Allen Feldman is the author of Archives of the Insensible: of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (U. of Chicago Press, 2015), Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland ( U. of Chicago Press, 1991. 1994) and numerous journal essays on Critical War Studies, the Politics of the Gaze, the Political Anthropology of the Senses and Embodiment, and Critical Carceral Studies. Supervisors: The late Stanley Diamond and Reiner Schurmann
Archives of the Insensible: of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory, 2015
In Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority,... more In Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo Prison (2004–2005) similarly inscribed a territory and a speculum wherein the sovereignty of the state was performed through the withholding of law. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the law itself is securitized and subjected to an extraordinary rendition and consigned to a black site from which all other black sites are authorized. Through analysis of these "terrorist" tribunals, prisoner hunger striking and the forced feeding of prisoners this chapter argues the mission of Guantanamo was not to de-radicalize or punish "terrorists" but to produce simulacra of "terrorists" through counterfeit forensic practices.
Louis Althusser (2001: 21) writes: "And supposing that this place. .. [of the political]. .. is a... more Louis Althusser (2001: 21) writes: "And supposing that this place. .. [of the political]. .. is a point, it would not be fixed, but mobile-better still, unstable in its very being, since all its effort must tend towards giving itself existence: not a transient existence. .. but historical existence." Althusser's refiguration of the political as a diachronically unfixed point coincides with Claudia Baracchi's (2002: 153-54) identification in Plato's Timaeus of an inherent kinetic instability of war and its discourses as teleocratic practices: "In the dialogue on the πολιτεία [politeia], thus, war emerges as a mode of motion. Discourse itself, opening up in its temporality, belongs to motion. This is eminently, though not exclusively, true of the discourse in and through which war is enacted. Such a discourse is, as was said above, of war-that is to say, it is a mode of war, a mode of that unique mode of motion which is war. As such, it is informed by the unique movement that warfare involves." Both thinkers open the question of the genesis of topological multiplicities from seemingly monolithic sites and apparatuses, such as political and war fronts. Their analyses privilege the political morphing of polemos and the polemological mutation of the political as kinetic and performative frontiers rather than teleocratic enclosures. If contemporary warfare and related formations of force, such as racialized policing, xenophobic borders, and mass incarceration, are modes of motion and recursion between fixed fronts and unfixed frontiers of edificial power, then the unmoored state cannot provision a continuous normative ground for such practices of dislocation; rather, a shape-shifting executive power arises from the contingency and transiency of its sub rosa infrastructural dismediation. As Althusser's mobile and unfixed point, the historicity of executive power is performatively reconstituted
The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated ci... more The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing corpus of habitats. This forensics communicates with Peter Sloterdijk's classification of terrorism (including state terror) in 'Airquakes' (2009) as environmental war, irrespective of disparate ideological justifications. A forensics of the power and privation that is entangled with juridical positivism and cognate humanitarian agendas presupposes the right-to-look as the property of a sovereign subject. However, the possession character of this right raises the question of envisioning a nonsovereign gaze and an ethics of opacity. The thinking through of a will not to will a right-to-look confronts the atmospheric and habitat hegemonies of technologies and ideologies of omnivoyance, including mass incarceration, policing, and the racial capitalism of environmental extraction.
The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the pub... more The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, promissory kill lists, prosecutorial, algorithmically generated metadata, drone signature strikes, superimposed kill boxes and enforced political disappearances become rumor materially enacted upon and lodged in cacographic, bodies, which, in turn, become rumor forms. The collaterally damaged as fabulations of the computational enemy are indispensable to the prosecution of a war. The circulating body deemed to be cacographic is the metadata underwriting the pattern recognition and excision of the politically anomalous. The hyperpeformativitiy of real-time data collection generates its own inadmissible cacographic surplus through “lossies” caus...
The 25th Anniversary Interview of “On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King, 2020
American Ethnological Society is pleased to share this interview celebrating our 25th anniversary... more American Ethnological Society is pleased to share this interview celebrating our 25th anniversary American Ethnologist article from 1994. John F.Collins, professor of anthropology at Queens College and theGraduate Center at CUNY interviews Allen Feldman, professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU about his article“On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King.” This interview explores the relationship between ethnography andt heory, descriptive adequacy, the weaponization of language, “shooting blanks,” algorithmic racism and the continuing photopolitics of cultural anesthesia.
To what extent visual perception in emergency zones is informed by, if not actually modeled on, a... more To what extent visual perception in emergency zones is informed by, if not actually modeled on, acts of violence; seeing and killing, being seen and being killed, are entangled and exchangeable in the ecology of fear and anxiety. Further, visual appropriation, because it is always pregnant with the potential forviolence, has become a metonym for dominance over others: power lies in the totalizing, engorged gaze over the politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as exposure to this penetration. In the war zones of Northern Ireland vision can be aggressive: weapons, in turn, become instruments of political image making—weaponry makes ideological objects, objectives, and scenography appear. This is the politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone—the gathered and linked components of crises.This symbiosis means that political subjects are formed, in part, within a circuit of visual prosthetics: the surveillance camera, the helicopter overflight, the panoptic architecture of the interrogation room and prison,13 and the aimed gun. These instruments of fatal vision can be divided into hardware and software technologies, and among the latter must be included the human eye, subject to a high degree of spatial and temporal extension and electronic supplementation. In turn, the fabrication of the politically visible infers the concomitant creation of that which is politically invisible. The circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention
The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the pub... more The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, promissory kill lists, prosecutorial, algorithmically generated metadata, drone signature strikes, superimposed kill boxes and enforced political disappearances become rumor materially enacted upon and lodged in cacographic, bodies, which, in turn, become rumor forms. The collaterally damaged as fabulations of the computational enemy are indispensable to the prosecution of a war. The circulating body deemed to be cacographic is the metadata underwriting the pattern recognition and excision of the politically anomalous. The hyperpeformativitiy of real-time data collection generates its own inadmissible cacographic surplus through "lossies" caused by compression technology. Asymmetrical war, seeking to purge the interference and cacophony of global asymmetry, returns us to the archaic association of rumor with the din of mobilized armies. Algorithmic warfare has not immunized itself from cacographic dissonance but produces it as surplus value through prosecutorial metadata, anomaly detection, and collateral damage.
I engage omnivoyant war through four interlocking schemas: (1) a phenomenology of omnivoyant alg... more I engage omnivoyant war through four interlocking schemas: (1) a phenomenology of omnivoyant algorithmic topology; (2) the desubjectivation of vision and violence; (3) the optical apophatics of Nicholas de Cusa; and (4) the pastoral governmentality of Michel Foucault.
War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance, 2019
Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance,
state anthropophagy and survivance, this ... more Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance, state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war. Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance constitute a temporal counter weight to the indivisibility of sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification.
Of new forms of war and state formation, borders and militarized racism in the trump era via Derr... more Of new forms of war and state formation, borders and militarized racism in the trump era via Derrida, Foucault, Althusser and Sekula. for original see: http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273
In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of ... more In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantánamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty's claims to transcendental right — whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic—by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial media and materiality of war. Excavating a scenography of trials—formal or covert, orchestrated or improvised, criminalizing or criminal— Feldman shows how the will to truth disappears into the very violence it interrogates. He maps the sensory inscriptions and erasures of war, highlighting war as a media that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. He proposes that war promotes an anesthesiology that interdicts the witness of a sensory and affective commons that has the capacity to speak truth to war. Feldman uses layered deconstructive description to decelerate the ballistical tempo of war to salvage the embodied actualities and material histories that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites. The result is a penetrating work that marries critical visual theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and media archeology into a trenchant dissection of emerging forms of sovereignty and state power that war now makes possible. Close
On War, Photopolitics, White Public-Space and the Body: A Conversation with Allen Feldman with As... more On War, Photopolitics, White Public-Space and the Body: A Conversation with Allen Feldman with Asif Akthar and Selim Karlitekin http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273. (for original site) On new mods of war and state formation based on my recent book Archives of the Insensible and beyond it.
Archives of the Insensible: of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory, 2015
In Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority,... more In Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo Prison (2004–2005) similarly inscribed a territory and a speculum wherein the sovereignty of the state was performed through the withholding of law. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the law itself is securitized and subjected to an extraordinary rendition and consigned to a black site from which all other black sites are authorized. Through analysis of these "terrorist" tribunals, prisoner hunger striking and the forced feeding of prisoners this chapter argues the mission of Guantanamo was not to de-radicalize or punish "terrorists" but to produce simulacra of "terrorists" through counterfeit forensic practices.
Louis Althusser (2001: 21) writes: "And supposing that this place. .. [of the political]. .. is a... more Louis Althusser (2001: 21) writes: "And supposing that this place. .. [of the political]. .. is a point, it would not be fixed, but mobile-better still, unstable in its very being, since all its effort must tend towards giving itself existence: not a transient existence. .. but historical existence." Althusser's refiguration of the political as a diachronically unfixed point coincides with Claudia Baracchi's (2002: 153-54) identification in Plato's Timaeus of an inherent kinetic instability of war and its discourses as teleocratic practices: "In the dialogue on the πολιτεία [politeia], thus, war emerges as a mode of motion. Discourse itself, opening up in its temporality, belongs to motion. This is eminently, though not exclusively, true of the discourse in and through which war is enacted. Such a discourse is, as was said above, of war-that is to say, it is a mode of war, a mode of that unique mode of motion which is war. As such, it is informed by the unique movement that warfare involves." Both thinkers open the question of the genesis of topological multiplicities from seemingly monolithic sites and apparatuses, such as political and war fronts. Their analyses privilege the political morphing of polemos and the polemological mutation of the political as kinetic and performative frontiers rather than teleocratic enclosures. If contemporary warfare and related formations of force, such as racialized policing, xenophobic borders, and mass incarceration, are modes of motion and recursion between fixed fronts and unfixed frontiers of edificial power, then the unmoored state cannot provision a continuous normative ground for such practices of dislocation; rather, a shape-shifting executive power arises from the contingency and transiency of its sub rosa infrastructural dismediation. As Althusser's mobile and unfixed point, the historicity of executive power is performatively reconstituted
The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated ci... more The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing corpus of habitats. This forensics communicates with Peter Sloterdijk's classification of terrorism (including state terror) in 'Airquakes' (2009) as environmental war, irrespective of disparate ideological justifications. A forensics of the power and privation that is entangled with juridical positivism and cognate humanitarian agendas presupposes the right-to-look as the property of a sovereign subject. However, the possession character of this right raises the question of envisioning a nonsovereign gaze and an ethics of opacity. The thinking through of a will not to will a right-to-look confronts the atmospheric and habitat hegemonies of technologies and ideologies of omnivoyance, including mass incarceration, policing, and the racial capitalism of environmental extraction.
The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the pub... more The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, promissory kill lists, prosecutorial, algorithmically generated metadata, drone signature strikes, superimposed kill boxes and enforced political disappearances become rumor materially enacted upon and lodged in cacographic, bodies, which, in turn, become rumor forms. The collaterally damaged as fabulations of the computational enemy are indispensable to the prosecution of a war. The circulating body deemed to be cacographic is the metadata underwriting the pattern recognition and excision of the politically anomalous. The hyperpeformativitiy of real-time data collection generates its own inadmissible cacographic surplus through “lossies” caus...
The 25th Anniversary Interview of “On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King, 2020
American Ethnological Society is pleased to share this interview celebrating our 25th anniversary... more American Ethnological Society is pleased to share this interview celebrating our 25th anniversary American Ethnologist article from 1994. John F.Collins, professor of anthropology at Queens College and theGraduate Center at CUNY interviews Allen Feldman, professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU about his article“On Cultural Anesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King.” This interview explores the relationship between ethnography andt heory, descriptive adequacy, the weaponization of language, “shooting blanks,” algorithmic racism and the continuing photopolitics of cultural anesthesia.
To what extent visual perception in emergency zones is informed by, if not actually modeled on, a... more To what extent visual perception in emergency zones is informed by, if not actually modeled on, acts of violence; seeing and killing, being seen and being killed, are entangled and exchangeable in the ecology of fear and anxiety. Further, visual appropriation, because it is always pregnant with the potential forviolence, has become a metonym for dominance over others: power lies in the totalizing, engorged gaze over the politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as exposure to this penetration. In the war zones of Northern Ireland vision can be aggressive: weapons, in turn, become instruments of political image making—weaponry makes ideological objects, objectives, and scenography appear. This is the politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone—the gathered and linked components of crises.This symbiosis means that political subjects are formed, in part, within a circuit of visual prosthetics: the surveillance camera, the helicopter overflight, the panoptic architecture of the interrogation room and prison,13 and the aimed gun. These instruments of fatal vision can be divided into hardware and software technologies, and among the latter must be included the human eye, subject to a high degree of spatial and temporal extension and electronic supplementation. In turn, the fabrication of the politically visible infers the concomitant creation of that which is politically invisible. The circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention
The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the pub... more The counterfactual sound-byte, a technocratic aphorism for phobogenic rumor, has bisected the public use of (un)reason, such as the counterfactual pattern recognitions that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. The militarized datafication of the counterfactual is predicated on signal/noise discriminations or cacography. Interrogation by torture, promissory kill lists, prosecutorial, algorithmically generated metadata, drone signature strikes, superimposed kill boxes and enforced political disappearances become rumor materially enacted upon and lodged in cacographic, bodies, which, in turn, become rumor forms. The collaterally damaged as fabulations of the computational enemy are indispensable to the prosecution of a war. The circulating body deemed to be cacographic is the metadata underwriting the pattern recognition and excision of the politically anomalous. The hyperpeformativitiy of real-time data collection generates its own inadmissible cacographic surplus through "lossies" caused by compression technology. Asymmetrical war, seeking to purge the interference and cacophony of global asymmetry, returns us to the archaic association of rumor with the din of mobilized armies. Algorithmic warfare has not immunized itself from cacographic dissonance but produces it as surplus value through prosecutorial metadata, anomaly detection, and collateral damage.
I engage omnivoyant war through four interlocking schemas: (1) a phenomenology of omnivoyant alg... more I engage omnivoyant war through four interlocking schemas: (1) a phenomenology of omnivoyant algorithmic topology; (2) the desubjectivation of vision and violence; (3) the optical apophatics of Nicholas de Cusa; and (4) the pastoral governmentality of Michel Foucault.
War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance, 2019
Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance,
state anthropophagy and survivance, this ... more Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance, state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war. Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance constitute a temporal counter weight to the indivisibility of sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification.
Of new forms of war and state formation, borders and militarized racism in the trump era via Derr... more Of new forms of war and state formation, borders and militarized racism in the trump era via Derrida, Foucault, Althusser and Sekula. for original see: http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273
In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of ... more In this jarring look at contemporary warfare and political visuality, renowned anthropologist of violence Allen Feldman provocatively argues that contemporary sovereign power mobilizes asymmetric, clandestine, and ultimately unending war as a will to truth. Whether responding to the fantasy of weapons of mass destruction or an existential threat to civilization, Western political sovereignty seeks to align justice, humanitarian right, and democracy with technocratic violence and visual dominance. Connecting Guantánamo tribunals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, American counterfeit killings in Afghanistan to the Baader-Meinhof paintings of Gerhard Richter, and the video erasure of Rodney King to lynching photography and political animality, among other scenes of terror, Feldman contests sovereignty's claims to transcendental right — whether humanitarian, neoliberal, or democratic—by showing how dogmatic truth is crafted and terror indemnified by the prosecutorial media and materiality of war. Excavating a scenography of trials—formal or covert, orchestrated or improvised, criminalizing or criminal— Feldman shows how the will to truth disappears into the very violence it interrogates. He maps the sensory inscriptions and erasures of war, highlighting war as a media that severs factuality from actuality to render violence just. He proposes that war promotes an anesthesiology that interdicts the witness of a sensory and affective commons that has the capacity to speak truth to war. Feldman uses layered deconstructive description to decelerate the ballistical tempo of war to salvage the embodied actualities and material histories that war reduces to the ashes of collateral damage, the automatism of drones, and the opacities of black sites. The result is a penetrating work that marries critical visual theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and media archeology into a trenchant dissection of emerging forms of sovereignty and state power that war now makes possible. Close
On War, Photopolitics, White Public-Space and the Body: A Conversation with Allen Feldman with As... more On War, Photopolitics, White Public-Space and the Body: A Conversation with Allen Feldman with Asif Akthar and Selim Karlitekin http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273. (for original site) On new mods of war and state formation based on my recent book Archives of the Insensible and beyond it.
Uploads
Papers by Allen Feldman
appear. This is the politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone—the gathered and linked components of crises.This symbiosis means that political subjects are formed, in part, within a circuit of visual prosthetics: the surveillance camera, the helicopter overflight, the panoptic architecture of the
interrogation room and prison,13 and the aimed gun. These instruments of fatal vision can be divided into hardware and software technologies, and among the latter must be included the human eye, subject to a high degree of spatial and temporal extension and electronic supplementation. In turn, the fabrication of the politically visible infers the concomitant creation of that which is politically invisible. The circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention
state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the
Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out
of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics
while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war.
Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced
by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental
as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance
constitute a temporal counter weight to the indivisibility of
sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy
that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification.
for original see:
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273
Books by Allen Feldman
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273.
(for original site) On new mods of war and state formation based on my recent book Archives of the Insensible and beyond it.
appear. This is the politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects, and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone—the gathered and linked components of crises.This symbiosis means that political subjects are formed, in part, within a circuit of visual prosthetics: the surveillance camera, the helicopter overflight, the panoptic architecture of the
interrogation room and prison,13 and the aimed gun. These instruments of fatal vision can be divided into hardware and software technologies, and among the latter must be included the human eye, subject to a high degree of spatial and temporal extension and electronic supplementation. In turn, the fabrication of the politically visible infers the concomitant creation of that which is politically invisible. The circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention
state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the
Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out
of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics
while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war.
Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced
by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental
as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance
constitute a temporal counter weight to the indivisibility of
sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy
that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification.
for original see:
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/273.
(for original site) On new mods of war and state formation based on my recent book Archives of the Insensible and beyond it.