Event overview
Aesthetic Objectivity: Department of Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2014
Professor Peter Adey (Royal Holloway, University of London)
(Bad) Evacuation: moving, naming, killing
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Goldsmiths
Thursday 6th March
5.00-7.00pm
In observing Adolf Eichmann’s disturbing rationalisations of the Nazi killing machine through the administration of ideas, bodies, practices, property and, ultimately, life, Hannah Arendt noticed the curious yet crucial slippage of terms perpetuated by the bureaucratisation of mobility, often named “Evacuation”. This, in the context of a Nazi geopolitics of territorial annexation, mass population movements, settlement planning and the economies of labour supply, really meant deportation, displacement and killing (sometimes by movement itself). In this paper I want to show how evacuation – the arts, logics, rationalities and technologies – the complex geographies of moving people out of the way - goes to the heart of how societies and states have learnt how to protect, but, to go further than that, it has also been a key way in which they have killed, persecuted, punished and separated peoples from their property, rights and freedoms. The conceit then is that evacuation is not simply bad, but that we must first wrestle and recover evacuation from its wider lexicon. It has also become politically important to replace evacuation with what it really is, to underscore what has lain below the surface, or to demote the process of evacuation so as to reveal the violence performed in its name. Furthermore, despite the plethora of work to interrogate the legal-juridical apparatus of exception in the space of the camp, we have forgotten that it is evacuation that has filled camps and legitimated them. That it is evacuation as a semi-legal and bureaucratic process of protection that comes to justify displacement, dispossession (of property and place) and spatial incarceration or internment. That in Arendt’s accusation that Eichmann could not think otherwise or outside evacuation and its bureaucracies, we find a momentum in the word that overtakes other sets of rationalities or decisions. In the paper I will explore in brief the origins of evacuation, but especially its rapid evolution, mechanisation, systematisation and medicalization in war-fighting, before disclosing its rapid displacement into the logics of state, territory and security during and just after the Second World War.
Peter works at the intersections of space, security and mobility. He has written widely on the vertical and material spaces of air, and the politics of emergency and evacuation. Peter was recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011 before being appointed at Royal Holloway where he went on to setup and lead an interdisciplinary masters programme on Geopolitics and Security. He is currently based at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham as an IAS Fellow. He has authored and edited several books including From Above: war, violence and verticality (2013, Hurst/Oxford University Press) and the forthcoming Air (2014, Reaktion). He is currently developing a long-term book project on Evacuation.
Aesthetic OBjectivity
The computational turn, or what might be called the algorithmic paradigm of calculation and modelling, has produced a new ethics that emerges out of bandwidth and code. This database-ethics has changed both the spaces in which action occurs and ways it is acted upon.
Increasingly, our primary access into the spaces of contemporary conflict is through remote sensing technologies and mobile phone uploads. For over four decades now, earth observation satellites have captured and transmitted data-streams allowing us to chart the long-term changes occurring within dynamic planetary systems, demonstrating the ruinous effects of deforestation, environmental pollutants, resource extraction, and climate change. CCTV video surveillance has also turned witnessing by mechanical means into a prevalent and normalised feature of every-day life. The Visual Cultures Public Programme for Spring 2014 aims to shed light on the kinds of spatial, aesthetic, and political transformations being produced by these changes.
The near real-time mediation of all contemporary events needs to be understood and examined not simply as a ‘progressive’ consequence of a technical evolution made possible by enhanced microprocessors, but as inaugurating a radical new form of aesthetic objectivity. How, asks this series, might we modify the aesthetic registers by which such objectivities are produced and activate new means critique and mobilise new modes of resistance?
Chair: Susan Schuppli
Free, no booking required ... all welcome
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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6 Mar 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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