• 1  Serge Gruzinski, La Guerre des images de Christophe Colomb à Blade Runner (1492-2019), Paris, Faya (...)

2We are, nevertheless, well aware that this is a high price to pay. In fact, the real issue is the historic debt that we in the West owe to the peoples we conquered, without ever bothering to try to seduce them: the mirror we held out was a trap, because by introducing this double gap between representation and subject, we carried out a full frontal attack on indigenous thought, cutting it off from its material connections, emptying it of its power over things. From 1520 onwards, the destruction of idols by the conquering Spanish was an attempt to force this dissociation between the divinity and the representation of the divinity, which for Mexican Indians until then had been one and the same thing, as they saw the universe without ontological cuts, and subjectivity as an expressive multiplicity though gestures, dances and music, where the issue of meaning was simply not on the table.1 Representation and the subject are thus nothing more than the two sources from which the westernisation of the world began: it appears to us that this is a good enough reason to make the effort to think on them together.

• 2  Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 8^th edition, 200 (...)

5We must go back in time to a certain conception of the universe in order to rid ourselves of the reflex that makes us liken an image to a representation. Bergson sets out this conception in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. He follows a traditional path from Kantian phenomenology where the thesis is that all we can know is the image. The originality comes from the fact that Bergson ignores the conscience within which, and for which, these images constitute themselves as such: the transcendental subject, that escapes all empirical determination to become the condition needed for the knowledge of things. The image, according to Bergson, exists in itself, is free from all subjects, for the simple reason that the subject itself is an image among others and, as such, does not occupy a dominant position.  “It is the brain that is part of the material world, and not the material world that is part of the brain.”2 Of course, my body can appear different to me, but what is important is that it is first and foremost a question of a body, and not of this difference. As image is, in the end, the equivalent of matter, it is the type of variation my body can introduce to this material universe that is the question here.

• 3 Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-mouvement, chapitres 1 et 4, Paris, Minuit, 1983.

6In other words, it is because the images affect me to the point of cerebral damage that they produce, and the gestures they lead to, that movement, reaction, action take the place of representation following on from a perception of things. As such, “the image is more than a representation and less than a thing”: it is that which, in direct connection with matter, allows perception to plug into immediately pragmatic dimensions, instead of being considered as a sterile impression of representations in the brain. Through the “absolute identity” of the image and the movement that comes from such an elimination of the problem of conscience, Deleuze comes to characterise the Bergsonian universe as “metacinema” or, according to his disturbing phrase “the eye is in the things.”3

• 4  William John Thomas Mitchell, “What is an image?,” New Literary History, vol. 15, “Image/Imago/Ima (...)
• 5  Taking the opposition between Visual and the image as a basis as formulated by Serge Daney (“Monta (...)

7The consequences of that which we commonly understand by “image” seem to us, today, to be absolutely underestimated. Indeed, from Bergson onward, it became impossible to distinguish what constitutes the “mental image” and the “realreal image,” according to the famous division between “image” and “picture” that William John Thomas Mitchell outlined in the English language,4 nor is it possible to create a typology of images, like that proposed by Jacques Rancière in Le Destin des images, as this would unavoidably reintroduce a transcendence of meaning to the immanence of matter.5 To affirm that the real is a metacinema is the same as saying that everything is an image, or “picture,” and that all images are equal for the effects that they are able to produce.

• 6  Félix Guattari, La Révolution moléculaire, Paris, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2012, p. 410. We only r (...)

9We cannot be unaware of the political origins that underpin the signifying formalisation of content. According to Guattari, “a system of power uses this formalisation to unify all modes of expression and centre them on fundamental values.”6 The very precise wording, reveals, in one felled swoop, the three essential traits of the power system that is capitalism. First trait: capitalism, as a collection of operations of capturing and managing material and semiotic flows, does not contain signification in itself, which explains how it can rely on a perfectly a-significant semiotic – such as algebra, statistics, or even the quantity of space one can occupy in the metro, to have this effectiveness on desires and on the real that it rejects all alternative praxes.

• 7  It is interesting to read the analysis of the television audience by Félix Guattari and Gilles Del (...)
• 8  On the reduction of signs to signifiers as a capitalist operation, see Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs a (...)

11Third trait, and a direct consequence of the second: capitalism acts by “social subjection” as much as “mechanical enslavement.” These two concepts, analysed in detail in the 13th plateau,7 work in tandem: while we are busy being “pieces in the machine” of social functioning, we must also comply with positions as subjects (woman, man, employee, unemployed person) and to the position of the subject. The importance of the contribution of the Guattarian analysis of the signs, is to show that in the open space between the signs and their effects, the meaning attached to representations clears itself a path that takes us away from our intensive multiplicity, to a “pluralism of articulations” beneath the subject, beneath the subject as a support for the dominant representations, and beneath the subject as isolated cell, with no agency.8

• 9  Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Paris, Gallimard, “Tel,” 1975; Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce qu (...)
• 10  Harun Farocki, “La guerre trouve toujours un moyen” (War always fins a way), in HF/RG Harun Farock (...)

13To affirm of an image that it is “effective,” is, first of all, to grasp it at the point where it works in a tangible way – which implies that we consider it as part of an instrumental logic of “means, with an end in sight.” This remark, while problematical on many levels (we can indeed wonder if we can analyse a society, and more to the point, a capitalist society, from the perspective of well-determined objectives and finalities), at least forces us to study images in the real conditions of their production and their circulation. A social and economic base appears to be necessary, that orients the analysis toward the political system that makes them work, and that allows us to limit our remit to technical images only, as a “semiotic apparatus,” if, by apparatus we mean “dispositive” as in Foucault and Agamben,9 and as such all of the signs that aim to orient behaviour. The appearance of a new technique always corresponds to a complete redefinition of the ways it can be used. As such, the technicity of a picture is not to be measured in terms of pixels but in terms of the type of operations it makes possible. In “War always finds a way,”10 Harun Farocki insists on this idea, affirming that the war in Iraq signalled the emergence of a “new type of image”: “operational images,” that are not informative, that in no way pretend to represent reality, but that, as the technical accomplishment of an objective, are an integral part of a power operation. These images, taken by drones, missile cameras or surveillance cameras, remain incomprehensible as long as they remain detached from their real effects: from the visual target to the explosive target, from perception to action, the transition is obligatory (fig. 1).

• 11  Tiqqun, “Comment faire?,” Contributions à la guerre en cours, Paris, La fabrique, 2009, p. 176. (...)
• 12  It is interesting to highlight that the way Deleuze used the Bergsonian concept of clairvoyance wa (...)
• 13  For more on the political reach of clairvoyance and its conflict with action/ agency, we suggest y (...)

15It may be surprising to draw similarities between the American army and the inhabitants of a Brazilian favela. While, in both cases we are dealing with the instrumentalisation of signs with a view to effects that go way beyond them, with the solicitation of perception with a view to provoking a reaction that is immediately linked, and finally with the mechanical function of the sensory-motor schema, we can still legitimately wonder if, in certain resistance practices, we leave behind a certain conception of politics as the imperatives of effectiveness outweigh the possibility of being able to live in the world in a different way. In another war text,11 the authors invite us to “Operate / a slight shift / with the common logic / of the Empire and its contestation / that of mobilisation/ with their common temporality / that of the emergency,” a sign that we can be at war without necessarily sacrificing existence on the altar of the objectives of a revolution that is yet to come. The introduction of the issue of time, with all its dilatations and variations, to a political perspective that is constantly aiming for action, seems to us to be highly important, as it allows perception to enter data that must be taken into account in the construction of real alternatives. In fact, when we are not taken up by the urgency to shoot back, when the sensory-motor schema that runs it is broken, we are dealing with what Bergson referred to as clairvoyance, meaning a pure form of perception that no longer selects among that which is perceptible, what interests us and on which we can act.12 We form intervals, breaks in which our capacity to feel is augmented. Dreams and the subconscious thus fully take part in politics, in as much as they reconfigure the lines between the real and the possible: instead of settling for a choice between possibilities that are predetermined in and by the social field, thanks to these dimensions, we can strike out in the direction of possibilities that, while they indeed may involve a certain lack of realism, can nevertheless pretend to the actualisation of something that didn’t exist before.13

• 14  Harun Farocki, “La guerre trouve toujours un moyen” (War always finds a way), in HF/RG Harun Faroc (...)

16But, how can images manage to create the conditions for such a breakage of the sensory-motor schema, for such a level of “politicisation” of perception? Farocki goes on to say: “If we are interested in images that are part of an operation, this more likely comes from the flood of non-operative images, from the tedium of meta-language. Tedium of the everyday practice of re-mythologizing everyday life, and the multiple and many-channelled program of images that confirm the most banal thing: that the world is as it is.”14 In other words, operational images capture our interest not through their inherent role (aim, kill, surveillance), but due to the fact of the explicitation of this operation that calls for another operation to be carried out, that itself, is precisely located at the level of perception: to see non-operational images, that answer to dominant semiologies, to “the world as it is,” from the operation they are aiming for while also hiding it.

• 15  Thomas Voltzenlogel, “Harun Farocki (1944-2014) ou la dialectique dans les images,” Période, 2014. (...)

17This is the job Farocki gives to the images he makes, by establishing a counter-apparatus that breaks the effects of identification with representations, by cleaning up the perception of déjà-vu of images and the consensus they produce. We could even speak of a “Brechtian distance,” relative to technical images: whether it is through a mise en abyme, as in Vidéogrammes d’une révolution (fig. 3) or through a direct, simultaneous confrontation on two screens, as in Serious Game (fig. 4), the object of the images is to produce and circulate the images themselves. The result is a critical virtualisation of the ordinary workings of the sensory-motor schema that a power system wants to ensure for pragmatic reasons.15 A gap appears between the images and the reactions they provoke, a gap that not only signals another way of inhabiting time, but that produces this difference from the mechanical logic of capitalism.

• 16  Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris, Galilée, 2004.

18This, we feel, is what Jacques Rancière is getting at when he raises the issue of a necessary disjunction between politics and aesthetics, when he contests the assimilation of art operations with “life forms,” instead of the valorisation of a policy unique to aesthetics, that would precisely consist of producing that “gap.”16 The thing is, on the one hand the gap does not necessarily seem to us to be that of a “dissemblance” in the order of representation, as the accent remains on the “distancing” of effects when the image is received. On the other hand, by building on a sharing of fields in constant interaction, as they are part of the same cultural horizon of meanings, the maintenance of a specificity for art images seems to us to be problematical with regard to the ambition of a renewal of politics: while it is true that it stops being understood in terms of a “power struggle” to cover that of a partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible), we could take on the challenge of creating new paradigms that are indistinctly aesthetic-political, where it is not so much a question of the disappearance of art and more a question of the transformation of the quality and typology of effects that signs can produce.

• 17  The expression “black artists” refers back to the membership of certain black artists to the BAM ( (...)
• 18  Stuart Hall, “Nouvelles ethnicités” (New Ethnicities), in Maxime Cervulle (ed.), Identités et cult (...)

21We understand that representation is doubly central for dominated groups that undergo exclusion, marginalisation and inferiorisation, and who were, for so long, forced into invisibility as bodies and as cultures. Firstly, because what is at stake through this representation is actual inclusion in civil society, and following on from this inclusion that moves them into a regime of active enunciation, it is then time to contest the stereotyped representations that circulate about them. Thus, the presence of black people on cinema screens, in films made by black artists17 with themes that involve rioting after police brutality to black people, seems to us to be an example of the political conflicts that form around representations that confront the protocol of the production of the dominant image. This dual characterisation of a “war for position” inside hegemonic discursive formations is what Stuart Hall details in “Nouvelles ethnicités”18 (New Ethnicities): the “burden of representation,” imposed by a system of colonial power, must lead to a “politic of representations,” if what we understand in the term “representation” is not the counterfeit figuration of a reality that exists outside of the means that let it express itself, but indeed in a discursive practice that is constituted by dominant groups.

• 19  Stuart Hall, “Qui a besoin de l’‘identité’?” (Who needs identity ?), in Maxime Cervulle (ed.), Ide (...)
• 20  Stuart Hall, “Qui a besoin de l’‘identité’?” (Who needs identity ?), in Maxime Cervulle (ed.), Ide (...)

22If the system of representation cannot be conceived of outside the system of the subject, it is not in the way that representations would appear in the supposed interiority of the subject, but in the way that the subject is the derivation of a certain number of representations. This is why the control of signs and their meaning turns out to be decisive. Hall, whose main preoccupation is to the highlight social and economic domination that run through cultural forms such as the production of signs, nevertheless insists on the risks of the obsolete identarianism such a politic can lead to, that runs the risk of imprisoning subordinate individuals inside new definitions, no less binding than those imposed by the dominant power. To this end, in another text, Hall notes the politically decisive distinction between identity and identification.19 While the first concept, designated as “naturalist,” aims to mask the constructive dimension of identity – pretending to subsume the unmissable differences between people who are necessarily unique by recognising common characteristics, identification makes this construction explicit and turns it into a process that has to undergo constant modification, as a type of performance level of the subject. So the concept here is not essentialist, it is strategic and positional. “Not, who are we? Where are we from? But more what will we become, how are we represented and how can this influence the way in which we represent ourselves?”20 While acknowledging the importance of Foucault’s work in favour of a total reconfiguration of the philosophy of “subject,” Hall nevertheless regrets that he failed to make a clear distinction between (1) individuals (2), the positions they find themselves occupying and (3) the way in which they “perform” in these positions without necessarily being fully on board.

• 21  Nicholas Mirzoeff, An introduction to Visual Culture, London/New York, Routledge, 1999.
• 22  Stuart Hall, “Qui a besoin de l’‘identité’?” (Who needs identity ?), in Maxime Cervulle (ed.), Ide (...)

23In the end, it is only through the study of each situation that we can measure the effect of such a policy of representations, that is to say its possible translation into images and the type of reception they may have. A certain branch of visual sociology proposes to carry out this study using the concept of “visualisation,”21 which is intended to show that there is no such thing as equal perception for each individual, but that this depends on the historical and social issues of each one. While in Bergson, anticipating the conceptual operations that come with the Deleuze and Foucault, the subject is derived from a perception that only takes on board what interests it and only reacts to that which it can move, the interest and the reaction are here, if not totally, then partially determined by the social field where the subject is located. What type of reaction will I have faced with a stigma or an advertisement where a blonde-haired family are all eating breakfast? Does it matter whether I am white or black, male or female, employee or refugee? Of course I comply with my own singular subjectivity, but I also define as female, black, Palestinian, and these attributes colour my construction as an individual. Whether identification is a process that can be termed “fictional,” ensuring a collection of representations that are, as we know, built on a non-existent ideal, this “does not diminish its discursive, material or political effectiveness.”22 In other words, the detour by the system of representation, to which we are constrained by the subordinating workings of capitalism, does not necessarily include a loss of agency. We could thus consider that the very famous photo taken at the 1968 Olympic Games, loaded with meaning by a gesture that is, in turn, signifying support for the Black Panthers, and led to the process of building a black identity that was to materialise as much in terms of the new image as in the meetings, gestures, collectives, struggles that we cannot see in the images, that go beyond the frame and became real in the period of time between the two pictures (fig. 5). To a certain extent, this makes them both significant and operational as images.

• 23  “To be considered merely as a witness to a certain situation, or as someone who has nothing to say (...)
• 24  Maïmouna Doucouré, Maman(s), 2015, 20'.

25To grasp the specificity of minority politics means to understand that the subject position that minorities occupy is strategic and not organic, in as much as they never end up coinciding with these positions. This means that their processes of identification are open to transversal and connective subjectivications as is the case of the current intersectional practices that postulate the existence of a “multiplicatory identity,” that is inter-categorical or anti-categorical. We must then take on board the changes that occur on the representation level due to this transversality. Indeed, the problem caused by “an effectiveness of representations” is whether or not the effects expected from a non-hegemonic representation, both in the shared sensible space as in the subjectivity construction process, must always be paid for by the abandonment of the multiplicity of feelings/affects that an image provokes.23 Thus, as part of the nouvelle vague of black women filmmakers in France, the latest short film by Maïmouna Doucouré, Maman(s)24 produces effects as much through the representation of black women that acts on the political awakening of other black women, as through the creation of a gap between perception and political reaction. If we insist on the possibility of a lack of distinction between the political function and the aesthetic function of images, it is precisely because a representation that goes up against a dominant representation cannot be understood only from the perspective of this conflict and cannot be reduced to its signifying dimension, but must also be taken as the departure point for the creation of new semiotics, a new authority the potential agency of which cannot be known and is difficult to measure in traditional political terms.