Andy Fisher

This article explores three key ways in which questions of abstraction have been and continue to be closely associated with photography: the tradition of photographs that desire to “be” abstract; the invisible but determining forms of abstraction central to capitalism and shaping of photography as a technical-historical form; and the technical-conceptual abstractions embedded in and structuring of photographic apparatuses. The exploration of these themes is pursued through analysis of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of photography, Lambert Wiesing’s analysis of abstract photography and Allan Sekula’s critique of capitalist modes of equivalence and exchange as these impact on the photographic. These analyses are pursued through exploration of the issues, processes and operations of “scale”, “scaling” and “scalability” entailed in these three modes of abstraction and in their critical and theoretical reflection. The aim of this strategy is to outline and to analyse the complex web of abstractions that are central to photography and the modes of scale that are crucial to abstraction in this context. The article suggests that to encounter or to think about abstraction photographically is to operate within some modulation of scale and that this may in fact be the closest one can get to envisioning the complexity of abstraction in the photographic context.

Giving a critical survey of the documentaries of Adam Curtis, Andrew Fisher evaluates the claims to realism and political neutrality made for his work, using the critical methodologies of Guy Debord and Georg Lukács My job is not to try to change the world, but to describe it. i Working at the BBC since the late 1980s, Adam Curtis has become one of the most celebrated contemporary British documentary film-makers. He is routinely fêted as the author of ambitious films that offer self-consciously provocative viewpoints on contemporary social and political issues. Since 2001, he has made three television series-The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007)-each of which outlines a lengthy and generalised account of ideas, individuals or elites understood to have had a formative impact on the present. ii Together, these films attempt to understand the present, but what understanding they offer remains politically ambiguous and thus demands critical analysis, not least because it is riven by a tension between the films' emphatic claim to realism and their play on the spectacular form of mass media. Curtis views history as a 'series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions', in which context things never work out as intended. iii The idea of historical narrative he derives from this is defined in opposition to the notion of 'balance' that characterises the institutional framing of journalism (especially at his place of work, the BBC), namely the injunction that one must show 'both sides' of a story. iv This idea of balanced representation tends, in Curtis' view, to frame events in a formal symmetry that all too easily prefigures and restricts the bases upon which

My essay on the archival documents of Sergei Tretyakov's interrogation and execution in 1937 is about to appear in this handsome looking anthology edited by Sharon Kivland and Rebecca Jagoe.

Violence is in language and Violence is language. The violence of language stratifies voices into those that matter and those that do not, using ideas of appropriate form and structure as its weaponry. It claims propriety and politeness are the correct mode of address, when urgency and anger are what is needed. Where languages intersect, hierarchies of language become means for domination and colonization, for othering, suppression, negation, and obliteration. The demand for a correctness of grammar, the refusal to see what is seen as incorrect, the dismissal of vernacular in favour of the homogenised tongue: all are violent. The narrative of history is a narrative of violence. The contributions herein refuse this narrative. They explore how violence permeates and performs in language, how language may be seized, taken back to be used against the overwhelming force of structural and institutional violence that passes as acceptable or normal. Violence may be a force for rupture, for refusal, for dissent, for the herstories that refuse to cohere into a dominant narrative.

'This powerful collection forces us to look beyond definitions of violence as either intentional harm or impersonal force, and our belief that systemic cruelty is the exception rather than the norm. These authors discriminate in the best sense, offering rare insights and perverse pleasures, while showing that violence is not only a matter of categorising and eliminating others, but also is tied up with how we distinguish and articulate ourselves.'
Paul Clinton

'This brilliant and well-timed anthology explores not just the horrors, but the pleasures of violence: violence as a means of reaction, regeneration and self-affirmation. The writers do not fetishise violence, but they approach it on its own terms. Stripping off layers of received rhetoric, ON VIOLENCE is an extremely clear-eyed depiction of the universal American psychic climate.'
Chris Kraus

'The last century was dubbed the century of wars and revolutions, and still it bleeds on. But what ON VIOLENCE reminds us is that all scales of cruelty, carelessness, and abuses of power differentials suffuse all dimensions of life. The organs and apparatuses of violence evidenced in this volume are broad in scope and application; their traumatic or galvanising effects are exposed, decried, theorised, or absorbed into fantasies that reveal them in all their absurdity. This is an exuberant book of bodies and grit heaped up in convolutions of tenderness, outrage, and sly joy.'
Sally O'Reilly