this
chapter to a close, I want to use this concept to reiterate what I find to be
a vital interpretive frame for making sense of Lynch’s world as it appears
to us in the “Gotta Light” episode. The prominent role that uncertainty
and mysticism play in the Lynchian oeuvre has been aptly documented by
previous scholarship, and my identification of a process of narrative opac-
ity builds further upon this foundation.38 In the eighth chapter of The
Return the centerpiece is a protracted sequence whose graphic qualities
are reminiscent of the experimental forms of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage
and Ernie Gehr. Its subject matter is nothing less than the instigation of
the Anthropocene epoch and the materialization of evil and its release into
the world. There is thus a robust correlation between, on the one hand,
the nature of the visual texture of the sequence—bolstered by the “sonic
thickness” of the fifty-two instruments performing Penderecki’s
Threnody—and, on the other, the theme of virulent malice being dis-
charged into the atmosphere.39 Studied through Lynch’s prism, one dis-
cerns that acts of mediation are embroiled in the toxification of the
environment. As Rooney points out,
[w]ind rushes through Douglas-firs, electric-lit air buzzes and crackles and a
nuclear mushroom cloud blasts the atmosphere. While it visually and aurally
represents air in its most elemental forms (as wind, breath), The Return also
simulates an atmosphere that has been contaminated and weaponised.40
Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s notion that in the post-nuclear age the envi-
ronment rather than the body constitutes the target of terrorism and
36
Justus Nieland, David Lynch, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012, 5. Faure’s essay
on cineplastics can be found in the posthumous publication Fonction du Cinema, Paris:
Mediations, 1953.
37
Asbjørn Grønstad, “Refigurations of Walden: Notes on Contagious Mediation,” in
Literature in Contemporary Media Culture, eds. Sarah J. Paulson & Anders Skare Malvik,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016, 207–222.
38
See, for instance, contributions by Nochimson, Wilson, and McGowan.
39
Rooney, 132.
40
Ibid., 125.
134 A. S. GRØNSTAD
warfare, Rooney makes the argument that the air, the atmosphere, and
human breath are also media channels in their own right and that The
Return emphasizes various ways of activating these “indivisible” means of
communication.41 There is of course the event of radiation, the attention
given to electrical devices, the foreboding message relayed by the
Woodsman, and the accentuation of respiratory transmissions in the form
of (mostly female) breathing, gasps, and cries (the show ends with a
scream). Contagiousness as a prime trope also surfaces in the spoiled corn
that becomes garmonbozia, in the Nine Inch Nails song that includes
words about “spread[ing] the infection,” and in the vast intertextual tap-
estry of the series as a whole (of particular relevance in these contexts are
the many references to the 1950s science-fiction films about nuclear pol-
lution, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)). The
view propounded by Durham Peters, that media are infrastructural sys-
tems that comprise both the technological and the ecological spheres,
gives further credence to the idea that Lynch’s work embodies the phe-
nomenon of contagious mediation, the ultimate source of which remains
resistant to transparent representation.
41
Ibid., 140; 124.
CHAPTER 7
A Hermeneutics of the Black Site:

Trevor Paglen
The ersatz towns erected in places like Nevada and New Mexico in the
1940s and 1950s have been seen as the origin of the “black world” of
covert military installations and operations, secret sites, and geographical
spaces beyond the law.1 Documenting this clandestine ecosystem entails
the adoption of yet another form of opacity. Where in Lynch opacity sug-
gests “beyondness,” as we have seen, the opaque image can also work to
further other objectives. Blurry photographs, for example, can serve as an
index of a conspicuous absence, as a reminder that potentially significant
information is being intentionally withheld from us. So, even if it certainly
matters who is in charge of the visible—since, as Sean Cubitt points out, it
“alters the constitutive grounds of sensing, knowing, and relating to one
another and to the world”2—visibility can also be manipulated from within
and galvanized to accomplish ends that thwart the repressive visuality of
the governing few, to remain with the terminology Simek and Mirzoeff
introduce. One such use of opacity is realized through the projects of the
artist and visual researcher Trevor Paglen. Focusing on stealthy military
operations and test sites—remote desert installations in the southwest or a
classified spacecraft orbiting the Earth—Paglen produces photographs
across substantial distances. These images capture a type of objects that
1
Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World,
New York: New American Library, 2009, 95.
2
Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels,

136 A. S. GRØNSTAD
appear quite low on visibility and decipherable informational content.

Looking at them, we do not know exactly what we are seeing.
It was when Paglen, a geographer, started to chart the growth of pris-
ons in California and the Southwest that he became aware of massive lacu-
nae in the Nevada desert. The aerial and satellite images he studied lead
him to consider the presence of empty spots on official maps. At a time
when the entire surface of the world has long since been scrupulously
mapped, the sheer existence of these black sites was conspicuous. They did
however cohere with a range of other phenomena that form intrinsic com-
ponents of the black world: secret military operations and aircrafts, shadow
budgets, extraordinary renditions and so-called ghost prisoners, and gra-
tuitous surveillance. Noting the dearth of serious research on black sites,
Paglen endeavored to produce a book that would reveal “how the United
States has become dependent on spaces created through secrecy, spaces
that lie outside the rule of law, outside the Constitution, outside the dem-
ocratic ideal of equal rights, transparent government, and informed
consent.”3 But the science of geography teaches us that things do not
disappear just because they are beyond our perceptual reach; everything
that happens takes place in a given topography. As Paglen helpfully points
out, what the map’s blank parts index are not only the absence of informa-
tion but also the fact of the secret.4
Paglen’s work, then, constitutes another and possibly paradoxical form
of opacity, one that applies pictorial indistinctness to alert the viewer to
missing or, more accurately, withheld knowledge. In this attempt to pic-
ture the confidential installations in the Nevada Basin, for example, Paglen
employs telescopes with focal lengths of 1300 to 7000 mm, a practice he
terms limit telephotography, a cousin of astrophotography. The distance
from the objects and the flattening of perspective that results from this
technique give the images an abstract quality, intensified by the shimmer-
ing heat and the particles of dust from the atmosphere. The nondescript
sites photographed are already low on informational value, however, so
Paglen’s images, one could argue, are mostly performative in nature. The
control towers, terminals, and vehicles that the captions allude to are, at
best, on the threshold of perceptibility. Invoking Nicholas Mirzoeff’s
phrase “the right to look” as a performance of citizenship, Henrik
Gustafsson considers that “the politics of producing the photographs
3
Paglen, Blank Spots, 16.
4
Ibid., 17.
7 A HERMENEUTICS OF THE BLACK SITE: TREVOR PAGLEN 137
outweighs the significance of whatever information they contain.”5 Since

the black world is hardly subject to conventional representational practice,
it can only be approached through strategies of indirection, or “an aes-
thetics of counter-transparency,” as Gustafsson names it (Fig. 7.1).6
In another project, The Other Night Sky, Paglen employs a methodol-
ogy he calls minoritarian empiricism. This is a visual research venture that
attempts to photograph and keep track of classified satellites with the help
of a global network of amateur astronomers. The data that this network
harvests with their telescopes and binoculars are shared online and feature
information on locations and trajectories. For his exploration of black sites
Paglen sometimes photographs from as far away as forty-two miles, using
professional telephoto lenses that create nebulous and hazy images.
Inadequate as evidence, the photos are exhibited in art galleries, their
value more aesthetic than indexical. But, as one critic has noted, “[t]he
Fig. 7.1 Photo from Limit Telephotography project (Trevor Paglen)
5
Henrik Gustafsson, “Foresight, Hindsight and State Secrecy in the American West: The
Geopolitical Aesthetics of Trevor Paglen,” Journal of Visual Culture, 12.1 (2013): 156.
6
Ibid.
138 A. S. GRØNSTAD
political efficacy of his photographs does not emerge from cognitive dis-
closure but from affective perturbation, that is, from revealing without
enlightening.”7 The contribution of these opaque images, like those of the
limit telephotography project, thus lies in the way in which they gesture
toward not only the existence of barely visible objects but, maybe more
importantly, the intended act of keeping something out of view in the first
place. Somewhat ironically, this is a form of opacity that renders tangible a
gap of information in the public sphere. In the information age, not all
information is designed for public consumption, a circumstance also borne
out by endeavors such as WikiLeaks.
In its destabilization of the assumed symbiosis of knowledge and vision
so essential to the history of positivist epistemology, Paglen’s post-
representational photographic practice might be an example of precarious
art. As Philipp Jeandrée states, the invisible or barely visible
is not simply the result of topographic, technological and legal restrictions

but just as much an aesthetic or even ethical choice in order to express politi-
cal concerns and skepticism regarding the revelatory use of (journalistic)
images and the suggestive relation between seeing and knowing.8
It is possible that one could consider this particular kind of unintelligibility

as a tropological opacity, in that it helps signify the tenuousness of truth in
an era of clandestine operations, the rule of the frontal, and the balkaniza-
tion of the public sphere. As Jeandrée sees it, Paglen’s aesthetics of opacity
is fundamentally the inverse of Robert Hariman’s and John Lucaites’s
photojournalistic enterprise to construct a visual public sphere. Citing
Jodi Dean’s notions of technoculture and communicative capitalism,
Jeandrée argues that the entire concept of a public sphere is “an ideologi-
cal fallacy that seeks to erase the antagonism necessary for politics.”9
Paglen’s blurry photographs enact a certain redistribution of the sensible,
in that they debunk the increasingly untenable fiction of the transparency
7
Philipp Jeandrée “The Limits of the Visible: The Politics of Contingency in the
Photographic Work of Trevor Paglen,” Critical Studies, 2 (2016), http://www.criticalstud-
ies.org.uk/uploads/2/6/0/7/26079602/jeandree_csv2.pdf, accessed December
13, 2016.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid. See also Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002, as well as her “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation
and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics, 1.1 (2005): 51–74.
of the public sphere. Here, the aesthetics of opacity is engaged in the pro-
cess not of showing seeing, to invoke W. J. T. Mitchell’s term,10 but of
showing non-seeing, or the attempt itself to curtail the right to look.
Perhaps more plainly than in the work of Gehr and Akomfrah, the indis-
tinct image in Paglen inscribes itself into the perceptual sensorium we call
aesthetics; it demonstrates that opacity is not the threatening Other of
artistic communication but, on the contrary, an epistemologically rejuve-
nating possibility that is of the aesthetic, not something that swallows it up.
What I would like to discuss in the remainder of this chapter is the part
that an art of opacity might play in drawing attention to contemporary
practices of secrecy that are politically and legally problematic. Paglen’s
work fulfills this role in an illustrative way and could, I shall maintain, be
considered in the context of a functional opacity, of a pragmatic phenom-
enology of the indistinct. Dismissing notions that his work is about expos-
ing classified information, and also that he traffics in ambiguity for its own
sake, Paglen instead seems to insist that the images he produces affirm not
only the existence of undisclosed activities and objects but also the mate-
rial diffusion of these phenomena across other domains.11 In other words,
Paglen’s project lends expressive force to elements whose interconnec-
tions tend to remain indiscernible to the public. If the pictures of secret
military installations fail to document anything in a conventional sense of
the word, they nonetheless capture evidence. This kind of evidence obvi-
ously has less to do with the legal sphere than with the slightly post-
phenomenological conception of the term found, for instance, in Jean-Luc
Nancy’s reflections on cinema. In his writing on Abbas Kiarostami, Nancy
introduces an affirmational ethics that stresses the capacity of the film
image to bring out the “realness” or “presentness” of the fragment of the
world caught by the camera.12 Perhaps predictably, “evidence” under-
stood in this sense raises the question of epistemology; to say that
10
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual
Culture, 1.2 (2002): 165–181.
11
Lauren Cornell, “Trevor Paglen in Conversation with Lauren Cornell”, in Mass Effect:
Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Lauren Cornell & Ed Halter,
12
See, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, “On Evidence: Life and Nothing More, by Abbas
Kiarostami,” trans. Verena Andermatt Conley, Discourse, 21.1 (1999): 77–88; and Jean-Luc
Nancy, The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami, Brussels: Yves Gevaert Éditeur, 2001. See
also Josef Früchtl, “The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc Nancy’s
Cinematic Ontology,” Critical Studies, 32 (2010): 193–201.
140 A. S. GRØNSTAD
something exists, but without saying exactly what it is that exists, what
kind of knowledge is that? Is not the palpable lack of specificity at odds
with any sort of epistemological value?
It depends. If we take a processual view of knowledge, the blurry or
indefinite image institutes a first movement toward an awareness that
something indeed exists, an awareness that might evolve into more sub-
stantive forms of knowledge at a later stage. When above I use the term
“pragmatic” to describe Paglen’s indistinct photographs, I understand his
work as a case of what might be termed deictic visuality, images that point
or gesture toward something without necessarily specifying what it is. The
act itself of directing the viewer’s attention and producing awareness is the
key objective of such images. While the applicability of deixis to photo-
graphic and filmic images has been taken up and summarily rejected by
previous theorists, most notably Christian Metz,13 I would still contend
that the capture and exhibition of a photographic image are pregnant with
an emphatic sense of gesturing toward the physical presence of some
object. Deixis comes from the Greek deiktos, meaning “capable of proof,”
which again has emerged from deiknunai, meaning “to show.” If one
takes a broader theoretical (as opposed to narrowly linguistic) perspective,
the concept of visual deixis may in fact prove to be illuminating, and espe-
cially in cases where the clarity of the object is compromised by various
formal-technological instabilities that create opacity within the frame.
While the iconic and symbolic value of barely readable images might be
scarce, to invoke C. S. Peirce’s terminology, their indexical purchase is
actually intact. When André Bazin makes the case that the photographic
image is existentially linked to the object or “the being of the model,” as
he puts it, the process of transference is equally operative for images that
are “fuzzy, distorted, or discolored” as for sharp and transparent ones.14
The indexical usefulness of opaque images is thus to a certain extent tied
to their deictic role as pointers, as a form of connective tissue that puts a
public into contact with classified objects that might be of relevance to
that same public.
As mentioned above, Paglen’s photographic practice is entangled in a
process in which sensible matter gets redistributed or reconfigured.
13
Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film, trans. & introd. Cormac
Deane, afterword by Dana Polan, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
14
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Volume
1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 14.
Exercising his right to look, Paglen tries to extract whatever knowledge he

can from a closed system. In his now classic text, Rancière explains his
concept of the distribution of the sensible thus:
the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously dis-

closes the existence of something in common and the delimitations that
define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sen-
sible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that
is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is
based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that deter-
mines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to par-
ticipation and in what way various individuals have a part in this
distribution.15
To paraphrase, Rancière’s concern is how space, time, and action are con-
figured or constituted in a number of ways—socially, culturally, economi-
cally, aesthetically, and politically—to enable access and participation in a
common sphere. The infrastructure of the sensible as a continuously
ongoing process is something that at once defines that which is shared by
all and what is given only to some. This dialectics of inclusion and exclu-
sion makes spatiality a particularly privileged concept, as it represents not
only one of the categories (alongside time and activity) that Rancière men-
tions but also the very structure of his theory. The notion of the distribu-
tion of the sensible, one might argue, is impossible to grasp without
recourse to a spatial perspective; in fact, the idea of distribution itself
requires a logic that is fundamentally spatial. When I propose that Paglen’s
project on Limit Telephotography can be understood as a redistribution of
the sensible, it can however be tied not only to Rancière’s philosophy but
also to the artist’s own notion of experimental photography.
Drawing on among other sources Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author
as Producer” (1934) and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974;
English trans. 1991), Paglen notes how the production of cultural artifacts
and texts is also at the same time a spatial practice. Artistic endeavors and
intellectual inquires generate new spaces of experience. In the aforemen-
tioned essay, Paglen points out, Benjamin makes a distinction between
artworks that articulate a political content and those that come to occupy
a political position. Benjamin’s relational approach implies that, in the
15
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics [2000], trans. Gabriel Rockhill, New York:
Continuum, 2004, 12.
142 A. S. GRØNSTAD
words of Paglen, “the task of transformative cultural production [is] to

reconfigure the relations and apparatus of cultural production, to reinvent
the ‘infrastructure’ of feeling in ways designed to maximize human
freedom.”16 For Benjamin, artists and other cultural laborers ultimately
need to occupy the political field and thus go beyond mere critique. In a
way, this is precisely what Paglen’s various projects do. His presence near
confidential spaces, the capture of tail numbers on aircrafts, and the exhi-
bition of classified terms and phrases in the ongoing Code Names project
constitute practices on the threshold of legality, practices over which he
has received death threats.17 Such interventions are examples of what
Brian Massumi has named the occurrent arts,18 which are relational and
event-oriented practices that construct political spaces. The gainfully
intrusive optics of the Limit Telephotography project chips away at the fur-
tive infrastructure of the Terror State conglomerate: the Department of
Homeland Security, the NSA, CIA, FBI, the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), and other institutions responsible for secret laws,
drone programs, cyber warfare, extralegal renditions, unlimited detention,
and “the retroactive ‘legalization’ of classified programs that were clearly
illegal when they began.”19 Opacity is a key component in the attempt to
occupy and reconfigure what is essentially a politico-epistemological space,
first, because it functions efficiently as a perceptual primer and, second,
because its very form emulates and thus foregrounds the knowledge gap
that these secret spaces themselves produce and which is also fundamental
to their mode of operation.
There is a conceptual (and quite possibly also phenomenological) affin-
ity between the secret, invisibility, and opaque materiality. They share in
common the attribute of being informationally underwhelming, as well as
the tantalizing sense of containing something more. The secret, the
16
Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production
of Space,” in Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and
Urbanism, eds. Nato Thompson, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009.
17
Julian Stallabrass, “Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor
Paglen,” October, 138 (2011): 3–14; 14.
18
Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Notably, the concept of semblance (Schein) is also used in
Benjamin’s work to denote the aura of something beautiful.
19
Trevor Paglen, “Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State,” Creative Time,
June 25, 2013, http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-the-con-
struction-of-a-terror-state/, accessed October 30, 2019.
opaque, the invisible—these concepts also pose a formidable challenge to

photography as a medium and aesthetic. To photograph an object within
“the complex fabric” of external reality, to borrow Bazin’s words, is one
thing; to photograph a social situation is something different entirely.20
Yet even more difficult is it to photograph systems, although, as Rebecca
Solnit points out, one can at least visualize their consequences.21
Photographic representations of military violence are a case in point. But
Paglen’s practice of opacity seems more intent on rendering what little it
can of the system itself. As an explorative practice, experimental geography
institutes its own spaces, but in Paglen’s work it is also attuned to the
multiplicative propensity of the black site. Classified installations are spa-
tially contagious. The activities going on there require additional sites of
operation. In other words, the expansion of the black site, both geograph-
ically and socially, produces a long chain of environmental consequence
and effects that interfere with the lives of citizens unaware of the content
of such sites. The Air Force’s Nellis Range Complex in Southern Nevada
is one example. With its 3.1-million acres, it extends across an area the size
of Switzerland. It is where the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) and later the Air Force Special Projects Office devel-
oped the stealth military program and its manufacture of airplanes less
vulnerable to radar systems. Initially a scientific idea, the project then
became a computer program. Secret factories were built. A classified air-
base materialized along with classified squadrons. At a certain point the
project traversed the perimeters of the Nellis Range, its activities altering
the chemical structure of the air and infecting the bodies of some of the
workers close to the site.22 In the late 1980s, a group of about 160
Lockheed employees were suffering from headaches, nausea, forgetful-
ness, and in some instances cancer. Water and air pollution was endemic to
the area. In investigating these environmental crimes and pushing for legal
action, organizations and individuals such as Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) and Jonathan Turley, a professor at Washington State
University who was head of the Environmental Crimes Project, brushed
up against a discouraging obstacle: the chemicals that the sick workers had
20
Bazin, “Ontology,” 15.
21
Rebecca Solnit, “The Visibility Wars,” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-
First Century, eds. Lauren Cornell & Ed Halter, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015,
243–254; 248.
22
Trevor Paglen, “Goatsucker: Toward a Spatial Theory of State Secrecy,” Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 28 (2010): 759–771; 765–766.
144 A. S. GRØNSTAD
been exposed to were top-secret, meaning that they technically did not
exist. “The legal contradiction,” Paglen writes, “was resolved by the
judge’s ruling that the space of stealth was fundamentally incompatible
with the legal system.”23 Thus, the black world had impinged upon yet
another social domain. Essentially, the legal system was forced to adopt to
the nature of the stealth program.
What Peter Galison terms “the classified universe” is in all likelihood
vaster than anyone would have imagined. One estimate is that it could be
up to ten times larger than the open materials sent to the nation’s librar-
ies.24 If, as Max Weber famously asserted, secrecy is bureaucracy’s method
for accruing power,25 the redistribution of the sensible is an endeavor
vitally invested in the advancement of both epistemology and politics. The
contradictions of state secrecy—factories and airplanes are not actually
invisible but have to exist somewhere in geographical space—are if not
directly exposed then certainly alluded to in Paglen’s photographic prac-
tice. Its blurry quality notwithstanding, this is an ethically fecund practice
that demonstrates the act of cutting well. In their theorization of photog-
raphy and mediation, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska use this phrase
to promote a poetics and ethics of mediation indebted, among others, to
the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and
Karen Barad. The cornerstone of the theory of the cut is that life unfolds
as a process of continuous mediation. In order to make sense of the cease-
less flow of matter out of which reality is made, we need structure that can
turn this raw matter into form. Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy
(1994) argue that the domains of philosophy, science, and art provide
such structures. On their view, these large-scale epistemological modalities
represent the Chaoids, the three daughters of chaos (presumably undif-
ferentiated matter) that offer “forms of thought or creation” that “cut
through the chaos in different ways.”26 Artistic practices are symbolic inci-
sions into the flow of matter, but they are also more than that. According
to Kember and Zylinska, cutting as an aesthetic act is a gesture full of
23
Ibid., 768.
24
Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004): 229–243; 231.
25
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1922], ed.
Guenther Roth & Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978.
26
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Graham Burchell
and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso, 1994.
vitality, capable of new meanings and even “life-making.”27 Photography

not only stores life forms, it also generates them. “[T]he practice of cut-
ting,” Kember and Zylinska contend, “is crucial not just to our being in
and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well
as becoming-different-from-the-world.”28 However, when it comes to spec-
ifying what it is that distinguishes an ethical cut from any other cut, they
have less to say, except that to cut well entails not “los[ing] sight of the
horizon of duration or foreclose on the creative possibility of life enabled
by this horizon.”29 There are evidently many ways in which to appraise the
preconditions of an ethical cut. It seems reasonable, for example, to expect
such a cut to be perceptive, judicious, inventive, revelatory, challenging,
surprising, and committed, although maybe not necessarily all at once. A
photographic image that brings into view, into the world, traces of matter
that power has resolved to conceal from it, is a good candidate for an ethi-
cal cut. The Limit Telephotography project epitomizes what Kember and
Zylinska call mediation as a vital process; Paglen’s images in effect mediate
between a world that is not supposed to exist officially and the world that
has to suffer its consequences.
Bridging these two worlds is an achievement of the photographic cut,
which, in Bazinian terms, causes a transfer of the real that imbues the
object with a “disturbing presence.”30 Such is the force of the index. But
the question that is still left open, perhaps surprisingly, is that of the docu-
mentary value of the image. Paglen’s own remarks on the matter betray a
lingering skepticism, one that has haunted photography before. In his
conversation with Julian Stallabrass, Paglen remains doubtful of visual
media’s evidentiary potential, especially in a legal context. Citing the
Rodney King footage and the Abu Ghraib photos as examples, he points
out that the images were not able to disclose “systemic torture and abuse
as political policy.”31 Even the WikiLeaks recording of the Apache helicop-
ter killing civilians in Iraq, which Stallabrass brings up, likely fails to be
adequately documentary in a judicial sense. There are certain limits to
what even the best visual documents can reveal. This skepticism echoes
Siegfried Kracauer’s derisive remarks about photographic reportage, as
27
Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process,
28
Ibid., 75.
29
Ibid., 82.
30
Bazin, “Ontology,” 14.
31
Stallabrass, 11.
146 A. S. GRØNSTAD
well as Berthold Brecht’s claim that the reality of factory life could not be
represented by photography.32 If the documentary authority of the photo-
graph is less secure than we have tended to believe, could it be that the
occasional graphic opacity of the image really is a metonym for a deeper
murkiness that, in its nature, is not just optical but epistemological and
even existential?
The photographic image courts uncertainty when its sensuous content
does not translate into comprehensibility, when it reveals too little, or
when the relations into which it is enmeshed are occluded. Even at its
crispiest, the photograph falls short of representing the depth of its object,
much less the unseen operations that produce the situations and objects
depicted. Despite this semiotic poverty, the photographic image can how-
ever still be documentary, albeit on its own terms. Paglen’s own approach
subscribes to a certain dialectics, in that his images make truth claims that
are also, in the same instant, being contradicted. The deictic gesture of the
indistinct image scans as an assertion; “there is something here, and that
something is a secret military facility.” Yet due to the compromised legibil-
ity of the image, the object captured could in principle be something
entirely different. The point is to alert the viewer to the very possibility
that the assertion might be correct, in which case the image is made to
point beyond itself, to the invisible forces, the “system,” that manages this
particular distribution of the sensible. As Jeandrée has suggested, Paglen’s
blurry photos work as prompts, they make us aware of this “invisible world
of great political impact and urgency beyond our familiar field of vision.”33
But this methodology also comes to enact a fascinating paradox. One the
one hand, the apparatus mobilized to produce these pretty opaque images,
images that occasionally border on or cross over into abstraction,34 is
painstakingly empirical in nature. The Other Night Sky, his satellite project,
employs a wealth of data on location, timing, and trajectories harvested by
hobby astronomers, and high-resolution lenses and telescope cameras are
part of his equipment. On the other hand, all this careful preparation,
sophisticated technology, and arithmetic data result in rather indefinite
32
Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany,
trans. Quintin Hoare, London: Verso, 1998, 32; and Berthold Brecht, “The Three Penny
Trial: A Sociological Experiment” [1931], in German Essays on Film, eds. Richard
W. McCormick and Allison Guenther-Pal, London: Continuum, 2004, 111–132; 117.
33
See Jeandréee.
34
In interviews Paglen has talked about the influence of abstract painting on his work. See,
for instance, Cornell, “Trevor Paglen in Conversation,” 258.
images that are inadequate as evidence and barely passable as semiotic

artifacts.
As scholars of visual culture have pointed out, mechanical and elec-
tronic media such as photography, film, video, and television carry with
them “the legacy” of a nineteenth-century positivist paradigm.35 Walead
Beshty, among others, writes that the attraction of transparency for the
modern world was evident in “the desire to capture the minutiae of move-
ment (cinema), to turn objects into surface (photography), to see inside
(x-ray).”36 But as Paglen’s practice demonstrates, even the most steadfast
empiricism cannot guarantee hard, unambiguous knowledge. Yielding
semi-abstract, nebulous results, Paglen’s photographs could be conceptu-
alized as both evidence and critique of the cultural equation of knowledge
with positivism. The system of abstract relations that is politics, that is
ideology, seems impervious to the kind of documentary compulsion that
animates photography-based media. In works such as Chemical and
Biological Weapons Proving Ground, Dugway, UT (distance: 42 miles)
(2006), Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NY (distance: 18 miles) (2007), and
The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) (2010), the object is largely indecipher-
able as an indexical reproduction. The images resemble, more than any
recognizably photographic precursor, the art of a Barnett Newman or a
Mark Rothko. Paglen’s self-described post-representational practice may
divert our attention to the sheer materiality of the photos and to the insti-
tutions of secrecy that are their main interest, but the efficacy of their
indefiniteness is perhaps more metaphorical than political in nature. On
their own, the images speak to the struggle for truth in a culture of secrecy.
Supplemented by the captions, which name the time and space of their
capture, the photos become grounded; no longer just allegorical, they
insert themselves more confidently into the sphere of the political. In a
reversal of sorts of the established relationship between the indexicality of
the photographic image and the symbolic nature of verbal language, the
image becomes arbitrary while the linguistic sign purports to document
empirical facts.
By now we might be in a better position than at the start of this chapter
to address the concept of a hermeneutics of the black site. How do we
35
Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual
Culture, 2nd edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 355.
36
Walead Beshty, as quoted in Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, London:
Tate, 2009, 54.
148 A. S. GRØNSTAD
interpret the unknown? What understanding might emerge from that

which offers up very little information? What meanings can be ascribed to
the barely sensible? What nourishes the gaze that inspects the dark? In
principle, all interpretive activity is motored by a desire to attain more or
better knowledge of a particular thing, phenomenon, or idea. The degree
of opacity in which that thing is enveloped evidently fluctuates a great
deal. In a way, all the works considered in this book constitute black sites,
epistemologically speaking. They are, all in their own ways, obstinate,
unyielding objects that for a number of reasons sabotage the effortless
transparency of more conventional visual representation. But the military
installations and satellites that Paglen photographs suggest a normaliza-
tion of the black site, of the clandestine, that is arguably unprecedented.
Some critics entertain the possibility that the public sphere and its open
information are fast becoming “the exception to the norm of secrecy.”37
Even if this assumption is only partially correct, the ideal of a free and
unrestrictive public sphere appears increasingly utopian. A rising number
of activities of both a military, political, and economic nature are cloaked
in secrecy. In a US context, the history of this accelerating black world
dates back to United States v. Reynolds, the momentous 1953 Supreme
Court case that granted legal protection to the so-called state secrets privi-
lege. The case created a precedent that enabled later administrations to
elide litigations concerning classified documents and covert operations.
United States v. Reynolds in effect laid the groundwork for more uncon-
strained presidential powers that in the post-9/11 political landscape have
involved measures such as extraordinary rendition, pervasive surveillance,
drone wars, and an expansion of a military infrastructure of classified facili-
ties as well as of “black budget.” The growth of a secret state in recent
decades has likely been abetted by a certain obsequiousness on part of the
judicial and congressional branches vis-à-vis the executive branch, exacer-
bating the health of democratic institutions already mired in a host of
other problems.
If the black world is in the process of quietly expanding, as both Galison
and Paglen imply, it could very well be that the hermeneutic enterprise
needs a new methodology. Investigating only those phenomena that are
freely accessible to us will yield mere fragments of a larger and more com-
plex truth. Paglen’s approach to the hermeneutics of the black site is use-
ful in that it emulates what Gustafsson terms the “spectral geography” of
37
See Jeandrée.
the black world, construing “optical aberrations” as a kind of documenta-

tion unto itself.38 But in a way the black site subverts the very premise of
any hermeneutics. It represents, as Gustafsson also suggests, a deracina-
tion of the flagpoles of the Enlightenment—rationality, transparency,
progress, and democracy. Seen in this light, the diegetic universe we
encounter in episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, discussed in the previ-
ous chapter, is a manifestation of this “shadow image” or “negative dou-
ble” of those Enlightenment values.39 In the Limit Telephotography project,
this world can only be vaguely alluded to, although this is a vagueness that
in no way diminishes the rhetorical heft of the images. What I earlier
named the deictic gesture of the photographs enables a form of revelation
that betrays what John Roberts understands as photography’s “immanent
powers of violation.”40 By this, he means that the medium’s penchant for
pointing at its object is an intervention that may cause “the ruination of
[its] self-identity” as well as “the denaturalization” of its mode of appear-
ance.41 In poking into the secrecy that enshrouds the black site (rather
than into its empirical components, which remain unavailable), opacity
itself is mobilized as a hermeneutical method.
In the chapter above on Saunders’s work I referenced Birchall’s ideas
concerning the notion of the secret as the ultimate aesthetic object.
Invoking the projects of Paglen as well as Jill Magid, Birchall argues that
they supplant a “hermeneutics of the secret” with an “aesthetics of the
secret.”42 A consequence of this proposed transformation is that the sig-
nificance of disclosure, interpretation, and meaning decreases, while the
value of encounter, affect, and sensuous experience increases. Birchall cre-
ates a diagram in order to display the various possible relations that can
exist between secrecy, knowledge, and aesthetics, which she calls (a) the
known known, (b) the unknown known, (c) the known unknown, and (d)
the unknown unknown. The first of these categories denotes the province
of aesthetic expression and reception. While any given artistic enunciation
is, in principle, semantically inexhaustible, even the most arcane, abstract,
or inaccessible work gives us something to perceive, that is, something
sensible in one way or the other. But there is still room for the secret in the
38
Gustafsson, “Foresight,” 158.
39
Ibid., 159.
40
John Roberts, Photography and its Violations, New York: Columbia University Press,
2014, 1.
41
Ibid.
42
Birchall, “Aesthetics,” 29.
150 A. S. GRØNSTAD
“known known” because artworks tend to suppress something even as

they show us something else. The second grouping, the unknown known,
refers to things that were once observable but have since been forgotten
or lost. Birchall mentions as examples the exhibitions Invisible: Art About
the Unseen, mounted at the Hayward Gallery in London, and Gallery of
Lost Art (both 2012), a Tate-curated online exhibition, both of which
featured Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). In
aesthetics, the unknown known also comprises works of art that have been
damaged, suppressed, stolen, misplaced, rejected, or works whose very
nature is ephemeral. Paglen’s and Magid’s projects belong primarily to the
third category, the known unknown, which is the realm of the open
secret.43 A key contribution of their endeavors is a certain insistence on the
materiality of the secret. For Paglen, the secret is not an abstract entity but
a network of “physical, legal, social, cultural, [and] economic institutions.”44
The photographer’s deictic poetics, as I have shown above, invites a
rethinking of hermeneutics. For Birchall, this implies a movement away
from the content of the secret to what she sees as “an affective response to
form.”45 In a way, this line of thinking recalls the tenets of various philoso-
phies of presence; to put it a little bluntly—form, encounter, and affect
replace content, interpretation, and meaning.46 Lastly, the unknown
unknown designates a more constant kind of secrecy, one in which the
secret is not a momentary state of un-knowing but rather a durable quality
that is “absolute” and “unconditional.”47
In the charts above, Paglen’s work might be situated in the panel the
known unknown, as Birchall observes, but I would argue that it also bleeds
into the unknown unknown. If our becoming cognizant of these clandes-
tine installations is an effect of the photographer’s images, they simultane-
ously serve to remind us of the possibility that other such sites probably
43
There are four different modes of the known unknown: secrets of which we are aware
but whose content remains unavailable; secrets “everybody” knows yet they cannot be veri-
fied; secrets that receive little or no attention once they actually get revealed; and finally
secrets that are known but stop shy of an appropriate means of articulation. See Birchall, 33–34.
44
Trevor Paglen, “Art as Evidence,” Transmediale, January 30, 2014, Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, Berlin, www.youtube.com/watch?vSDxue3jGAug, accessed November 12, 2019.
45
Birchall, 34.
46
See, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning
Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004; and Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Evidence of Film.
47
Birchall, 44.
exist. Just because not even a blurry, urgently out-of-focus photo can be
obtained to document their reality does not mean that there are not in fact
many more sites, spaces, and phenomena of the black world out there.
There is thus a shadow of the unknown unknown hanging over Paglen’s
photos. Their hazy yet torpidly inquisitive gaze promulgates an ethics of
intrusion, a political-epistemological perseverance that aims to incite an
alternative hermeneutics built, perhaps paradoxically, on a foundation of
opacity. Earlier we have seen that Akomfrah’s work attains a level of opacity
that chimes with Glissant’s philosophy of alterity, in that his poetics becomes
a bulwark against epistemic attempts to reduce the complexity and funda-
mental unknowability of experience. Paglen’s aesthetics of opacity is of a
different kind; where Glissant in a sense worries about too much representa-
tion, Paglen’s hermeneutics of the black site implies not only that there is
too little but that this insufficiency itself needs to be given a form.
CHAPTER 8
Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas
In the research for this book, the aesthetics of opacity has for the most part
been located in various screen media. But the phenomenologically indis-
tinct is not exclusively a feature of cinema, video, television, or contempo-
rary art—or of sound and writing—but appears in the extra-textual world,
too. A fairly pervasive site for displays of opacity is the face. From the
niqab and the burqa to Anonymous’s Guy Fawkes disguises, Antifa’s black
mask, and the KKK hoods, the veiling of the human face represents a cul-
turally diverse practice that has confidentiality as its aim and opacity as its
method.1 During the events in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, the
New York City Police Department revived an 1845 law that prohibits
masked assemblies in public spaces. Some of the jailed Occupy protesters,
furthermore, had to agree to iris scans, their biometric data thus being
harvested even though they had not been convicted of or charged with
any crime. What was all this anxiety on part of the state about? The artist
and writer Zach Blas relates it to what he dubs “‘global face culture,’”
explained as “obsessive and paranoid impulses to know, capture, calculate,
categorize, and standardize human faces.”2 Something akin to a new
1
For the significance of concealment for such movements, see, for instance, B. ‘Butch’
Mendoza, Antifa Book of Practical Disguise#RESIST, Steel Springs Press, 2015; for a visual
representation of Anonymous, see also Anthony Tafuro, Anonymous Million Masks, Brooklyn:
Powerhouse Books, 2018. See also Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy:
The Many Faces of Anonymous, New York: Verso, 2015.
2
Zach Blas, “Escaping the Face: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Facial Weaponization
Suite,” NMC: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 9.2 (2013), http://median.newmediacau-

154 A. S. GRØNSTAD
cular regime, this rapidly escalating culture encompasses measures such

o
as the application of biometric technology for visas and international
travel, the extensive deployment of surveillance cameras in metropolitan
clusters, individualized consumer marketing, and social media applications
for facial authentication. These technologies, Blas suggests, transform our
conception of the face. While there is certainly some merit to the idea that
the human face was reinvented by that emblematic machine of late moder-
nity, the cinema, it has also been considered unique and untranslatable.3 In
the age of operative forms of visuality, however, the face has been turned
into “a mode of governance, a quantitative code, template, and standard-
ized form of measure and management.”4 In short, the transecting inter-
ests of the state, the military, and commercial enterprises are mobilizing to
transparenticize the face.
Attempts by protestors and other groups to respond to and oppose this
biopolitical governmentality are numerous, and in the post-Arab spring
climate of resistance issues of free speech, rights to assembly, visibility, and
representation blend into one another. In December 2012, for example,
40,000 masked activists marched through cities in Chiapas under the aus-
pices of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. In the art world, too,
efforts have been made to address this new optical world order, and Blas
himself has contributed work informed by a principle of critical opacity.
His Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014) opposes the practice of bio-
metric facial recognition by producing so-called collective masks. From
the amassed facial data of several participants the work generates opaque
masks that modern facial recognition technology is unable to read. This
aesthetics of illegibility in effect performs Chamoiseau’s aspiration for a
poetic approach somehow capable of political intervention, as the art proj-
ect sutures its technique powerfully to pressing problems involving race,
sexuality, and immigration. Fag Face, one of the masks that has received
particular attention, has been assembled from the biometric information
of the faces of homosexual men, as a riposte to scientific studies that con-
nect the identification of sexual orientation to facial recognition technolo-
gies. Another mask contends with legislation passed in France in 2010
banning the use of face-covering outfits, such as the niqab, in public
cus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/escaping-the-face-biometric-facial-recognition-and-
the-facial-weaponization-suite/, accessed December 8, 2017.
3
See Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
4
Ibid.
8 FACELESS, NAMELESS: ZACH BLAS 155
spaces. Blas’s mask, one could infer, interrogates the legitimacy of urging
what might be seen as a strident form of visibility. Yet another mask
engages with the notion of blackness, providing a discursive site upon
which three different topics converge: the predilection for the color black
in activist aesthetics, the symbolic function of black as that which eclipses
information (as in redacted documents), and the failure of biometric
equipment to sense dark skin (Fig. 8.1).
The practices both in and beyond the art of concealment, secrecy, and
defacement have previously been considered as a kind of negative aesthet-
ics, notably in the work of Michael Taussig.5 In his art making as well as in
his writing, Blas explores the broader ethico-political ramifications of con-
scripting opacity as a medium of resistance:
one can claim that political desires abound in protest today that stress tactics
of escaping forms of recognition-control by abandoning, devisualizing, and
defacing the face, becoming faceless through masking actions that mutate
Fig. 8.1 Photo from Facial Weaponization Suite (Zach Blas)
5
See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999.
156 A. S. GRØNSTAD
the face into something else entirely. Importantly, while acts of defacement
are about a certain kind of political refusal and imperceptibility, they are
equally concerned with hypervisible collective transformation […] As the
face becomes a site of ever increasing control and governance, new ethical
relations to the face are emerging that embrace defacement and escape, not
necessarily mutual recognition but collective transformation that is both
anarchic and commonizing. Today, the mask is the most popular implemen-
tation of defacement, a celebration of refusal and transformation.6
Here, Blas seems to suggest that the various processes of defacement—in

effect, an aesthetics of opacity—enable “new ethical relations” to emerge,
relations that contradict the disembodiment and objectification that are
the outcome of biometric technologies. A work such as Facial
Weaponization Suite, I would argue, indicates that the phenomenologi-
cally indistinct is ultimately preferable to the reductiveness of the “identity-
industrial complex,” in which identity is downgraded to data and
capitalized.7 It is not only that biometrics unscrupulously oversimplifies
the corporeal complexity of the individual but also that it, as Shoshana
Amielle Magnet has pointed out, exhibits a built-in prejudice, evident, for
instance, in the system’s frequent inability to scan the hands of
Asian women.8
In the aforementioned project Facial Weaponization Suite, Blas inter-
venes in the debate about biometric methods of identification by con-
structing a series of amorphous masks drawn from the facial information
of a number of subjects. As a result of this process, the masks—which
allude to questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nationalism—
cannot be perceived as human faces by facial recognition technologies.
Reminiscent of the ways in which various social movements deploy masks
as a form of political communication, Blas’s works could be seen both as a
critique of the reduction of the human to data and as an embrace of an
ethics of non-transparency. Taking Blas’s project as its point of departure,
this chapter argues that the political methodologies of defacement evident
in the work of Blas and others represent yet another instantiation of a
poetics of opacity, one that speaks directly to some of the current
6
Blas, “Escaping the Face.”
7
Simone Browne, “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity, and Biometrics,” Critical
Sociology, 36.1 (2010): 133.
8
Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of
Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 2.
challenges facing global migration and values associated with cosmopoli-

tanism. Glissant’s work on cultural difference, colonialism, history, and
geography is helpful also in this context, as it produces an understanding
of ethical relationships based on his model of opacity. Glissant’s philoso-
phy rejects essentialism and universality and focuses instead on particular-
ity and diversity. His position on ethics revolves around the recognition
that opacity, for the non-Western subject, functions as a defense mecha-
nism against the objectifying gaze of the other. Clarity is always on the side
of colonial power, but history can never be transparent, and the problem
with clarity is that it inevitably translates (and thus diminishes) the differ-
ence of the other into an already known cache of knowledge. To insist on
opacity is then to resist the process of reducing the other to some pseudo-
universal category. What the concept of opacity fundamentally contests is
the assumption that one has a right to understand the other. Glissant
instead advocates an intersubjective, participatory, and intuitive form of
understanding capable of grasping its own limitations. After discussing
Glissant’s philosophy, the chapter turns to consider both how the notion
of opacity might fruitfully inform a rethinking of the value of transparency
in contemporary media culture and how artists might use a poetics of
opacity as a tool of political resistance.
As we have seen in a previous chapter, in the work of Glissant and some
of his Antillean colleagues, opacity as a theoretical concept is closely
aligned with a method of thick description known as épaisseur and with
what Patrick Chamoiseau terms “the poetic approach.” This method, or
stance, is at least potentially capable of functioning as a tool of political
resistance against the encroachment of neo-imperialism and global capital-
ism. Chamoiseau’s support of this approach, while evidently rooted in the
postcolonial tradition, also speaks to broader contemporary issues that
have arisen with the emergence of what Clare Birchall calls the “datatar-
iat,” understood as “a ‘class’ encouraged to make use of and be used as
data; a mass connected through data access, production, accumulation,
and exploitation.”9 “For the datatariat,” Birchall claims, data constitute
“the prime currency, vector, commodity, lifeblood.”10 The poetic
approach, to Chamoiseau, is a way of mobilizing against a myopic eco-
nomic logic and the management of life by data. “We’re facing a rationality
9
Clare Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/
Politics, 83 (2014): 25–46; 26.
10
Ibid.
158 A. S. GRØNSTAD
that has forgotten about the poetic,” Chamoiseau complains, “[w]hat

Glissant and I have tried to do in most of our work is to reinstate the for-
gotten, poetic dimension of the political… that which organizes the city of
men and allows peoples to come into their own.”11 We might consider the
poetic as a particular vernacular within whose remit the thickness of expe-
rience is conveyed. The Caribbean philosophers’ use of the term épaisseur
certainly evokes the ethnographic concept of thick description, associated
with Gilbert Ryle and popularized by Clifford Geertz, who in a key text
on the subject defines the objective of anthropology as “the enlargement
of the universe of human discourse.”12 Here, I would like to suggest that
épaisseur as both a hermeneutic and communicative practice would seem
to complement the deployment of opacity in Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s
thinking. In the context of their work, opacity is not principally about
uncommunicativeness or the deliberate withholding or vitiation of infor-
mation. It is, rather, an approach, an attitude—and possibly even an aes-
thetics—that seeks to safeguard a subject or a phenomenon against the
threat of reducibility. On this view, unknowability is preferable to
essentialism.
The migration of the concept of opacity from a postcolonial to a neo-
liberal setting has provided an opportunity for reexamining its critical
potential. For contemporary technocratic cultures, transparency appears
to be so much of an ideal that not only open-endedness and ambiguity but
even the practices of reading and interpretation themselves have become
disagreeable to the system. There is also a sense in which the neoliberal
governance of populations by transparency is perceived as apolitical man-
agement, thus dubiously muddling the boundary between politics and
administration. In this scenario, the purview of opacity extends beyond
the protection of the irreducibility of the colonial subject to encompass
every individual confronted with new regimes of monitoring, surveillance,
and observability or with what I above have termed the “ominous politics
of luminosity.”13 In 24/7, to return again to Crary’s book, he discusses
these regimes in terms of their “institutional intolerance of whatever
obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of
11
Patrick Chamoiseau as quoted and translated by Nicole Simek, “Stubborn Shadows,”
symploke, 23.1–2 (2015): 363–373; 367.
12
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The
Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, 14.
13
See page X above.
visibility.”14 On Crary’s reading, we recall, neoliberal politics wages a war

against what he calls “the otherness that is the motor of historical
change.”15 Such a dismal diagnosis implies that transparency can be an
oppressive force, suggesting as its unsurprising antithesis opacity. But, as
Nicole Simek has argued, to endow the concept with a uniquely transgres-
sive power would be a mistake; in this matter, too, the point is perhaps not
so much what opacity really is as how it materializes.16 There is not neces-
sarily anything intrinsically seditious or progressive about, for instance,
opaque images. We are likewise wrong to assume that opacity can only
mean total impenetrability. Wisely, Simek ties the notion of the opaque to
reading as a political act, to the possibilities for discernment that reading
provides. This is how Simek encourages us to consider the notion of
opacity:
the idea of a stubborn density, of something layered, something partially

penetrable but with a mind of its own, seems to me a more productive way
of thinking about opacity, a more productive way of harnessing its power of
critique its ability to shift assumptions and feelings so that new modes of
relating, new criteria of evaluation can be developed.17
For Simek, reading as a cultural practice represents exposure to “conflict

and ambiguity as a facet of social interaction,” whereas non-reading entails
“a faith in the evacuation of conflict and opacity altogether through tech-
nical means.”18 The basic conflict drawn up here seems to be the one
between the transparency of big data and the complexity of hermeneutic
interpretation.
Several contemporary painters, photographers, filmmakers, and media
artists participate in aesthetic practices that all in different ways confront
and critique the “thin description” of the datatariat. In what follows, I
want to draw attention to the work of the aforementioned Blas as well as
to that of Adam Harvey, Leo Selvaggio, and Sterling Crispin, who share a
common interest in the construction of anti-facial recognition masks.
Used in CCTV cameras throughout urban spaces, in subways and airports,
in drones, as well as for automatic number plate detection, facial
14
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, 2013, 9.
15
Ibid.
16
Simek, 372.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
160 A. S. GRØNSTAD
recognition technology facilitates the algorithmic identification of faces. It

is also found in Facebook’s photo-tagging service. The thing about this
kind of technology is that its mechanisms remain invisible. Algorithmic
operations compute data at an astonishing speed, rendering the phenom-
ena unobservable and thereby, as Patricia de Vries has noted,
“ungraspable.”19 The relationship between the subject and technologies
for data capture is oddly asymmetrical. On the one hand, facial recogni-
tion devices gather and stockpile biopolitical information about the indi-
vidual; on the other, these technologies are themselves phenomenologically
unavailable to us. This imbalance generates a particular form of unease
concerning the integrity of the self in the face of data capture technolo-
gies. The datafied, information-driven regime of which facial recognition
tools are a symptom could be seen as one materialization of what Gilles
Deleuze calls societies of control, embodied by the corporation and replac-
ing what Michel Foucault terms disciplinary societies, embodied by institu-
tions like the school, the factory, and the prison. In his “Postscript on the
Societies of Control,” Deleuze works through a set of oppositions that
differentiate the former from the latter. Where disciplinary societies are
marked by enclosures, machines, numbers, products, and labor, societies
of control are defined by dispersion, computers, code, services, and debt.
But most pertinent to the current issue, Deleuze’s societies of control turn
individuals into “masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.”20 In short,
societies of control essentially commodify identity and reduce subjectivity
to data.21
For some critics and artists, resisting the new control regimes entails
imaginative acts of concealment and escape. The process of making visible
that undergirds data capture technology motivates various methods of dis-
appearance as well as enactments of invisibility. Adam Harvey’s project CV
Dazzle (2010) makes use of computer vision camouflage inspired by the
so-called dazzle painting applied to World War I warships to dodge sur-
veillance systems. The object is not to hide but rather to baffle the
19
Patricia de Vries, “Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The Janus Face of Anti-Facial
Recognition Masks,” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 8.1 (2017): 72–86.
20
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59: 1992, 3–7; 5.
21
For a comprehensive study of the colonization of contemporary life by economical mod-
els under neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of
Antidemocratic Politics in the West, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. See also
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the
New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books, 2019.
software so that it fails to read a face. In his CV Dazzle Workshop, Harvey

invites the patrons to design and try out their own maquillage and hair-
styles, resulting in the manufacture of a kind of negative face. A different
aesthetics informs the masks created by Leo Selvaggio for his URME proj-
ect (2014), which lets users wear a 3D-printed hard resin prosthetic of the
artist’s face so that whenever they are exposed to facial recognition soft-
ware their face gets identified as that of Selvaggio himself, thus concealing
their own identities from the cameras. Sterling Crispin’s Data-Masks series
(2013–2015) crafts face masks from reverse engineering facial detection
algorithms. The human-like visages that form the basis of the 3D-printed
masks are generated by the operations of the algorithms, and the artist has
described these masks as “animistic deities brought out of the algorithmic-
spirit-world of the machine.”22 Crispin’s aim is to make tangible the pro-
cedures of a technological other that reads us and configures our identity
according to its own parameters.23 His Data-Masks undertaking inverts
the relationship alluded to above between facial recognition systems and
the individual, in that the masks make visible certain components of the
“invisible power structures” that govern the technology while at the same
time hiding the identity of the person who wears them.24 A similar inten-
tion characterizes the work of Blas, which could be understood as his
response to the possible threat facial recognition technologies pose with
regard to reproducing the odious pseudoscientific practices of the nine-
teenth century. Like Crispin, Blas is committed to visualizing how data
capture systems scan human faces and to thwarting their computation by
manufacturing face masks that are unreadable to the technology. The
masks that comprise his Facial Weaponization Suite are nebulous objects
devised to safeguard the self against the perils of informatics visibility and
total quantification, which both are phenomena that crush alterity and
reduce the self to mere data.25
A series of community workshops geared toward LGBT groups and
other minorities also form part of the Facial Weaponization Suite project,
and the activist underpinnings of all these works are clear enough. The
masks are made in order to be worn by protesters occasionally taking part
22
Sterling Crispin, “Data-Masks (Series),” http://sterlingcrispin.com/data-masks.html,
accessed October 9, 2018.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
de Vries, 75, 78.
162 A. S. GRØNSTAD
in acts of civil disobedience. In this, artists like Blas, Crispin, Selvaggio,

and Harvey inscribe themselves into a larger iconoclastic tradition of dis-
senters like the Zapatistas, Anonymous, and Pussy Riot. The masks are
one instantiation of what de Vries calls “sociotechnical imaginaries,” which
we might comprehend as critical and creative interpolations, perfor-
mances, or mediations that reconfigure the fraught territory between
emergent technologies and the social sphere.26 They partake in what
Alexander Galloway sees as “the politicization of absence- and presence-
oriented themes such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity, or the rela-
tionship between identification and legibility, or the tactics of nonexistence
and disappearance.”27 What seems at stake for artists-activists like Blas is
nothing less than the political-legal state as well as the ontological status
of the human itself, which as a result of smart technologies, artificial intel-
ligence, and robotics have arrived at a point of existential crisis. While de
Vries is ultimately skeptical of projects like Data-Masks and Facial
Weaponization Suite, claiming that the artists merely replicate the falla-
cious binary logic of human and machine that they wanted to suspend, the
masks nonetheless enact a form of identity revision that challenges the
classificatory regimes of technological rationality and neoliberal capital-
ism. Ethnicity, race, and gender get largely obfuscated by the wearing of
these masks, which represent a mode of unidentifiability and unrecogniz-
ability that chimes with Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s belief in opacity as an
instrument of political and existential emancipation.
What I also want to suggest is that the performance of opacity that the
face masks of Blas, Selvaggio, Harvey, and Crispin enable could also be
seen as an expression of a cosmopolitan ethics. The emphasis on global
citizenship that threads through philosophies of cosmopolitanism from
Diogenes of Sinope and St. Paul to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace
(1795) and onto modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler,
and Kwame Anthony Appiah presupposes a universal morality and equality
that in order to work has to be, in a metaphorical sense, faceless. But the
larger point that I would like to make here involves a different facet of the
notion of cosmopolitanism, one that surfaces in the work of Emmanuel
Levinas and, later, in that of Paul Gilroy. As I have shown elsewhere,
Levinas’s ethics—grounded in the irreducibility and vulnerability of the
26
de Vries, 73.
27
Alexander Galloway, “Black Box Black Bloc,” in Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, eds.
Arthur Kroker & Marilouise Kroker, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, 224.
Other and the demands that this makes on the subject—shares a close
affinity with Glissant’s poetics of opacity.28 For both Levinas and Glissant,
in our encounter with the Other, her alterity needs to be preserved; for the
latter, as we have seen, this becomes possible through techniques of opac-
ity and thick description. In his text “The Planet,” Paul Gilroy argues that
exposure to Otherness is essential to the task of fostering the value of
diversity. For him, a commitment to cosmopolitanism thus entails a
“methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own cul-
ture and history.”29 The simultaneous spectacle and opacity of the face
masks visualize at once the alterity and universality of the self; in the words
of Appiah, they are “universality plus difference.”30
In the remainder of this chapter I want to examine more closely how
the staging of opacity through the use of facemasks disrupts both the prin-
ciples of neoliberal governance and the intransigent subscription to the
techniques of datafication that tends to accompany it. But in order to
grasp the wider context for this disruption, it is apposite first to assess the
nature of the philosophy of devaluation that undergirds neoliberal doc-
trine. As Wendy Brown has compellingly argued, neoliberalism is some-
thing more than just a particular rationale for conducting economic affairs,
routinely associated with deregulation, privatization, free markets, tax
reduction, and cuts in welfare. In addition, and far more ominously, it also
represents “a normative order of reason” that “configures all aspects of
existence in economic terms.”31 This order, which in its fundamental
mode of operation resembles a Foucauldian regime, poses a threat to the
conditions of democracy itself, which is an overarching concern in Brown’s
research. When “all spheres of existence are framed and measured by eco-
nomic terms and metrics,” she writes, the political essence of the demo-
cratic is evacuated and supplanted by an economic one.32 One telling
indication of this shift, for Brown, is Obama’s State of the Union speech
in January 2013, in which the president in no uncertain terms conveyed
28
See Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016, 200.
29
Paul Gilroy, “The Planet,” After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia,
London: Routledge, 2004, 75.
30
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Education for Global Citizenship,” Yearbook of the National
Society for the Study of Education, 107.1 (2008): 83–99.
31
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Brooklyn: Zone
Books, 2015, 10; 17.
32
Ibid., 10.
164 A. S. GRØNSTAD
that the primary aim of his administration was economic growth and that
democratic ideals such as liberty and equality were simply means toward
the attainment of that objective. The repercussions of such a transference
of power from the political to the economic are potentially severe. At stake
is the sheer capacity to imagine a specific content for democratic institu-
tions in the future. For all its plasticity and historically variable appear-
ances, what epitomizes neoliberalism is its anti-Keynesianism and its
construal of the individual and the state on the model of the corporation.
Like the firm, the individual is seen as a project to be managed for the
optimalization of capital value. What Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon
term “economization” have momentous consequences for present-day
democracies.33 As delineated by Brown, these are rising inequality (docu-
mented in research by Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty,
Amartya Sen, Robert Reich, and others); monetization of sectors consid-
ered to be external to the logic of the Market, such as education and
health care; corporatization of the state; and, finally, global financial vola-
tility. Whether intended or not, the ideology of reduction that vitally
informs the neoliberal regime is anathema to realizing the possibilities of
the human, which, in the words of Brown, are attainable “not through”
but “beyond” the realm of the economic.
An ideological order founded on the omnipotence of the economic has
no use for any notion of the social,34 but it requires a particular kind of
governance, one that subscribes to the same totalitarian imaginary prob-
lematized by Crary as well as to the “soft power” intrinsic to Deleuze’s
societies of control. Central to this managerial logic are the tangled tech-
niques of transparency, quantification, and datafication, practices designed
to root out forces of complexity and uncertainty; in short, anything that
might pose a threat to and undermine the depthlessness of neoliberalism’s
economic regime. As a classificatory enterprise, the computationally
enabled detection of faces utilized in CCTV and other surveillance sys-
tems, as well as in a range of social media and smartphone applications,
constitutes just such a practice of quantitative measurement, devised to
translate particularity into pre-existing taxonomies. While critics have been
33
Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon, “Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the
Economy Towards Processes of Economization,” Economy and Society, 38.3 (2009):
369–398.
34
See Wendy Brown, “The Big Picture: Defending Society,” Public Books, October 10,
2017, https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-defending-society/, accessed January
17, 2019.
quick to point out the similarity of such systems of biopolitical cataloguing

to the disgraced science of physiognomy,35 the fact remains that some
computational technologies (e.g., Affectiva) for facial detection have
adopted the historically contingent constellation of basic emotions origi-
nally put forward by Charles Darwin.36 But the concern over facial recog-
nition systems goes deeper, one problem being that the technology is
grounded in a set of presuppositions that have proven dubious, if not
untenable. The digital coding of both facial identity and emotion is fraught
with equivocality, but the latter is particularly tentative because uncertain-
ties exist already on a semantic, pre-computational level and, not the least,
because the coded image is ill equipped to register the temporal dimen-
sion of the human face as an expressive medium. As communication schol-
ars Thomas Bjørnsten and Mette-Marie Sørensen point out, technologies
such as Affectiva rely on a model which presumes that emotions are “trace-
able as fixed points in the face,” not “socially contingent and relational.”37
The human face is subject to the variabilities of a continuous temporal
unfolding, and hence its expressive qualities cannot be adequately cap-
tured by inert images. Even leaving aside the questionable assumption
that the site of emotion is the face rather than the body, the implicit prem-
ise underlying facial recognition technology that the face possesses an
invariable, static identity seems rather infelicitous. Although the body is an
entity from which various data can be extracted effortlessly, this does not
mean that the body is isomorphic with these data.38
Besides duration, another aspect of the face not easily acquirable for
automated detection systems is its cultural sculpting. For the Deleuze and
35
See, for instance, Joseph Pugliese, Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics, New York:
Routledge, 2010, and Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the
Technology of Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Consult also Zach Blas,
“Informatic Opacity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 9 (2014), http://www.joaap.
org/issue9/zachblas.htm, accessed January 21, 2019.
36
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872], Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965.
37
Thomas Bøgevald Bjørnsten and Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, “Uncertainties of Facial
Emotion Recognition Technologies and the Automation of Emotional Labour,” Digital
Creativity, 28.4 (2017): 297–307; 299.
38
For another illuminating study of the biopolitical management of the individual and its
rendering of people into categories, see also Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
166 A. S. GRØNSTAD
Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus, the face is nothing if not political,39 and

in his magisterial work on the twin histories of the face and the mask, art
historian Hans Belting contends that the face “is just as much the expres-
sion that we give it as it is the result of evolution.”40 Through this expres-
sivity, fueled in part by paint, make-up, tattoos, glasses, piercings, veils,
and various surgical procedures, the face becomes something malleable, an
unfinished project. For Belting, the mask and its attendant cultural histo-
ries also form part of the history of the face, which in turn trails the anthro-
pological history of media.41 Seen in this context, the different masks that
Blas, Crispin, Selvaggio, and Harvey engineer etch themselves into a long
tradition of regarding the mask as an intrinsic part of the concept of the
face, a proxy or facsimile that gradually became a disguise. But then again,
in relation to the subject’s interiority, the face is always also a mask. What
is more, the obsession with facial modification through biomedical tech-
niques is revealing of the extent to which the face is a cultural object
defined by plasticity rather than just a biological entity with fixed features
easily scanned by facial detection systems.42
From the Facial Action Coding Systems developed by Paul Ekman and
Wallace Friesen in the late 1970s to the Affdex apps, the method of man-
aging the human face as an unvarying image composed of distinctive seg-
ments and points brushes up against a number of problems, then. Not
only is the face subject to the changes that inevitably occur in durative
conditions—and not only are the emotions that manifest themselves
through it far from straightforwardly interpretable—but it is also power-
fully shaped by cultural affects that are too convoluted for machine-based
analysis. But even this is not the whole story. An image is never completely
isomorphic with the pre-photographic object, no matter how high the
resolution. A face, Agamben writes, is the site of a profound openness.43
39
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1987. See also Jenny Edkins, Face Politics,
London: Routledge 2015, and Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the
Politics of Appearance, New York: New York University Press, 2014.
40
Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History, trans. Thomas S. Hansen & Abby
J. Hansen, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, 3.
41
Ibid., 6; 1.
42
Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance,
New York: New York University Press, 2014.
43
Giorgio Agamben, “The Face,” Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti & Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000, 98.
In a way, it is a representation even before it is being represented in any

given medium. But when this site becomes an image, if anything its com-
plexity deepens. As Paul Coates observes, the filmic face is self-referential;
it becomes “a surface haunted by intimations of concealment, interiority
and exteriority.”44 Such a surface forms a zone of indetermination.
However, this is not how the modern, digital image has come to be seen.
On the contrary, as the editors of a special issue of the journal Digital
Creativity hold, “discursive and practical employments of images today
can very often be seen as affirming and reaffirming certainty via marked
returns to emphasizing high resolution, sharpness, clarity and realistic
representation.”45 But as easily manipulable digital images proliferate, so
does their liability. The apparent surge in technologically enhanced clarity
is offset by a correlated intensification of murky images, which introduce
a certain level of “representational undecidability.”46 These “uncertain
images,” which is the term the aforementioned editors use to describe cur-
rent forms of opacity, shape visual culture on many levels: they influence
the production of knowledge, institute themselves into various power rela-
tions, reshuffle ethical values, and function as arbiters in all kinds of socially
and politically precarious contexts.
The human face is also a specimen of the uncertain image. Its emo-
tional content never fully available to linguistic paraphrase, as Béla Balázs
notes in Visible Man, the face likewise resists the computational measure-
ments of Affdex and similar systems.47 “We do not gain any useful inter-
pretation of the actual face,” Bjørnsten and Sørensen state, “but rather the
result of an algorithmic idea of mapped features that align with metrics
optimized for efficient calculations.”48 But if the face is already touched by
an untranslatable inscrutability, are not the contestatory masks of Blas,
Crispin, Harvey, Selvaggio, and others redundant or even gratuitous?
Here, I want to argue that the masks might not only be tasked with pre-
venting identification, but that another purpose is to trouble the flagrant
reductionism inherent in facial recognition systems. The kind of reading
this technology promulgates is shallow and based on correspondences of
44
Paul Coates, Screening the Face, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 2.
45
Ulrik Ekman, Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup & Kristin Veel, “The
Uncertainty of the Uncertain Image,” Digital Creativity, 28.4 (2017): 255–264; 255.
46
Ibid.
47
Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans.
Rodney Livingstone, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
48
Bjørnsten & Sørensen, 306.
168 A. S. GRØNSTAD
an exterior nature. It records and registers surface information; data that

not only capture a mere fraction of the subject’s identity but which could
also potentially be misleading when it comes to suggesting or relaying
information of a more inferential kind. In short, facial detection practices
generate information without knowledge.
Such systems betray a faith in the transparency of data so blind that it
ironically threatens to stifle their informational value. The reliance on ana-
logical correspondences, on matching identities, breeds only repetition,
the dull reoccurrence of the same. Works like Data-Masks, CV Dazzle,
Facial Weaponization Suite, and the URME project, in contradistinction,
seem related to what Janet Wolff has called the aesthetics of uncertainty,
art whose deliberate or unintentional opacities massage our imagination in
productive ways.49 Pondering the function and meanings of the masks that
Blas, Crispin, and the others manufacture, I was reminded of the existence
of other masks; more specifically, my own. It was my oldest daughter who
made them for me. The first one was my Snapchat avatar. She thought my
account looked a little slipshod without one, so she constructed a face for
me. There was some resemblance there. She got my hairstyle just about
right, although the color was a tad darker. Against the square, yellow, and
punctured Snapchat background, my new face stared back at me with vivid
yet ultimately expressionless blue eyes. She was eleven or twelve at the
time, and I thought she did a great job. For Christmas a year or two later,
she gave me a new face, this time an analog one. It was a mask made of
clay, a sturdy and fairly heavy object the crafting of which seemed to have
required a certain level of effort and care. I noticed right away that the
color of the hair and the eyebrows was almost exactly the same as that of
my Snapchat avatar. My ceramic lips were a bright burgundy, my some-
what protruding eyes a severe blue. If a particular look could be extrapo-
lated from my handcrafted countenance, I would say it was one of minor
worry. Delighted to receive a present that was not, say, a tie, but instead
something so endearingly homespun, I still wondered what to do with it.
So I brought it to my office. I tried wearing it, my new face, but it was not
quite compatible, size-wise. If it were to replace my old face, I would look
chronically concerned.
Being a solid, tree-dimensional object, my new mask occasioned a med-
itation upon the relationship between, on the one hand, opacity and, on
the other, the density and tactility of things. Unlike screen images, the
49
Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
mask is not a surface. It has a certain volume. There is a force of resistance

embedded within its materiality. If I wore it in real life, it would serve as a
disguise; an unchanging, motionless, uncommunicative face, a frozen gri-
mace negating all transparency. Although entirely different media, there is
a peculiar equivalence between ceramic masks and photography. Both
embalm the face. Both represent stasis. Belting talks about this relation-
ship in the context of technological history:
Instead of creating faces that are reproducible in the photograph with an

immediacy and mechanical precision never before achieved (apparently
without the intervention of the human eye), modern technology was ulti-
mately just creating masks. As a result, the nearly obsessive invention of new
image media (beginning with film) from the turn of the twentieth century
on was triggered by a flight from the mask. The hope was to banish the inert
mask from the moving picture. Photography had shown something that was
no longer a face, but in the next moment had already become a memory in
life. The so-called live image (the concept is deceptive) competed with life
in the gap that photography had left behind.50
If one were to follow Belting’s argument, photography—including iden-

tificatory images—is a creator of masks. As a stasis-inducing technology,
photography is naturally incapable of capturing the flow of time, the power
of duration without which experience and being become impossible.51
When biopolitical governance is converting the face into “a quantitative
code, template, and standardized form of measure,”52 what is being refash-
ioned is something that in a way is already a mask. In light of such image
philosophical considerations, the masks of the artists referred to above
might be found to disguise something that is itself a disguise. What, then,
is their real purpose? I want to suggest, first of all, that even though these
artistic objects and, say, a passport photo could all conceptually be regarded
as masks, they vastly differ in terms of usage. While the sole value of the
latter lies in its referential and identificational function, the former’s shape-
less features grant its wearer at least temporary anonymity. Put differently,
50
Belting, 205.
51
For a vivid example of the dynamics of cinematic duration and faciality, consider Abbas
Kiarostami’s 2008 film Shirin, as well as my reading of it. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “Abbas
Kiarostami’s Shirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy, Film Criticism, 37.2
(2012): 22–37.
52
Blas, “Escaping.”
170 A. S. GRØNSTAD
the photograph as a biopolitical mask arrests identity, while the facemasks

release it. Secondly, the artificial masks must be understood, I would like
to contend, in the context both of play and playfulness as well as of resis-
tance and revolt. There is a hint of the carnivalesque in Selvaggio’s URME
project and in Crispin’s Data-Masks, for instance, a desire to overturn
social expectations about the locus of agency and the nature of the face.
This ludic dimension suggests a kinship with Chamoiseau’s “poetic
approach,” or épaisseur, the thickness of a heterogeneous experience of
the world in which relations are always liquid and shifting.
CHAPTER 9
Sublime Static: Low
The art of masquerade explored in the previous chapter is a technique that

essentially turns the face into noise. In this closing chapter, I assay a differ-
ent case of aestheticized faciality, but this time with the added twist of
connecting the visual with the acoustic. In Chap. 2, I noted how noise
habitually is mobilized as a metaphor to describe indefinite images. While
in the context of communication studies noise is seen as the unwelcome
interruption of a signal, in other contexts—for instance musicology or
aesthetic theory—it is regarded as an expressive device in its own right.
This study has been preoccupied with the epistemologically and ethically
productive uses of different kinds of visual noise. In a sense, opacity in the
visual arts entails the attempt of the image to subvert its own fixity. In
bringing this book to a close, I want to float the hypothesis that maybe we
need to reflect a little on auditory opacity in order fully to appreciate the
functions of blurry or otherwise indistinct images. I intend, in other
words, to introduce a comparative perspective of sorts, not so much to
present a simple analogy as to flag up the possible limits of visual opacity.
If a vital purpose of the perceptually opaque is to provoke, to bewilder,
and to produce a sense of cognitively fertile turmoil, the state of contain-
ment upon which the image is contingent might lessen such effects (and
moving images are not much different in this respect, as they, too, are
subject to the restraints of the frame). Sound, on the other hand, is disper-
sive, unbounded. Since anatomically we remain unequipped with the
equivalent of eyelids, Christoph Cox points out, we are “forever and

172 A. S. GRØNSTAD
inescapably bathed in sound, immersed in it in a way that we are not

immersed in a world of visible objects.”1 Sound invites a particular entan-
glement, which, in the case of noise, entails an encounter with opacity that
conceivably is more sensorially intense than that with opaque images. In
the remainder of this chapter I consider the interrelation between optical
and aural modes of opacity by analyzing the hybrid aesthetics of the music
album. More specifically, I shall focus on a record that addresses issues
similar to some of those dealt with in the previous chapter, in particular
the transformation of the face into a mask. That album, Low’s Double
Negative (2018), also captures a politically pungent moment in the cul-
ture and may furthermore be read as a response to the accelerating blare
of social media. My argument is that Low adopts opacity as a poetic device
in the service of a particular kind of socio-aesthetic bildung.
As a young child, I immersed myself in literature, cinema, and music.
Album covers in particular had me transfixed.2 What fueled my interest in
the form was not its iconic purchase but rather its impenetrability. Much
as I admired their graphic qualities, and as much as I gained aesthetic plea-
sure from scrutinizing them, the covers of, say, Wish You Were Here (Pink
Floyd, 1975) or Murmur (R.E.M., 1983)—which I listened to for the first
time when I was five and thirteen, respectively—seemed uncommunicative
or almost mischievously enigmatic. If we stop to think about it, this pen-
chant for the ambiguous and the cryptic pertains not just to individual
covers but quite possibly to the form as a whole (while there are evidently
exceptions). In this, the genre—and I will purely for the sake of simplicity
refer to album covers as a genre, although I do not really think they con-
stitute one—is different from other visual forms with which they share an
obvious resemblance, such as the movie poster. The latter typically fea-
tures its star or stars or alternatively a key scene or motif from the film, and
it rarely trades in the kind of abstruseness that often trails the music album
sleeve. Starting from this observation, I would first like to suggest that the
record cover is defined by some sort of dialectical tension between the
music and its graphic elements or between the sound and the image.
Second, I shall contend that the rhetorical figure that best encapsulates
1
Christoph Cox, “Sonic Thought,” in Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach,
ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, 99–110; 99.
2
Years later this interest resulted in an academic publication. See Coverscaping: Discovering
Album Aesthetics, eds. Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2010.
9 SUBLIME STATIC: LOW 173
this tension is that of opacity. Third, I want to delve into the epistemologi-
cal ramifications of this conceptual basis by examining more closely the
work of the American indie-rock band Low, in particular their aforemen-
tioned 2018 release Double Negative, an uncompromisingly experimental
work teeming with brutal noise and sublime static. Below I discuss the
album’s graphic and sonic affordances in terms of a poetics of opacity. I
also consider the band’s extensive catalogue to ask what kind of narrative
might be discernible from the evolution of its album covers, both alone
and in conjunction with the music.
When Double Negative was released on Sub Pop on September 14,
2018, it was hailed as “a dystopian masterpiece” and as “a scowling and
shell-shocked response to Trump’s America.”3 Sharing its title with albums
by the American prog-rock and jazz band The Muffins (2004) and the
London punk band The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Anything
(2018)—as well as artist Michael Heizer’s work of land art near Overton,
Nevada (1969)—the record was generally seen as “a disquieting docu-
ment of our time,” to borrow the words of another reviewer.4 This was
not just due to its unusually abrasive textures but also because it promoted
“nuance and uncertainty” in times characterized by a disheartening scar-
city of both.5 Produced by BJ Burton, who also helmed Low’s previous
album Ones and Sixes (2015), as well as Bon Iver’s explorative 22, a Million
(2016), Double Negative was the culmination of some boldly innovative
shows the band had performed at venues such as Amsterdam’s Westerkerk
and London’s Union Chapel. The sonic experiments heard on the record
are not the result of finished songs being processed or tweaked retrospec-
tively, but are rather the product of a compositional evolution in which
sketches and drafts by the band were further developed by Burton in
Justin Vernon’s studio April Base in Wisconsin.
The band is no stranger to the use of electronic textures, which goes
back almost twenty years, to their breakthrough album Secret Name
(1999). A greater presence than ever before on Ones and Sixes, electronics
and noise assume such a prominent role on Double Negative that the
3
Gareth James, Album Review, Clash Magazine, September 13, 2018, https://www.
clashmusic.com/reviews/low-double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019, and Rich
Juzwiak, Album Review, Pitchfork, September 14, 2018, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/
albums/low-double-negative/, accessed November 26, 2019.
4
William Doyle, Album Review, The Quietus, September 28, 2018, https://thequietus.
com/articles/25383-low-double-negative-review, accessed November 26, 2019.
5
Ibid.
174 A. S. GRØNSTAD
project easily inscribes itself into an aesthetic tradition comprising artists

such as the English industrial music innovators Throbbing Gristle, the
Irish noise rockers My Bloody Valentine, the Radiohead of Kid A (2000),
the Canadian Walter Benjamin-quoting glitch-and post-rock artist Tim
Hecker, the American avant-garde composer William Basinski, the
Canadian experimental music collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor,
the German multimedia artist Thomas Köner, and the Norwegian ambi-
ent music project Deathprod, just to name a few. Widely reviewed, the
album has invited a plethora of colorful descriptions. The noise is “jar-
ring,” yet also somehow “‘purifying’ of the band’s essence.”6 For some, it
is “harrowing and transportive” all at once.7 On “Quorum,” the opening
track, the sound supposedly emulates that of “being run over by square
tires with snow chains.”8 Surging waves of static will have us “triple-
checking [our] speakers,” writes the reviewer for Record Collector.9 The
gist of the album’s reception is that the music is aggressive and the terms
used to unpack it are accordingly violent. “Noise slurps and laps away at
melodies with a diseased tongue,” concludes one critic.10 The melody is
deliberately “[mangled],” claims another.11 Descriptors such as “dam-
aged,” “disfigured,”12 “warped,” “decay,” “oblique,” “contorted,”
“visceral,”13 “dissonance,” “distortion,”14 “degradation,”15
6
Steven Johnson, Album Review, Music OMH, September 14, 2018, https://www.musi-
comh.com/reviews/albums/low-double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019.
7
Ian Mathers, Album Review, Dusted, September 17, 2018, https://dustedmagazine.
tumblr.com/post/178180890404/low-double-negative-sub-pop, accessed November
26, 2019.
8
See Juzwiak.
9
Mike Goldsmith, Album Review, Record Collector, 483 (2018), https://recordcollector-
mag.com/reviews/double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019.
10
See Juzwiak.
11
See James.
12
See Johnson.
13
See Juzwiak.
14
Spyros Stasis, “For Their 25th Anniversary Low Produce a Work of Unreal Quality in
Double Negative,” PopMatters, September 11, 2018, https://www.popmatters.com/low-
double-negative-review-2595077858.html, accessed November 26, 2019.
15
Michael Cyrs, Album Review, The 405, September 18, 2018, https://www.thefouro-
hfive.com/music/review/review-low-maintain-their-icy-creativity-on-the-often-brilliant-
double-negative-153, accessed November 26, 2019.
“disorienting,”16 and “alien” proliferate among the reviewers.17 To sample

one of the more concise attempts to convey the flavor of the music, I
would like to quote William Doyle’s piece for The Quietus:
Every instrument has been abstracted almost beyond recognition, and all
sounds are in messy conflict with each other. Extremities are stretched out,
oscillating between claustrophobic rumble and gleaming beauty. The drop-
outs and clicks of the album’s most intense moments are littered with cracks
that let light shine through.18
In terms of acoustic audacity, then, Double Negative has rightly been

saluted as a groundbreaking piece of artistic expression, arriving at a time
when expectations for radical aesthetic innovation perhaps were not the
highest (after all, this is the age of both sampling and the eternal reissue).19
One theme that reappears across the reviews of this album is its per-
ceived connection to the zeitgeist. The ecological crisis, economic auster-
ity, the rise of right-wing populist movements in the West, the chaos of the
Trump administration, and a sense of general despondency—these socio-
political circumstances shape the music, critics contend, and the corrosive
sonic tapestry of the album has been largely seen as the band’s timely
response to them.20 Another interpretive frame that was mobilized by
some commentators is that the music’s confrontational experimentalism
addressed the interminable clamor of contemporary social media. For
some, Double Negative speaks to the “overstimulated” self, or the state of
being ceaselessly inundated with information.21 “If ever an album was
built to make a mockery of the stream once and tweet era,” one reviewer
opines, “it was this.”22 The music is too intense and overwhelming to
focus on anything else. A too easy interpretation of the album would be
that it offers an aesthetics of decay for a decaying world. The noise, as one
16
Fraser MacIntyre, Album Review, The Skinny, September 13, 2018, https://www.the-
skinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums/low-double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019.
17
Mark Deming, Album Review, AllMusic, September 14, 2018, https://www.allmusic.
com/album/double-negative-mw0003197435, accessed November 2019.
18
See Doyle.
19
For more on this, consider Mark Fisher’s observation that after the turn of the millen-
nium the ability of electronic music to be innovative and generate new sounds dried up. See
Fisher, “Hauntology,” 16.
20
See, for instance, Beaumont-Thomas.
21
See MacIntyre.
22
See James.
176 A. S. GRØNSTAD
critic claims, “no longer underpins the song—it is the song.”23 While it
does not seem unlikely that the record does in fact make sense as a rejoin-
der to a geopolitical moment fraught with dystopian overtones, the obser-
vation posits a relationship between work and context that is too simple,
or mechanical. A work such as Double Negative is fundamentally genera-
tive rather than mimetic. The album might have noise “coming out of its
wounds,” but we should understand this noise not as an effort to repre-
sent the havoc out “there,” in the world, but rather as a creative force that
serves other and eminently post-representational functions.24 Noise speaks
the language of opacity. It is not at all random; on the contrary, this is
aesthetically processed noise, which, evidently, begs the question if per-
haps we should call it something else.
As signposted by its title, Double Negative is a kind of protest music,
albeit markedly different from, say, Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” (1963),
Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970), Bob
Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” (1973), or Rage Against the Machine’s
“Killing in the Name” (1992). It is also possible to argue that Low’s aes-
thetic project was an adversarial one right from the start. With its drone
minimalism and methodical patience—traits that would become instantly
illustrative of the band’s poetics—their first album I Could Live in Hope
was released on the Vernon Yard label in the middle of the grunge era, in
February 1994, less than two months prior to the death of Kurt Cobain.25
While probably indebted stylistically to the early sound of the Canadian
band the Cowboy Junkies (whose debut Whites Off Earth Now!! was
released by the Latent label in the fall of 1986)—this is my own conjec-
ture, by the way—the austere, reverent slowness exhibited on that record
was light years away from the popular music of its time and pushed the
envelope of what rock and roll could be. It was as if their aesthetic of sub-
traction was informed by a line from the record’s third track “Cut;”
“get[s] rid of things that don’t matter.” Even the cryptic and mostly
monosyllabic song titles adhere to a minimalist persuasion: “Words,”
23
See Goldsmith
24
See Juzwiak.
25
I Could Live in Hope is of course seen as one of the albums that were key in ushering in
the so-called “slowcore” genre of alternative rock, which comprise artists such as Codeine,
Red House Painters, Bedhead, and Blue Tile Lounge. The members of Low appear to disap-
prove of this moniker and I refrain from using the concept here.
“Fear,” “Slide,” “Sea,” and “Rope,” to name a few.26 By the time they get
to Double Negative, almost a quarter century after I Could Live in Hope,
the words are frequently difficult to discern, due to the heavily processed
vocal and the churning noise by which it is enfolded. The verbal content
of “Tempest,” for instance, is practically impossible to make out; maybe as
listeners we are supposed to think that the message is just too excruciating
to be properly enunciated. There are however clues in the lyrics that sub-
stantiate the impression that Double Negative is a protest record.
“Quorum,” the opening track, seems to hint at the 2016 US presidential
election and the defects of the electoral college system. The third song,
“Fly,” possibly alludes to the detrimental effects that the echo chambers of
social media have on the sustainability of democratic institutions while also
revolving around a desire to escape a state of permanent conflict. References
to war also show up elsewhere, as in “Always trying to work it out.” The
lyrics occasionally appear to evoke the ecological crisis, as on the final
track, which begins with the couplet “Before it falls into total disarray/
You’ll have to learn to live a different way.” Among the reviewers, the line
most readily quoted, understandably enough, is from the song “Dancing
and Fire;” “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope.” Maybe, with Double
Negative, Low is no longer able to live in hope.
In what follows, I want to make a series of suggestions regarding the
relationship between sound and image as well as between narrative and
opacity. Throughout, my principal preoccupation will be the notion of
texture, which I take to be fundamentally important in approaching what
we may call a poetics of noise. First, I shall entertain two propositions
involving the album cover that may appear incongruous. What if we think
about the record sleeve not in terms of a supplement to the music, nor in
terms of a marketization of it, but rather as a site of textual denseness,
muteness, or even alterity? What if the cover image, at least in some cases,
is non-representational vis-à-vis the “content” of the record, a.k.a. the
music inside? The album covers of Low are quite instructive in this regard.
I Could Live in Hope features a young child in the left bottom half of the
image doing his homework. The rest of the cover is a nondescript
26
This penchant for very short titles continuous on later albums as well. Long Division
(1995) features “Violence,” “Shame,” “Turn,” and “Stay;” The Curtain Hits the Cast
(1996) has “Laugh,” “Lust,” and “Dark;” Secret Name (1999) contains “Soon,” “Immune,”
and “Home;” and Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) includes “July,” “Embrace,” “Whore,”
and “Closer.”
178 A. S. GRØNSTAD
brown-beige spread. On the cover of Long Division we are shown the

loneliest light bulb anybody has ever seen. Foregrounded on the sleeve for
The Curtain Hits the Cast is an equally forlorn snare drum placed against
opulent yet murky drapes that, had they been red, would seem kind of
Lynchian. Secret Name displays a bouquet of what appears to be asters,
while Things We Lost in the Fire shows a naval map. Trust, one of the few
Low covers with a human presence, exhibits a lone arm stretched down-
wards against a deep red background. A drawing of what looks to be huge
clouds of billowing smoke rising from a lake adorns the cover of The Great
Destroyer. Drums and Guns is just a white surface with some grey smudges,
with the title printed in red letters below the band name. The cover of
C’Mon, with its silhouetted drummer and shadowy lower third, recalls The
Curtain Hits the Cast. The Jeff Tweedy-produced The Invisible Way fea-
tures a painting (or, possibly, drawing) in the style of early twentieth-
century modernism by the Duluth artist Ryan Lemahieu. Appearing on
the cover of Ones and Sixes is a leafless, lonely tree against a gray setting.
Finally, the cover of Double Negative contains what at first sight is a strange
and not immediately identifiable object against a light pink background
(more on that one a little later). Pretty consistent across this body of work
is a graphic sensibility that shares the asceticism associated with Low’s
songs. The figurations are often simple and somber, accentuating single
objects—a tree, an arm, a drum—that are if not completely decontextual-
ized than at least situated in a spatial environment that we recognize as
desolate and spartan. While there is a certain continuity of image and
sound in terms of minimalism, the album covers are mostly enigmatic and
opaque, and it would certainly be a stretch to see them as a visual tran-
scription of the style of music emerging from the grooves of the record. In
Fig. 9.1 Photo from

Double Negative (Low)
a way, the covers come across as almost demonstrably incommunicative

(Fig. 9.1).
What I am getting at here is that even before we encounter the squalls
of noise on the record, we are immersed in a particular kind of opacity.
Note that this is not tantamount to unintelligibility. Opacity does not
imply the absence of meaning, or semiosis, it is in itself a form of signifying
practice, more a veiling than an erasure of meaning. This brings me to my
second proposition, which is that album covers—in spite of their non-
supplementarity and intractable uncommunicativeness—might be consid-
ered as a form of skeletal narration. In his work on album covers, Robert
J. Belton goes against the tradition inherited from G. E. Lessing that holds
that still images can only depict things and not actions because they exist
only in space and not in time. Using The Beatles’s Abbey Road (1969) and
Genesis’s Nursery Cryme (1971) as examples, Belton asserts that record
covers can in fact engender a narrative content as what he refers to as
“emergent properties of various types of intertextual relationships.”27
Drawing on Barthesian theories of the open and interconnected text,
Belton makes an embryonic yet promising attempt to consider record
sleeves as the source of a narrative process. I would like to take the oppor-
tunity here briefly to elaborate upon this thesis by introducing the idea of
a successive assemblage. Would it be possible to decipher a story from an
analytical appraisal of all the album covers of a particular band or artist? If
so, what kind of narrative would emerge from this sequential constella-
tion? Would studying the evolution of covers across an artistic oeuvre shed
new light on the overarching aesthetics of the artist in question?
To sum up, what I propose here is that we may profitably consider an
album cover as a relational object, as a hermeneutic node in a larger assem-
blage that spans the complete discography of the artist, and, for that mat-
ter, other components of their visual cache such as music videos, band
photographs, and documentaries. In some—or maybe most—cases, the
graphic heterogeneity of any given artist may seem bewildering; take, for
example, The Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. In other cases, say, some of
the bands associated with the 4AD label (like Cocteau Twins, Pixies), the
pictorial design might be quite consistent across albums. But viewing
27
Robert J. Belton, “The Narrative Potential of Album Covers,” Studies in Visual Arts and
Communication: An International Journal, 2.2 (2015), http://journalonarts.org/wp-con-
tent/uploads/2016/01/SVACij_Vol2_No2-2015-Belton-The-narrative-potential_CS02.
pdf, accessed December 6, 2019.
180 A. S. GRØNSTAD
album covers in this way, relationally, does not of course mean that their
images become any less opaque. As for the case of Low, their covers appear
to fall into the latter category, as hinted at earlier.
The cryptic yet often elegant simplicity that embodies Low’s album art
is very much in evidence on Double Negative. Designed by British artist
Peter Liversidge, who was also responsible for the artwork on their previ-
ous album Ones and Sixes, the cover features what looks like a piece of
wood with two holes in it, painted black against a soft, pinkish back-
ground. Neither the name of the band nor the title of the record appear
anywhere in the image. If studied closely, one may detect tiny fissures on
the object’s top horizontal edge, and its bottom edge is clearly uneven, as
if it has been clumsily detached from a larger object. When I purchased my
vinyl copy of the album back when it was released in September 2018, I
did not understand what I was looking at. Perhaps perversely, I quickly
accepted this lacuna—it was not like the shock of the music itself did not
give you enough to think about—and it was only some time later when I
was doing research for a book chapter on the album that I learned more
about this rather enigmatic item. As an artist, Liversidge is among other
things known for playing around with the notion of creativity, as well as
for his “proposals.” For years his exhibitions have consisted of written
proposals for artworks, objects, performances, and happenings, only some
of which have materialized. Back in 2009, for instance, Liversidge mounted
an exhibition named The Thrill of It All at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh
(I have been unable to ascertain whether the title is an intertexual refer-
ence to the opening track on Roxy Music’s fourth album Country Life
(1974), but I suppose it very well could be). As part of the process, he
wrote 160 so-called Proposals to Richard and Florence Ingleby; Proposal
No. 15, for example, asked to have all the Inglebys’ furniture moved to
the gallery, Proposal No. 4 simply stated “to come and visit from time to
time,” whereas Proposal No. 87 demanded that Liversidge drive all avail-
able rental cars in Edinburgh to Glasgow. Proposal No. 106 is probably
the prototype for the tree figure that ended up on the cover of Ones and
Sixes. This is the fully realized A Pair of Winter Drawings (2010), a depic-
tion of bare trees (not unlike those on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s sixth
album Bare Trees (1972) applying black masking tape on paper. But as
critic Lauren Dyer Amazeen writes, “proposals not actualized hold just as
much importance as those that are, for they remain to be acted upon in
the imagination of each viewer.”28
A collaborative artist in more ways than one, Liversidge a few years later
had school children from East London make their own artworks on the
theme of protest. The project became the exhibition Notes on Protesting
shown at the Whitechapel Gallery between March and June of 2015. It
was around this time, in 2013 to be exact, that Liversidge came to work
with Low, creating the stage design and projection backdrop for the
band’s shows at the Royal Festival Hall and at the Barbican Centre. Since
then he has also collaborated with the Canadian band The High Plains for
their album Cinderland (Kranky, 2017) and with the Portland minimalist
duo David Allred and Peter Broderick for their record Find the Ways
(Erased Tapes, 2017). The Whitechapel show featured slogans printed on
cardboard or textiles such as “Give money to the poor,” “Clean up after
you,” “Make the city calm,” and “Less trucks and cars. More chocolate
bars!” As a conceptual artist, Liversidge thus has a history of generating
activist or protest works, an interest that likewise flourishes on Double
Negative.
What its cover image shows, or at least could show, is a shattered panel
from a pump organ’s foot bellows. It has also been suggested that the
small holes represent two negative spaces. If so, it would be a consolida-
tion of the album’s title, which references the syntactical phenomenon in
which two forms of negation are included within the same sentence struc-
ture, as in “I cannot find my keys nowhere” or “He ain’t never told no
lies.” In linguistics a double negative is considered a form of colloquial
speech, if not incorrect per se than certainly a case of poor and/or confus-
ing use of grammar. Some critics, like the reviewer for The Guardian, has
interpreted the title as a knowing, self-conscious witticism on part of the
band, implying that the album “[doubles] down” on the melancholy
moroseness for which they have become famous.29 The choice of the pedal
makes a little more sense when we know that Liversidge is in fact also a
collector of objects that look like faces, be they carpets, stones, or pieces
of cardboard. For the cover of Double Negative, he originally wanted to
use a different object, and when he poses for a picture by a fan, it becomes
clear what the thing on the cover is actually supposed to be—a means of
disguise. The strange and mute device that garnishes the cover is thus a
28
Lauren Dyer Amazeen, “Peter Liversidge,” Artforum 48.10 (Summer 2010): 365.
29
See Beaumont-Thomas.
182 A. S. GRØNSTAD
mask, which in turn is a kind of face. But what does it mean, in the context
that I have established for the album, that the first thing we see is a piece
of camouflage?
One direction we could go in is to explore the conceptual ramifications
of the idea that the album cover is itself a mask, a screen, or masquerade,
one that conceals certain things even as it reveals other things. This makes
a lot of sense, since, after all, the meaning of the term that music lovers
and vinyl devotee use so casually is both to protect and to hide.30 But in
what remains of this talk I am more interested in Double Negative specifi-
cally and in the cover’s interaction with the sound of the album and with
the themes of opacity and protest. The function of a mask is precisely to
be non-transparent. It produces a form of semiotic “noise.” In an era like
ours, marked as it is by geopolitical instability, civic unrest, mass demon-
strations, arguments over the niqab and the burka, the rise of activist
groups like Anonymous, intensified surveillance, and cutting-edge facial
recognition technologies, the face has become a culturally and politically
contested site, so much so that a singular aesthetic tradition—discussed in
the previous chapter—has recently emerged as a response to current
debates about faciality. As we have seen in Chap. 8, artists such as Crispin,
Selvaggio, Harvey, and Blas have developed a variety of masks intended to
jam the work of technologies of facial recognition. I want to suggest that
it is into this tradition Liversidge’s image for Low inserts itself. The chunk
of the foot bellows that we see on the cover of Double Negative is a highly
abstracted face, a mask of noise that disrupts our reading of the image. In
this sense, the cover matches the dissonance of the music, except that the
album’s acoustics is confrontational, whereas the image is almost soothing
in its graphic modesty.
There is another connection between the sound and the image. The
pre-photographic object, if it is indeed a pedal from a pump organ, is
wrecked. A broken instrument seems an appropriate index for the aural
environment on Double Negative, which to a certain extent is defined by
distortion and noise. This aesthetic could have more than just one single
purpose or implication. It may address the escalating chaos out there in
30
The meaning of the former, protection, is made abundantly clear to anyone who has had
the misfortune of sorting out the mess after a lively all-night party where dozens of vinyl
records were played without being put back into their respective covers. Christian Marclay’s
Record Without a Cover (1985), which is exactly what the title says it is, explores what hap-
pens when the damage done to the coverless vinyl through transportation, storing, and play-
ing becomes part of the work itself.
the world, as many of the reviewers have picked up on. It may be aimed at
the listener as a gesture of provocation—in which case it could be seen as
a work of transgressive art—punishing the audience for being such capri-
cious and easily distracted subjects in the era of music streaming and social
media. The noise could furthermore be intended as a foil to the undeni-
able moments of piercing beauty that the album still contains. It could
also simply represent experimentation for its own sake. These explana-
tions, or hypotheses, might all be relevant frames of interpretation. But I
also want to introduce one additional argument, which is that the album—
and by “album” I mean both the aural, the visual, and the textual compo-
nents considered as an indivisible whole—thematizes its own materiality, a
critical act that serves to galvanize the opacity that is intrinsic to the artistic
expression. The music, just like the album cover, is ultimately impenetrable.
The modernist vanguard of the early twentieth century considered
what they called “noise-sound” an unequivocally welcome development.
This “revolution in music,” which they compared to the clatter of indus-
trialization, was the subject of the painter Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise,
popularly known as The Futurist Manifesto.31 Written in Milan as a letter
to his composer and musicologist friend Balilla Pratella on March 11,
1913, this was a text that argued that the tradition of classical music was
obsolescent and boring—the concert halls are referred to as “hospitals for
anemic sounds”—and that above everything the future of music
was noise:32
Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more
attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by
distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic
pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal
spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the
loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping
of flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestration of department stores’
sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars of railroad sta-
tions, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants
and subways.33
31
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise (Futurist manifesto, 1913), trans. Robert Filliou,
New York: Something Else Press, 1967, 5.
32
Ibid., 6.
33
Ibid., 7.
184 A. S. GRØNSTAD
The Manifesto embraces a hungry vitalism characteristic of its time. Noise,

Russolo claims, “has the power to bring us back to life.”34 The “‘joys of
noise’,” as Marie Thompson puts it, quoting the composer Henry Cowell,
have been one of the dominant themes of twentieth-and twenty-first-

century aesthetics from the typical (albeit problematic) lineage of ‘noise’
that is drawn through the Futurists, Varese, musique concrète, Cage, Dada,
Fluxus, industrial music, drone, free jazz, Japanese noise music and glitch,
to circuit bending, record scratching and the popular use of gain, distortion
and feedback in guitar playing.35 (28)
Drawing on Michel Serres’s work on the idea of the parasite, Thompson

adopts a counterview of noise that contests its status as “unwanted, unde-
sirable or damaging sound” to regard it, instead, as an affective energy
with the capacity to be imaginative rather than destructive.36 In line with
Serres, Thompson argues that “the noise-parasite induces a modification
within the system,” which makes it a productive agent.37 Seen from this
philosophical perspective, the currents of noise on Double Negative denote
what Bernd Herzogenrath calls sonic thinking.38 In the final instance, this
might be what Low is about in this phase of their career, subverting the
hegemony of the visual sense as the primary site of reflection, which is the
lesson Hans Jonas imparts in his “The Nobility of Sight” (1954). Noise,
Stephen Kennedy contends, offers an “evasive mobility” that “resists the
fixing of the gaze that is characteristic of visual methods.”39 Low’s embrace
of a poetics of opacity, I want finally to conclude, should be seen as a con-
tribution to such a sonic thinking, faultlessly committed to the political
potential of Russolo’s noise-sound.
34
Ibid., 9.
35
Marie Thompson, “Productive Parasites: Thinking of Noise as Affect,” Cultural Studies
Review, 18.3 (2012): 13–35; 28.
36
Ibid., 13.
37
Ibid., 18.
38
Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, New York:
Bloomsbury, 2017.
39
Stephen Kennedy, Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise, New York: Bloomsbury,
2018, 1.
Afterword
When I first began thinking about the notion of opacity, it was against the
horizon of precarious art. At the time, this was a rather unspecified, open-
ended concept onto which several and likely disparate tracks of thought
converged: the hunch that certain (roughly) contemporary works were
more invested than others in addressing states of urgent political and social
precarity; the perception that the concern with formal issues had become
somewhat suspect; as well as art’s inherent vulnerability with regard to
public neglect and the power of ephemerality and forgetfulness. Pondering
the precarious in turn led me to the subject of opacity, which upon closer
scrutiny yielded a link back to my earlier attempt at rereading mimetic
theories in the field of film theory.1 In that work, I introduce the notion of
the amimetic as a philosophical tool with which to argue against the view
that the film mage—even in its most realistic guise—is a transparent reflec-
tion of a world beyond the screen. The image—dense, textured, crusty,
and impermeable—is of a different order. When materially damaged, as in
the work of artists such as Bill Morrison and Ernie Gehr, this density is
rendered more conceptually available, more explicit. An image that threat-
ens to fall apart conveys its status as “written forth,” as intentionally pro-
duced, better than a seamless image. As Sophie Ristelhueber puts it,
“[w]hen an object is broken, it is seen better. It seems undressed.”2 In a
1
See my Transfigurations, in particular chapters 1 and 2.
2
Sophie Ristelhueber, Operations, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009.

186 AFTERWORD
certain sense, therefore, opaque images act as a figure for the constitutive
opacity of all artistically manufactured images.
These reflections, however, were simply the point of departure for fur-
ther inquiries. What I have desired to know more about is what one might
call the axiology of opaque aesthetics. What kind of knowledge does an art
of opacity produce? Does it have a special affinity with ethics? Although
opaque in widely different ways, do such artworks have something in com-
mon? How do we critically appraise a poetics marinated in opacity? What
are some of the key examples of this tradition (if we can call it that)?
Curious to trace the theoretical genealogies of the concept of opacity, I
devote a full chapter to a discussion of a range of critics, from Canudo to
Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marin, Lyotard, Hito Steyerl, Beugnet, and many
others. A dominant interpretation of the various cases of opacity in the
corpus that follows is that they can be found to interrogate the largely
undisputed cultural valorization of transparency. I address the problems
pertaining to a rigid adherence to transparent mediation by invoking the
work of Glissant (in the realm of ethics) and Crary (in the domain of poli-
tics) especially. What I call an aesthetics of illegibility is discussed in a series
of analyses of selected works by Gehr, Akomfrah, Saunders, Lynch, Paglen,
Blas, and Low, all of which gravitate in one way or the other toward a
reckoning with neo-positivist models. Opacity in the cinema of Gehr and
Morrison is tied to the filmmakers’ ongoing examination of materiality
and communicability, while in the work of Akomfrah opacity is located in
the intertextual fragment understood as a particular kind of ruin. What I
call the mongrel visuality of Saunders’s Passageworks reveals a form of
opacity that may be understood as a graphic embodiment of the abstract
notion of the secret. To show that opacity also has a narrative dimension
is the aim of my analysis of an episode of Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.
The last three case studies explore works that are more openly political in
their orientation and composition. In my engagement with Paglen’s pho-
tographic practice, I argue that the production of opacity mainly serves to
draw our attention to other and more culturally urgent opacities. The next
chapter reads the artistic design of facemasks as an expression of political
resistance to the proliferation of biometric technologies. In the final chap-
ter, I ask if the presence of the frame works to domesticate the “visual
noise” inside it and if media of sound are perhaps better equipped both to
produce and to maintain a poetics of opacity that is more uncompromis-
ingly transgressive.
AFTERWORD 187
There are evidently many styles of opacity, and this book does not claim
to be nowhere near exhaustive in its mapping of an aesthetics of illegibility.
Not only are the artworks that warrant inclusion in such a project count-
less, but the theoretical perspectives that I nurture throughout could both
be deepened and supplemented. Since I have aimed at a certain degree of
comprehensiveness, several avenues of analysis are left insufficiently
explored. I am confident that much remains to be said about the different
ideas and concepts with which I have wrestled. The book is called
Rethinking Art and Visual Culture because I insist that taking into account
the relative lack of transparency in aesthetic communication represents a
vital transition in our conceptualization of the materiality of image, sound,
and text. We are acutely conditioned to take transparency for granted and
to think about it as an ideal, something that can be tirelessly refined, and
so bringing into focus the notion of the opaque requires a reorientation—
both sensory and thematic—that may strike us as taxing, objectionable, or
even counter-intuitive. Consider, then, this book as a preliminary broach-
ing of the subject, one that leaves plenty of room for further investigation.
In conclusion, I would like to submit three topics in particular that are in
need of more sustained work. The first is the critique of visibility. Over the
different chapters in this book I frequently tie opacity to neo-positivism,
claiming that the former is an index of opposition to the latter. But the
bulk of my analysis is committed to charting an ontology, if you will, of
visual opacity, one centered by a range of case studies, and as a result my
treatment of the topic of visibility/clarity/luminosity is not as extensive as
I would have liked. In an era of ever more aggressive surveillance going
deeper into visibility as an ideological regime is certainly an urgent matter.
Secondly, my interpretation of the poetics of opacity is necessarily informed
by the formal specificities of the cases with which I have engaged. Future
studies that concentrate on different empirical materials are thus indis-
pensable in order to flesh out this embryonic poetics of opacity presented
here. Thirdly, while I have considered a wealth of critical sources to pro-
vide a rough outline of an intellectual history of the opaque image, this
narrative is still incomplete, and more work needs to be done with respect
to augmenting the present sources, pointing out latent connections
between different conceptions of opacity, and recontextualizing whatever
significance that I have been able to glean from the theories consulted. My
hope is that this book might serve as a reference point and inspiration for
ambitious future endeavors in this field.
Index1
A Akomfrah, John, 3–4, 6–9, 77–101,

Abstract Expressionism, 106 103–104, 150–151
Accidental gaze, 26 Album covers, 172–173, 179–182
Acoustic, connecting with the Algorithms, 159–161
visual, 171–184 Althusser, Louis, 64–66
Actors, image-making in Saunders’ Amimetic, 59–61
work, 111–116 art, 4–5
Aesthetic imaginary, 5–6, 59–60, opacity, 46–48
64, 72–76 Anecdotalism, 115–116
Aesthetics Angelopoulos, Theo, 86–87
of decay, 175–176 The Anthropocene, 128–130
image-making of actors, 111–116 Anthropocene televisuality, 131
precarious, 10–12 Apocalypticism, 131
of the secret, 149–150 ‘Apparatus theory,’ 34–35
‘showing non-seeing,’ 138–139 Arcangel, Cory, 23–24
Aesthetic sympathy, 117–118 Archival ghosts, 77–101
Affdex apps, 166–167 Arendt, Hannah, 15–16
Affirmational ethics, 139–140 Art
Agamben, Giorgio, 58–59, album covers, 172–173, 179–182
86–89, 166–167 illegibility, 23–25
Air Force Special Projects opacity in, 4–5, 23–25
Office, 142–144 Artistic practice, opacity in, 3–4
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

190 INDEX
Atomic energy, 129–131 Black sites, 135–151

Axiographics, 26 Blas, Zach, 3–4, 8–9, 117–118,
153–157, 162–163, 168
Boehm, Gottfried, 45
B Bolden, Charles Joseph 'Buddy, 80–81
Balázs, Béla, 30n22, 167 Bolter, J. David, 44–45
Balsom, Erika, 28–32 Bonsu, Osei, 98–100
Banu, George, 96–98 Bordwell, David, 120–122
Barad, Karen, 144–145 Boundaries of discernibility, 53–76
Baron, Rebecca, 23–24 Bowditch, Lucy, 28–29
Baudelaire, Charles, 29–30, 70 Brakhage, Fran, 73–74
Baumgarten, Alexander Brecht, Berthold, 145–146
Gottlieb, 32–33 Brennan, Teresa, 15–16
Bazin, André, 61–62, 71–72, 140–146 Breton, André, 113–114
Bellour, Raymond, 17, 61–62 Brown, Wendy, 163–164
Bellows, George Wesley, 64, 70 Butler, Judith, 10–11
Belting, Hans, 45–46,
165–166, 168–169
Belton, Robert J., 179–180 C
Benjamin, Walter, 106–108, 141–142 Cage, John, 21–23
Bentham, Jeremy, 96–98 Caliskan, Koray, 163–164
Benveniste, Émile, 36–37, 39–40 Callon, Michel, 163–164
Bergson, Henri, 144–145 Cameron, Allan, 28–32
Bergstrom, Janet, 120–122 Canova, Judy, 109
Beshty, Walead, 147 Canudo, Ricciotto, 28–31
Beugnet, Martine, 32–33 Carlyle, Thomas, 94–95
‘Beyondness,’ 120–121, Casetti, Francesco, 54–55
132–133, 135–136 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 43–45, 65–68
Big data, 159 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 92–94, 157–158
See also The datatariat Cinécriture, 36–37, 39–40, 46–48
Bildung, 171–172 Cinema
Bioderegulation, 15–16 ‘as such,’ 5–6, 56
Biometric technologies, 153–170 of awareness, 54–55
Biopolitical governmentality, 154–156 boundaries of discernibility, 53–76
Birchall, Clare, 94, 111–112, Gehr, Ernie, 72
149–150, 157–158 ‘imitative,’ 56
Birdwise, Scott, 96–98 low definition, 29–32
Bjørnsten, Thomas, Lynch, David, 120–121
164–165, 167–168 mimetic capture, 33–34
Black art, 96–98 Cinematographic vision, 32–34
Black Audio Film Collective, 77–101 Cineplastics, 132–133
Black diasporic experience, 6–7 Citizenship, 136–137
INDEX 191
Clarity, and opacity, 32–34 Depth dimension, 51–52, 110–111

‘Clear but confused’ Deren, Maya, 23–24
perception, 32–34 Derrida, Jacques, 36–37, 76
Cliché verre, 104–105 Discernibility, boundaries of,
Cognitive effects, opacity, 21–23 5–6, 53–76
Cohen, Tom, 47–48 Disciplinary societies, 159–160
Communicative capitalism, 138–139 Dissensus, 14
Comolli, Jean-Loui, 32–33 Distribution of the sensible,
Concentrationary imaginary, 67–68 140–141, 144–145
Contagious mediation, 133–134 Doyle, William, 173–175
Cornell, Joseph, 109 Dudo, Slatan, 104–105
Cousin, Mark, 132–133 Duras, Marguerite, 36–37
Cowill, Henry, 183–184 Dworkin, Craig, 21–23
Cox, Christoph, 171–172
Crary, Jonathan, 15–16, 41–42, 94,
158–159, 164–165 E
Crispin, Sterling, 159–163, 168 ‘Economization,’ 163–164
Cubitt, Sean, 114–116 Einfühlung, 117–118
Cultural memory, 57–58 Ekman, Paul, 166–167
Cultural production, 141–142 The elsewhere of the image,
86–87, 89–91
The Enlightenment, 148–149
D Enunciation, 36–37
Data capture technology, 160–161 Épaisseur, 92, 157–158
See also Biometric technologies Equiano, Olaudah, 98–100
The datatariat, 157–161 Ethics
‘Dawson flutter,’ 59 of curiosity, 26
de Vries, Patricia, 159–162 opacity and art, 21–23
Dean, Jodi, 138–139 politicized visibilities, 13–14
Debord, Guy, 35–36 transparency and opacity, 16–19
Debuysere, Stoffel, 81–82 Ex-centric cinema, 7, 88–89, 107–108
Decay, aesthetics of, 175–176 Experimentalists, 53–54
Decomposing images, 55–56 Extinction narratives, 131
Defacement, 155–156
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), 142–144 F
Deictic visuality, 140 Face masks, 153–170
Deiktos, 140 Faces, opacity in, 9, 153–154
Deleuze, Gilles, 70, Facial Action Coding
159–160, 164–166 Systems, 166–167
Delpeut, Peter, 55–56 Facial authentication
Denis, Claire, 120–122 technology, 153–170
192 INDEX
Fargier, Jean-Paul, 34–36, Global face culture, 153–154

38–39, 110–111 Godard, Jean-Luc, 35–36, 56–57
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 104 Goodwin, Douglas, 23–24
Faure, Élie, 132–133 Gordon, Michael, 57–59
Fay, Jennifer, 128–130 Gorky, Maxim, 128–130
Feminism, and gaze, 48–49 Greenberg, Clement, 44–45
Fetveit, Arild, 27–28 Grusin, Richard, 44–45
Figural/figurality, 37–43, Guattari, Félix, 144–145, 165–166
65–66, 110–111 Guillory, John, 53–54
Film theory, 28–31, 34–52, 64–65 Gunning, Tom, 59–61,
Foster, Hal, 57–59, 82–83 74–75, 103–104
Foucault, Michel, 159–160 Gustafsson, Henrik,
Frampton, Holly, 12 136–137, 148–149
Free speech, 154–156
‘Frenzy of the visible,’ 32–33
Friedrich, Caspar David, 77–78 H
Friesen, Wallace, 166–168 Hall, Stuart, 100–101
The Futurist Manifesto, 183–184 Hamlin, Janet, 24
Hammid, Alexander, 23–24
Harbord, Janet, 88–90, 107–108
G Hariman, Robert, 138–139
Gaddis, William, 21–23 Harvey, Adam, 159–163
Galison, Peter, 144–145 Hermeneutics of the Black
Galloway, Alexander, 161–162 site, 147–148
Gaut, Berys, 44–45 Hermeneutics of the secret, 149–150
Gaze Herzogenrath, Bernd, 184
accidental, 26 High definition, 31–32
Black sites, 147–148 Hobart, Rose, 109
film theory, 48–49 Hoberman, J., 62–63
gender, 48–49 Hypermediacy, 44–45
screen theory, 52
Geertz, Clifford, 157–158
Gehr, Ernie, 3–7, 59–61, I
72–78, 106–107 ‘Iconic difference,’ 45
Gender, and gaze, 48–49 Illegibility
Genet, Jean, 84–85 aesthetics of, 3
Giedion, Sigfried, 117–118 aim of this book, 1–3
Gilroy, Paul, 162–163 art, 23–25
Glissant, Édouard, 16–19, 84–85, Image-making, of actors, 111–116
94–95, 150–151, Images, as writing, 110–111
157–158, 162–163 See also Cinécriture
Global citizenship, 162–163 Immediacy, 44–45
INDEX 193
Indexical purchase, 140 Lynch, David, 3–4, 7–8, 118–134

Interstitial space in art, 106–107 Lyotard, Jean-François, 38–40
Intertextuality, 6–7
Irigaray, Luce, 18
M
Malevich, Kazimir, 5–6, 56
J Marin, Louis, 37–38
Jacobs, Ken, 73–74 Masquerade, 153–170
Jay, Martin, 38–40, 42–43 Massumi, Brian, 141–142
Jeandrée, Philipp, 138, 146–147 Mauer, Barry, 113–114
Jenkins, Bruce, 103–106, 108, 109 McElheny, Josiah, 104
Jonas, Hans, 184 Media theory, 1–4
Mediality, 5–6
effect on the imaginary, 68–70
K Méliès, Georges, 96–98
Kant, Immanuel, 162–163 ‘Metahistory,’ 98–100
Kaurismäki, Aki, 104–106 Metz, Christian, 64–65, 140
Kember, Sarah, 144–145 Metzger, Gustav, 24
Kenaan, Hagi, 51–52, 110–111 Migration, 79–80, 98–100
Kennedy, Stephen, 184 ‘Mimesis of the precarious,’ 58
Kooning, Willem de, 131–133 Mimetic capture, 33–34
Kubrick, Stanley, 86 Mimeticism, 47–48, 131–133
Minh-ha, Trinh, 40–42
‘Minor cinema,’ 104–105
L Minoritarian empiricism, 137–138
Lacan, Jacques, 64–66 Mirror satellites, 15–16
Larose, Alexandre, 24 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 64,
Lefebvre, Henri, 141–142 94–95, 136–137
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 32–33 Misek, Richard, 28–32
Lessing, G. E., 179–180 Mitchell, W. J. T., 138–139
Levinas, Emmanuel, 18–19, 162–163 Montez, Maria, 109
Lichtenstein, Roy, 106 Morin, Edgar, 70–71
Liminal experience, 131–133 Morrison, Bill, 5–6, 53–76
Limit telephotography, 136–137, Mroué, Rabih, 24
140–141, 144–145, 148–149 Music, connecting the visual with the
Lippit, Akira, 130 acoustic, 171–184
Lipps, Theodor, 117–118 Mylar film, 104
Literature, opacity, 24–25
Liversidge, Peter, 180–181
Low (rock band), 171–181 N
Low definition, 28–32 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 139–140
Lucaites, John, 138–139 Narrative opacity, 118–122
194 INDEX
Narrative process, 179–180 and transparency, 84–85, 158–159

The nebula of corrosion, 106 unshowability, 130–131
Neoliberalism, 163–165 value of, 16–19
Nichols, Bill, 26 visual culture, 34–52
Nieland, Justus, 132–133 Opaque images, 8–9
Nochimson, Martha, Opaque thickness, 36–37
120–121, 131–133 Optimalization of capital
Noise value, 163–164
aesthetics of, 26–28 The Other, 18–19
‘clear but confused'
perception,’ 32–33
connecting the visual with the P
acoustic, 171–184 Paglen, Trevor, 3–4, 8–9,
opacity in, 9–10, 24–25 117–118, 135–151
poetics of, 177–184 Peirce, C. S., 140
‘Noise-sound,’ 183–184 Pellonpää, Matti, 111–112
Novo, Reynier Leyva, 16–17 Pessoa, Fernando, 84–85
Nuclear power, 129–131 Peters, John Durham, 44–45,
128–130, 133–134
Phantasmagoria, 62–63
O Phantomality, 76, 128–130
‘Oblique autobiography,’ Gehr, 62–63 Philosophical imaginary, 67–68
Occupy protests, 153–154 Photography
Occurrent arts, 141–142 art and illegibility, 23–25
‘Oceanic ontologies,’ 98–100 Black sites, 141–144
Opacity clarity and opacity, 32–34
as an aesthetic, 10–12 cliché verre, 104–105
affective experiences, 55–56 irrational power of, 61–62
aim of this book, 1–3 low definition, 29–32
allegorization, 107–108 Paglen, Trevor, 135–151
in art and theory, 4–5, 21–23 ‘Poetic approach,’ 92–94, 157–158
in artistic practice, 3–4 Poetics of noise, 177–184
Black sites, 135, 136, 138–140, Political effects, opacity, 21–23
142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 151 Politicized visibilities, 13–16
cinematographic vision, 32–34 ‘Poor image,’ 58
in criticism, 25–26 Positivism, 147
disruptions of the image Postcolonialism, 11–12, 16–17
plane, 118–119 Post-modernity, 23–25
faces, 9, 153–154 Poststructuralism, 36–37
materiality, 114–116 Potentiality of the image, 86–91
in media theory, 3–4 Precarious aesthetic, 10–12
spectrality, 59–60 ‘Precarious attachments,’ 49–51
INDEX 195
Precariousness, 10–11 Secrecy

Protest, through music, 172–177 culture of, 147
Provost, Nicholas, 23–24 distribution of the
sensible, 144–145
knowledge and aesthetics, 149–150
R Saunders’ work, 112–113
Race, Akomfrah's film- Secret-flix, 109
making, 77–101 Seers, Lindsay, 24
Racial bias, 96–98 Self-reflexivity, 40–42
Rancière, Jacques, 14, Selvaggio, Leo, 159–163
49–51, 140–141 Semi-legibility, 1
Rauschenberg, Robert, 21–23 Semper, George, 117–118
Reappropriation, 83–85 Serres, Michel, 26–28, 184
Reflexivity, 40–42 Shannon, Claude, 26–28
Research, in Saunders’ work, 113–114 Sherman, Cindy, 113–114
Roberts, John, 148–149 ‘Showing non-seeing,’ 138–139
Rooney, Monique, 128–130, 133 Simek, Nicole, 13, 92–94, 158–159
Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, Sloterdijk, Peter, 133–134
36–40, 110–111 Smith, Jack, 109
Rosa, Salvator, 77–78 Smith, Marquard, 113–114
Ross, Christine, 49–51 Social imaginary, 43–45
Rotoscoping, 104–105 Societies of control, 159–160
Rückensfigur, 90–91, 96–101 Sonic thinking, 184
Rushdie, Salman, 100–101 Sørensen, Mette-Marie,
Russolo, Luigi, 183–184 164–165, 167–168
Sound
‘clear but confused’
S perception, 32–33
Sagar, Anjalika, 84–85 connecting the visual with the
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 64–65 acoustic, 171–184
Saunders, Matt, 3–4, 7, 103–116 noise aesthetics, 26–28
Schmarsow, August, 117–118 ‘noise-sound,’ 183–184
Schygulla, Hanna, 111–112 opacity in, 9–10, 24–25
Scientification of the poetics of noise, 177–184
humanities, 11–12 Spectator position, 65–66
Scientific imaginary, 67–68 Spectral historicity, 109–111
Screen media, 153–154 Spectrality, 7, 59–60, 76, 89–90
Screen theorists, 37–38 Stallabrass, Julian, 145–146
Screen theory Steyerl, Hiro, 25–26, 58
gaze, 52 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 63–64
leveling of, 51–52 Structural Film movement, 72
spectator position, 65–66 Surrealist Manifesto, 113–114
196 INDEX
T Verbeeck, Jeroen, 96–98

Taussig, Michael, 155–156 Vidler, Anthony, 117–119
Taylor, Charles, 66–69 Virilio, Paul, 41–42
Technoculture, 138–139 Vischer, Robert, 117–118
Texture, poetics of noise, 177–184 Visibilities, politicized nature,
Thiele, Hertha, 104–106, 113–115 13–16
Thompson, Marie, 183–184 Visual culture
Transatlantic imaginary, 67–68 assumptions and beliefs, 1–3
Transnational imaginary, 67–68 poetics of opacity, 21–23
Transparency purpose of this book, 1–3
clarity, 32–34 transparency and opacity,
and opacity, 16–19, 34–52
84–85, 158–159 Visuality, 94–95
politicized visibilities, 13–16
visual culture, 1–3, 34–52
Transtextuality, 83–85, 92, 96–100 W
Trigg, Dylan, 77–78 Warburg, Aby, 58–59, 87–90
Turvey, Lisa, 111–112 Warhol, Andy, 23–24
Warped space, 117–119
Weber, Max, 144–145
U Wilder, Billy, 105–106
Universality of the self, 162–163 Wolff, Janet, 100–101, 168
Unshowability, 130–131 Writing, see Cinécriture; Images,
as writing
V
Vagueness, 42–43 Z
Valéry, Paul, 100–101 Zylinska, Joanna, 144–145

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Rethinking Art and

Rethinking Art and

ISBN 978-3-030-46175-1 ISBN 978-3-030-46176-8 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Michael Heath / Alamy Stock Photo

The seeds of this book were planted during my stewardship of the

Bergen, March 5, 2020 Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

1 Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency Versus

2 On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory 21

3 Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr 53

4 Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere of the Image: John

5 The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders103

6 And Dark Within: David Lynch117

7 A Hermeneutics of the Black Site: Trevor Paglen135

8 Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas153

9 Sublime Static: Low171

Fig. 4.1 Screengrab The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah) 99

Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency

© The Author(s) 2020 1

through its reliance on a set of recurring properties: fuzzy graphics, motion

proclivity for employing it in a sustained manner seems higher in the

and visual noise in a compendium of theorists, from Hito Steyerl and

mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection,”3 the

Paglen’s projects. His blurry photographs, I argue, enact a certain redistri-

has become so widespread an ideal, valued and invoked by diverse constitu-

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film that derives so much of its intellec-

experience.”15 On this reading, then, visibility is no longer considered

Glissant and the Value of Opacity

This observation might prompt us to ask, why might clarity be a problem

Moreover, the structure of the relations accentuated in his theory clearly

inflicts on the arbitration of intersubjectivity. The dilemma is this: to know

On the Concept of Opacity in Art

© The Author(s) 2020 21

way or other have been materially damaged, either deliberately through

phenomenon in a more substantial way, one that is not unhelpfully nar-

Art and Illegibility

kneading proliferate in the visual art practices of the twenty-first century,

identification in contemporary film and media theory between the con-

What is particularly noteworthy about the connection Steyerl makes is

some scholars have pointed out.11 In the standard information theory of

Noise, furthermore, can be more than the material interference with an

the phenomenon of noise from a comparative angle, he defines medium-­

The Aesthetic and Philosophical Significance

Until around 2016 the critical preoccupation with low-definition or

capacity to reproduce a faithful image of the external world—in significant

captures a sense of cinematic specificity, and thwarts mimeticism.23 Above

potentially could lay bare “an illusory transparency deemed to be ideologi-

Cinema Between Clarity and Opacity

but confused” to describe other kinds of knowledge formations than that

seem less amenable to a philosophy of the “clear but confused” (but as we

though we have arguably never known a broader range of possibilities in

Transparency and Opacity in Post-classical Film

that particular forms of cinematic writing (those similar to pictographic or

v­ isible relation with what it represents.”49 Strangely, then, in this model

of discourse is too crude to be sustainable, as it fails to discriminate suffi-

Trinh Minh-ha’s advocacy of greater reflexivity in the attempt to capture

text and its potentially unbounded contextuality in equally sharp focus at

the historical variation of cinematic techniques, their appearance-­

On Comolli’s reading, social imaginaries and media technologies lock into

When it comes to high and low definition—transparency and opacity—

Bergen, March 5, 2020 Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

1 Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency Versus

2 On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory 21

3 Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr 53

4 Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere of the Image: John

5 The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders103

6 And Dark Within: David Lynch117

7 A Hermeneutics of the Black Site: Trevor Paglen135

8 Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas153

9 Sublime Static: Low171

Fig. 4.1 Screengrab The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah) 99

the phenomenon of noise from a comparative angle, he defines medium-

v isible relation with what it represents.”49 Strangely, then, in this model

the historical variation of cinematic techniques, their appearance-

olemics, [and] contradiction.”92 If the differentiality of art is diminished,

erformed by a fifty-five-piece orchestra while slides of visual decay were

e lusiveness of the ethical prove inadequate in the face of political chal-

database-enhanced poetics is the intertextual efforts of countless brico-