On the eve of the crucial national elections of May 6 th , , Loverdos and Chrisochoidis were convinced that the time had come for their ideological construction to produce its political surplus value. The first one, by showing off complacently the evidence of a unique diagnostic capability. The second one, by filling up the additional concentration camps that he himself had built. Even before the dust around the tragic incident in question had settled, the medical police would once again take to the streets. A transformation that appears as a logical extension of the political and juridical denuding that the figure of the migrant and the refugee in Greece has been subjected to from the outset.
And this is what is applied in the raids in question. Where the limits of the law are redefined along with the limits of the space. A new habitual culture is imposed through this absolute indistinguishability, on the one hand concerning the intimate sphere of the oikos and on the other, the public space of the city. Like police blocks, it is everywhere. A new model of urban governance then, one that is tried out even in the most common and everyday spaces of the migrants: The police spokesman is illustrative in this regard: A hygienic discourse, then, that tests out limits.
Whether these involve hygienic quarantines, the sealing of borders, or the violation of private spaces, the question of health draws limits and subject positions, forming both the terms of national unity and public order as such. Which is why health observers participated in the raids. According to Chrysa Botsi, the hygienic legislation and the legislative mechanisms would always hold relationships primarily with the sector of justice, and much less so with the police. Nevertheless, as she claims, it is only recently that such operations appeared and with such depth.
We reach, in this way, the final stop of this brief overview; right at the end of September In medical websites and bourgeois newspapers, identical articles are published concerning the composition of the first hygienic and epidemiological map of Athens by the HCDCP. They have obvious political intention and attempt to rejuvenate, by feeding it with scientific-like arguments, the anti-migrant construction that had pathologised migrant populations in Greece already from mid They do not concern, then, the recording of the spread of infectious diseases in Athens in general, but specifically how migrants are involved in this supposed spread.
But also, for Sexually Transmitted Diseases, the outcomes were indicative: These articles professed a crystal-clear responsibility of the migrant populations in regard to the spread of infectious diseases in the centre of Athens, with emphasis on the HIV. Yet beyond this resounding rebuttal, the most effective way for one to be convinced of the constructability of the data composing the discourse in question is to refer to the official epidemiological data published by HCDCP itself for the year The E pidemiological Bulletin of that year showed then, in regard to the HIV, what had already been shown in the case of the prosecution of the seropositive women, which had not yet been forgotten at that point, since most of them remained in pre-trial detention.
A set of articles that utilised a set of disparate epidemiological data, assigning them a certain identity and reinforcing anew the dominant anti-migrant discourses. Nevertheless, the ever-so-obvious disparity between the official epidemiological data and the supposed cartographic findings of the articles in question sparked the interest for a personal research regarding the standing and the intentions of the latter. Quizzed faces, unanswered electronic messages and unawareness at the other end of the phone line. The articles in question had no relationship whatsoever to the epidemiological mapping out of Athens!
A very systematic operation to construct a field of medical-police intervention which commenced, as we saw, with an official institutional rebuttal and was completed, as part of this overview, with the description of a faux and imaginative epidemiological map. And for the purposes of this nation-rebuilding, the pathologisation of migratory populations offered on the one hand a historically tested solution and on the other, a concrete way through which the Greek state would be able to see and to show the first results of this reconstructing, away from moral and juridical limitations.
And this construction, within the biopolitical horizon of the processes of meaning-assigning from which it remained confined, ought to be articulated in biological terms. And this had to happen convincingly. It had to happen in ways that would prove that the epidemiological dangers were not some hysteric announcements of a fantasist minister, but were in a position, by that point, to be reflected in a clinical and cartographic way. Suiting, that is, to an able state mechanism which applies a plan of holistic management and which has convinced itself about this capacity.
But first and foremost, it recomposed the preconditions of a collective belonging, and suggested a way in which to think about it. This suggestion constitutes one of the two tremendous meanings that the publication of these articles maintains. As Etienne Balibar points out, after all, the notions of nature and culture can only be read in an inextricable interaction, when we encounter them in the interpretative frameworks of either old- or neo-racisms.
Naturalising, eventually, racist behaviours. And demonstrating that the body continues to comprise the ultimate refuge of truth; a container for the extraction of concepts and meanings that is entirely functional, as Bashford showed us, both for political philosophy in general and for the conceptualisations of the nation in particular. It appears, then, that the bio-medical discourse, despite whatever deviations it may have from the anachronistic articulations of the Rassenhygiene racial hygiene , proves to be, even today, terrifyingly present in the thinking of the national identity. In being that necessary gluing material between the natural and the political body, biomedical discourse offers the most tangible set of images for limits and their transgressions; in the case of the articles in question, it took on describing them through the organic and often macabre antagonisms describing the dialectics of health and illness.
Shinning as it does in its metaphorical richness, illness finds itself wherever anything else struggles to convince. The same syntax which turned the breaching of public spaces, the enforced blood-tests and the detentions of seropositive women an entirely normalised practice. And in order to politically capitalise, in return, upon the endless empty field born by the demand for personal protection and security. And part of this training comprises the invention of fields of intervention. Which is what the teams of the medical police did so methodically.
The political management of fear, as in the examples of the culture of fear unveiled by Taussig, leads with quite some certainty to the landscapes of exception and of legal violence. Where necessitas legem non habet. Yet it was not only certain populations that were problematised through these clinical articulations of the emergency.
It was also certain geographies. This is, then, where the second functional importance of the discoursein question is located. As the Self-Organised Space of the Architecture School very poignantly claims, commencing from the occasion of the architectural competition Re-think Athens ,[79] the ideological and symbolic importance of the athenian centre proves to be immense.
It comprises the field for the production of meanings. The systematic references to the hygienic dangers and in particular, the co-ordinated references to the existence of a cartographic tool of epidemiological surveillance, create an image of the city that resembles a magnetic field. And this image is an image of emergency. It requires radical solutions. It requires, in other words, police applications. The origins of this project of medical-police problematisation of the athenian centre are located in the intersection of two different traditions.
On the one hand, in the discourse that connects the field of hygiene with the theory and the practice of urban replanning, already from the birth of the early industrial city. On the other hand, in the framework nowadays forming the dominant discourses on cities and designs policies of public security through the targeting of post-colonial migrant neighbourhoods in the hearts of western metropolises. And each one of these traditions pertains its own particular disciplinary importance. It is well-known that the matter of hygiene was assigned, from the outset, a key mission in the planning of the modern city.
And this is not a mere managerial mission. The newly appearing working class and its habits became the object of a complete reform on the basis of hygienic arguments with strong moralistic and ideological extensions. At a time when organic metaphors offered the necessary tools for the thinking about the city and its vital functions, the state planning of the terms of life and habitation of the difficultly adjustable workers held a strong hygienic framework.
As the architect Eyal Weizman points out, the military experimental designs and the urban transformations to which they paved the way, show us a close relationship between the hygiene programmes and the urban modernisation of the 19 th century. The demand for a structural replanning of the city was articulated, as we know, in the shadow of the revolutionary events that shook Paris and other large European cities, right about at the middle of the 19 th century; and it had, therefore, its own military issues.
But the military staff chose to articulate and to materialise the demand in question also through hygienic pretexts. The city historian, Leonardo Benevolo, writes characteristically about Paris: The dominant imaginaries for the early industrial cities and their functions were constituted, then, through specific problematisations of the figures of the workers; of their health, their habits, their resistances, their residencies and their public spaces. Very broadly, one could claim that what this collective figure of the worker offered in the past, in terms of the dominant meaning-assignments of the cities and the proposals for their replanning, is nowadays offered through the environment formed by the presence of the post-colonial migrant populations in the heart or in the periphery of the western metropolises.
What was therefore tested out so meticulously in the colonial spaces and times, leading Edward Said to such a deep analysis of the orientalist practices, is nowadays paradoxically repeated in the western metropolitan environment. The methodology is, nevertheless, the same.
Graham writes in this regard: In the drastic transformations of the urban functions and in the demographic changes that characterise contemporary metropolises, colonial practices are tested out in new fields of application. The places of collective migrant presence in the western urban environments comprise, perhaps, the most important of these. The colonial field as an interweaving, first of all, of spaces and populations.
The notion of visibility hereby brings together and condenses a sum of relationships, purposes and practices: How are some objects highlighted while others are obfuscated? What relations are suggested between subjects and space? How is risk mapped and what are the suggested remedies? The management, therefore, of the centre of Athens as an application of hygienic and orientalist representations may, in a paradoxical way, be included in the tradition of these technologies of governance.
And as we saw, it comprises the point of a catastrophic meeting of different regimes of truth. In this way, one can nowadays discern in the dominant discourses around Athens, sometimes that anachronistic description of urban planning as a matter of bodies, spaces and germs. Other times, the guideposts of the clash of civilisations. Let alone when it carries with it a set of organic challenges.
Author: Jacqueline Vickery / University of North Texas - Flow
The response to this invasion can only be a military one. It requires military management. The discourse around the epidemiological map in question may be alternatively seen as a public presentation of a map of police operations. Because the map is not only a visualization of the field one wishes to command. It is also a very specific way in which to speak the truth. It is truth per se. This truth, as a question of visibility comprises, then, one of the main stakes of the governance of populations, of populations in space, of the populations as spaces per se.
And the map was always in a position to shed light; to light up even the darkest of spots. And if need be, to draw them out of nothing. Esposito Roberto, Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Interpretation of the Twentieth Century, trans. Esposito, Terms of the Political , ibid. See in this regard Agamben, ibid. They are these three laws, published in See also Taguieff, ibid.
Bashford, I mperial Hygiene , ibid. Two typical examples prove the paradox of this reasoning, both offered by the rich tradition of the pathologising of the Jews through the centuries. The first case concerns the Jewish ghetto in renaissance Venice and the second one, the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw during the occupation of Poland by the Nazis. In both cases, the belief that Jews gestate contagious diseases was confirmed by the outcome of confinement conditions in the ghettos themselves.
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In addition, in the Warsaw example, the ghetto was situatedin an area that was already contaminated. See in this regard https: I thank Chrysa Botsi for pointing out this reference. From personal communication with Chrysa Botsi, ibid. The sense of emergency was intensified by the fact that both the press conference and the issuing of the hygienic decree in question took place on a Sunday; that is, urgently.
Agamben, Homo Sacer , ibid. See for example the observations of the Swedish professor of political sciences, Herbert Tingsten , as adduced in Agamben Giorgio, State of Exception , trans. See the relevant Press Release of the Greek police directorate, available at http: See the Press Release of the directorate of the Greek police on April 26, , ibid.
See also the relevant Press Release of the Greek police on April 27, It is hereby worth remembering that a similar operation was repeated on March 6, in the Athenian city centre, this time round with mass arrests of drug users and their transfer to the migrant detention camp of Amygdaleza. There, they were subjected to compulsory blood tests and detailed recording of all their personal and medical data, before they were released. See indicativ ely the Press Release of the Greek police of March 7 , See the Press Release of the directorate of the Greek police on August 4, See the Press Releases of the Greek police up until February 23, See the Press Release of the Greek police on April 21, Agamben, Homo Sacer, ibid.
See the Press Release of the Greek police on August 4, , ibid. See the Press Release of the directorate of the Greek police of February 15, The map in question is not to be confused with the hygienic map that the HCDCP has been composing in recent years in common with the National School of Public Health NSPH , and which comprises, essentially, a recording of data regarding public and private health services providers in Greece. At this point, it is interesting to see that references to male prostitution do not recall, as one would expect, the well-known moralistic and hetero-normative arguments that link HIV to sexual contact between men.
To the contrary, they utilise well-known motives of the main argumentation of the contemporary cultural racism , aiming at the assessment of male migrants sex workers on the basis of cultural criteria, and their inclusion into a framework of cultural retrogression. They bring, in this way, homophobia to the fore and they update the tools of the xenophobic agenda.
They do not consider themselves to be homosexual, while they oft-times hold homophobic and anti-homosexual feelings, due to their cultural background and their Muslim religion. Momentarily, the presence of such a piece of information in a series of articles with a hygienic direction might puzzle. Soon enough, however, one understands that what we are faced with is not mere medical philology with xenophobic insinuations. To the contrary, the hygienic arguments and whatever clinical images are the ones hosted in this libel of anti-migrant propaganda.
And for this reason, the use of popular forms of contemporary islamophobic rhetoric should not come as any surprise. This meticulous construction of responsibility is connected with a unique feature of first-world self-perception. See also, table 2, p. In regard to the dominant narratives and the often-encountered arguments linking migrants to the spread of infectious diseases, Christina Samartzi, head of the Domestic Missions Unit of the Athens Multi-Clinic of the Doctors of the World during , claimed that they attempt to target migrants for political reasons.
From personal communication that took place in Athens on February 7, Clearly, the operation of pathologising the migratory flows did not end there. See the press release under the same title, available at http: I thank Chrysa Botsi for this information. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor , ibid.
Bauman Zygmunt, Liquid Fear , trans. A Latin phrase that may be translated in two ways. Adduced in Agamben, State of Exception , ibid. See relevant information at the website http: Graham, Cities Under Siege , ibid. For the purpose of the conference that took place in Athens May 9th and 10th we had asked our guests to develop some thoughts based on an idea or a question that we posed them. In collecting their answers, we aimed to create a framework for the preparation of the conference itself, and to help outline those aspects of urban everydayness that we consider to be the most important for us to understand the questions posed by the city itself, at this moment of crisis.
The contributions were published here on this site, as well as gathered in the conference publication which was distributed at the conference. During the last two decades, a commonplace realization among scholars, practitioners and activists involved in the study of the EU migrant policy has been that the evolving model of migration management is based on securitization, deportation and exclusion Boswel et al. While examining thus minor age as a potential refuge-, or last resort- endowment on the course of migration, the basic question arising is whether within the current repressive policy framework the legal quality of childhood under 18 years old actually forms a beneficial interstice among structures of the existing deportation regimes.
In the context of this presentation, in order to encompass agents migrating alone within a generational spectrum extending from puberty to early adulthood, i. Customarily, regardless which border juvenile migrants enter Greece from land or sea they head towards Athens, in hope of opportunities to work and to connect to existing peer networks.
Accommodation is mainly found within abandoned, crumbling houses, food by queuing up for charity meals, by generating minimal sums of money through picking return bottles from the garbage, and begging for non- merchandisable vegetable and meat parts at shop- closing times. This is the first shelter of people who come here. But we knew that if the police find us there, things are going to go bad. I stayed there for two months [meaning the two crumbling houses].
It was very difficult. There used to be such long queues that when you arrived in front, you were sometimes told that the food was over. There were even people beating each other in order to get in front at the line. Sometimes I preferred to stay without any food at all rather than start fighting with others over a meal. Ralli] without giving them any food or drink. It is a prison but it is migration at the same time. This system was picking Heineken and other bottles from the garbage. Because over there in Athens, you can sell beer bottles between ten and twenty pence each.
We knew that we could get some food at six [means p. So we could not pass without getting arrested and beaten up. Thus, we were collecting the bottles to sell. One bottle, 10 cents. We were going through garbage, and going through garbage. That was what we cooked before going to sleep and then we could eat. There are also cans you can put to the recycling.
This might happen after longer waiting durations and following they might become relocated in a variety of places all over Greece. As documented in the case of the specific reception unit where my research was conducted Konitsa , the main aspects of institutional protection deficiency comprised:.
In total, the majority of my interlocutors expressed a feeling of being plainly tolerated but not welcome within the reception unit [6]. With special regard to the quality of daily communication between Juvenile Migrants and some of the institution staff the following quote is indicative:. Last time they asked me to give them a hand with something by calling: You should know by now that my name is I. Thus, after leaving UMs reception centers, encounter with authorities represents a major stressful instance. However, since that people are mostly destitute and house either unofficially in crowded apartments or are homeless and errant, this type of mobility in quest of lawfulness forms an interdictory option for the large majority.
Hence gradually, added to the rest of undocumented migrant populations, juvenile asylum applicants increasingly end up circulating with expired asylum application bulletins as they become progressively hesitant to appear to any police department for renewing them in fear of an arrest, potentially leading to deportation. In fact though, the law takes into consideration the eventuality of those people being homeless and errant.
Additionally, juveniles among further asylum applicant migrants have repeatedly attested duty misconduct on behalf of police officers who arbitrarily destroy or confiscate asylum application bulletins during identification procedures, without providing any further explanations to their holders regarding motives of such actions. This situation has been described as a type of daily terror especially for those living in Athens and represents an additional propulsion of fall into clandestine HRW ; Pro Asyl Thus, settlement possibilities for youth of third nationals are countered by a rejection of civic and sociocultural belongingness, corroborated on the level of daily interactions with the aid of rigidly pronounced nationalist and racist discourses.
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Especially in the case of juveniles, all migratory displacement forms an amalgam of emergencies and aspirations. Nonetheless, regardless of the percentage in components within this amalgam and due to the tremendous amounts of structural violence people are systematically exposed to while trying to set a foot on European territories, I argue here that it is precisely on these territories that migration undertakings become forced. What could actually in this case be the arguments against lying Bok ?
Some of those who are able to realize this journey, attempt to recur to the Konitsa institution for legal help. In both cases, those moves are proved to be taking place in vain, unless migrants have the seldom luck of encountering an officer who simply acts lawfully and actually renews their cards without presenting them with further complications regarding official housing contracts.
For further details on administrational complications to renew asylum claim bulletins due to lack of regular accommodation see the relevant paragraph 4. Returns of Asylum applicants to Greece. In Nea apo tin Ipiro. Germany, Stiftung Pro Asyl. The truth may be bitter, but it must be told.
Moral choice in public and private life. The securitization of migration: A study of movement and order. Protecting Europe and protecting migrants? Strategies for managing unauthorised migration from Africa. Migration and Social Protection: Claiming Social Rights Beyond Borders. Journal of Development Studies, 48 4 , European asylum policy harmonization and unaccompanied asylum seeking minors.
Childhoods Today, 2 2 , ENOC September Athens, Greece, European network of ombudspersons for children. PDF [accessed on the: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas. In Issue 1, Nr.: Migration, nation states, and international cooperation Vol. Greek Police Abuses of Migrants in Athens. The politics of insecurity: Fear, migration and asylum in the EU.
Exposing problems of access. Development, 50 4 , Asylum and EU Solidarity. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 31 4 , Unaccompanied Minor Asylum seekers in Greece. London, UK, Reel News, http: The stepwise migration process of sub-Saharan African migrants heading north. Probleme des Postkolonialismus und der globalen Migration, Wien: Special report on the administrational detention and deportation of minors of foreign nationals. Unaccompanied Minors in the Greek-Turkish Borders: Evros Region, March March Greek Council for Refugees. Irregular migration in Europe: Systematic failure to protect unaccompanied migrant children in Greece.
Reception Centers for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees: Accounts from the Inside: A Consumer City in the Making. I grew up in Athens throughout the 80s and 90s, in the midst of a transition period that brought dramatic changes to the Athenian cityscape. By , the year of hosting Olympics, Athens was keen to erase its more recent memories and eager to fetishise antiquity in its rebranding as a world-class destination. Major facelifts and investments in urban infrastructure had turned the city itself into an alluring object of consumption: But the transition of Athens into a city of consumption was far more pronounced not in the physical surroundings but in the everyday logics and practices of its residents.
In the neighbourhood I grew up, and which in many ways epitomised the Greek model of urban gentrification, the formation of new subjectivities akin to the neoliberal consumer-citizen began to manifest in all spheres of daily life. At least for some time, nearly everyone seemed blessed with the freedom of experimentation and identity differentiation through the acquisition of an ever-expanding list of consumption objects.
Soon it became not only about what people were consuming but also where, marking the formation of neighbo u rhoods with distinct class identities. Popular songs and TV series, for instance, narrated stories of people from different districts of Athens middle versus working class that were to fall in love and strive a life together despite different class-related tastes and sensibilities. For a city that never underwent a process of heavy industrialisation and class-stratification, as for example Paris or London, this was a remarkable cultural shift.
Pouliasi and Verkuyten, A Contested Consumer City. The years of the Athenian spectacle ended violently and abruptly in December , uncovering various underlying tensions and contradictions, not least in the consumption-led model of urban development see Vradis and Dalakoglou, Operating on the basis of self-management, anti-hierarchical structuring and anti-commercialisation, the park aspired to be: At the same time, it aspires to be a neighbourhood garden which accommodates part of the social life of its residents, is beyond any profit or ownership-driven logics and functions as a place for playing and walking, meeting and communicating, sports, creativity and critical thinking.
The park defies constraints relating to different ages, origins, educational level, social and economic positioning iv. There was a collective, for instance, that directly traded with Zapatistas and various other alternative trading networks that brought together politically like-minded producers and consumers without intermediaries.
For a consumer researcher, post Athens seemed to be an ultimate laboratory where alternative tactics of consumer resistance and modes of consumer-oriented activism were constantly tried out. A Failed Consumer City. Fast forward five years, however, theories and critiques of consumerist society and possessive individualism Graeber, have to a certain extent been made redundant. As Skoros, an anti-consumerist collective put it: It was much easier to propose anti-consumerism, re-use, recycling and sharing practices. How can one propose a critique of consumerist needs when people struggle to meet their basic needs?
Indeed, Athens is now by and large inhabited by people who can no longer fully express themselves on the basis of what they consume and where. In many ways, the consequences are far more pronounced in Athens than anywhere else. Holbrook and Hirschman, abide. Put differently, these new sites of consumption represent a very last but much-needed resort for consumption-mediated expressions of identity positioning and differentiation.
How to counterpropose solidarity and community when the crisis isolates individuals and makes them turn against each other? Against such dystopian present, solidarity was bound to surface as a keyword. But it is hardly a new word in the streets of Athens. Soon after the crisis, however, discourses of solidarity diversified and multiplied. Various social actors began counter-proposing their own solidarity logics and practices. It was now as if all other taxes did not have to do with solidarity.
Any willingness left to extend solidarity across difference and distance was therefore displaced into firmly depoliticised acts of pitifulness, supporting an implicit ontological understanding of the crisis as accidental rather than systemic Harvey, , a temporary rather than prolonged state of being Agamben, Concurrently the strengthening of ingroup-outgroup categorisations and practices of othering undermined universal solidarity.
Among others, proudly Greek citizens concerned with the rise of migrant-led crime could now enjoy benefits such as guarded walks to ATMs. A kind of walk that for psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein could be read as the projection of paranoid-schizoid mechanisms into the other: As I have illustrated elsewhere Chatzidakis, the struggle was no longer only about urban space but also the phantasmic realm of commodities.
For most Athenians, solidarity therefore failed to channel itself into more politically progressive realms. If anything, it was the family institution and the notion of intergenerational family solidarity that took centre-stage to firefight the gaps left by the dramatic cuts in standards of living and the demise of the welfare state. Moving back with the parents and grandparents, having extended family meals, sharing salaries and consumption objects and trying to get rid of these that once a sign of freedom had now become burdens e.
In Athens and beyond, an increasing number of people had no choice but to rediscover the pleasures and the perils of extended family living. Athens in the Here and Now. In a capitalist system that is reaching its end, we are not going to feel nostalgic about the illusions of happiness offered by consumerist lifestyles but we are going instead to seek for novelty. We pose questions around degrowth, issues of scale and balance, and we deny the hegemony of financial profits. We believe in solidarity, social support and collaboration and not in charitable giving.
We are part of society, not its rescuers. Our suggestion is simple. We produce and share goods, services, knowledge. We become independent of the old structures and develop new ones. These new structures will cultivate an environment that will allow a way out of the current economic, social and cultural crisis.
For those with an alternative vision of public and community life, one less mediated by consumption, the crisis represented a threat but also a welcomed opportunity for the cultivation of new ways of doing and thinking politics. Their way of living changed drastically but their political consumer subjectivities proved to be rather less versatile.
Concurrently, new politics of time and space stretched the Athenian antagonist movement to its limits. For most people participation in alternative trading networks simply made sense in their quest for lower prices. It was hard to blame them for doing so whilst watching them nearing and falling below the poverty line.
But some find it hard to stop thinking and dreaming rather more dangerously. After all, the history of their city reminds that there will always be potential turning points and critical junctures that can trigger radical upheavals. Chatzidakis A Commodity fights in p ost Athens: Kravets O and Sandikci O Competently ordinary: Clearly, everyday domicide is as systematic and widespread as the pursuit of economic interest.
It has affected and will continue to affect large numbers of mostly powerless people, especially in the developing world. The murder of homes is an intentional act. Domicide violates and terrorizes its victims as bulldozers and cranes reduce their homes to rubble. It also wounds their sense of dignity.
Everyday domicide, in other words, in many ways cruelly redefines the existence of its victims and severely diminishes, if not destroys, the quality of their lives. While her findings are largely based on the city of Shanghai, the stories of uprooted families and flattened dwellings are reminiscent of millions of other similar cases around the world. This was equated with the addition of another million urbanites by Obviously, this does not mean that all million rural villagers are to migrate to existing cities. It is expected that this addition would occur through the further expansion of small and medium-sized cities, townships and counties and through the conversion of rural villagers into urban citizens and their relocation from original villages as was the case in Chongqing.
The World Expo held in Shanghai vividly exhibited this urban-oriented political rhetoric. In other words, all that is required for a happy life is to live in cities. The Chinese central and local states have been particularly proactive in making sure that these processes are mutually reinforcing, ensuring that productive investments in the built environment are made as a means to facilitate the primary industrial production.
The investment in fixed assets has been a quick speculative solution to ensuring the GDP growth at both local and national scales. According to government statistical yearbooks, real estate construction has also been growing phenomenally, accounting for more than half of fixed asset investment in major cities like Beijing in the s see also Shin, iii , pp.
The speculative urbanism is also spreading to other second and third tier cities and to counties that try to emulate the kind of urbanism originally centred on the eastern coastal region. Speculation henceforth becomes the principal source, the almost exclusive arena of formation and realization of surplus value For China, it is not simply the over-accumulation in the primary circuit of industrial production, which facilitates the channelling of fixed asset investment into the secondary circuit of built environment.
Labour exploitation therefore occurs to ensure the capping of labour costs in industrial production as much as possible. For the foreseeable future, this internal snowballing process of industrial relocation seems likely to continue given the huge geographical scale of China, but obviously this will face greater frictions as years go by. This is epitomised by the gradual infiltration of Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronic goods manufacturer, into the central region. The expansion is facilitated by the intervention of entrepreneurial local states that ensure the timely provision of land and infrastructure to accommodate both workers and capitalists.
Local states in particular also ensure that capital enjoys access to pacified and disciplined workers as much as possible. Such investments in both production facilities, infrastructure and housing occur not only within existing cities, but also in urban peripheries and rural villages as well as in special zones of exception, combined together to produce the urban. The city as the container does not become a meaningful unit of analysis, as this process of accumulation through the secondary circuit does not limit itself to existing urban administrative boundaries but spills over onto peripheries see also Brenner and Schmid, vi ; Merrifield, vii.
The urban is also created in rural and suburban areas as well as the rural is reborn in urban counterparts see Keil, In this way, China is urbanising as urbanism spreads to inner regions away from the eastern coastal centre. It does this by taking advantage of the geographical uneven development of production and reproduction of labour power, while controlling for demand for urban citizens and for supply proletarianisation to continue to supply cheap labour.
As the built environment has become both the end and the means of capital accumulation, the right to the city remains important in China as a political project Shin, In this process of urban accumulation, urban spaces, old and new, increasingly embody the rapidly exacerbating inequalities in society. Workers, most of whom consist of migrants from rural hinterlands, face harsh working environments, poor job securities and suppressed wages. Affluence rises in major cities as centres of accumulation, but the pace of wealth accumulation alienates those who produce it. Claiming the right to the urban is also inevitably a political project as it only has any chance of seeing any kind of success when disparate classes experiencing exclusion and deprivation come together across regions, which the Chinese state endeavours to stop from emerging.
Here, for grassroots organisations, jumping up the scale to overcome spatial isolation is very important Smith, So are the efforts of regional, national and transnational organisations to link up with grassroots organisations to contextualise and embed universal agendas in concrete realities. In China, claiming the right to the urban faces huge constraints for a number of reasons. Second, the authoritarian Chinese state is highly sensitive to any bottom-up struggles to form cross-class and cross-regional alliances to challenge authority see Shin, x for more detailed discussions.
While various socio-economic reform policies have been designed and put into practice, political reform is deeply lagging behind. While some measures have emerged to enhance local democracy e. Socio-economic inequalities and regional disparities are often glued over by the logics of nationalism e.
China Dream that is increasingly replacing socialism as the ideological basis of running the country by the Party State. More recently, the state project to build a middle class society provides an ambiguous but not so promising situation for any claim on the right to the urban by the masses. Looking at the household disposable income in according to the China Statistical Yearbook, the bottom threshold of such an income range refers to mostly the highest income decile group that the government was envisaging as being the middle class.
On the other hand, what turns out to be more progressive is the lower class, that includes blue-collar industrial and service sector workers, the small-scale self-employed, the unemployed, retirees and college students. As the state and capital proceed with their heavy investment in fixed assets and rewrite the built environment, displacement becomes the norm for villagers and urbanites.
The cross-class alliance of the type above, which had emerged and prompted the brutal oppression in , would be something that may not be established in the near future but remains to be a political imperative if the hegemony of the dominant interests is to be subverted. The alliance is in need of further inclusion of village farmers whose lands are expropriated to accommodate investments to produce the urban, and of ethnic minorities in autonomous regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang whose cities are appropriated and restructured to produce Han-dominated cities.
What else is to be done to challenge the state and capital in China? Here, I refer to the proposition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who wrote in November for their preface to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:. But without a vision about what could be a different way of organizing social relations, one which restores the centrality of politics over the tyranny of market forces, those movements will remain of a defensive nature.
If one is to build a chain of equivalences among democratic struggles, one needs to establish a frontier and define an adversary, but this is not enough. One also needs to know for what one is fighting, what kind of society one wants to establish. This requires from the Left an adequate grasp of the nature of power relations, and the dynamics of politics. What is at stake is the building of a new hegemony. So our motto is: Harvey D The urban process under capitalism: Keil R ed Suburban C onstellations: Marcuse P From critical urban theory to the right to the city City: Shao Q Shanghai Gone: Shin H B Life in the shadow of mega-events: Smith N Contours of a spatialized politics: Global shifts, neoliberalism and right to the city movements in Mexico and Greec e.
Mexico and Greece comprise typical cases of the so-called semi-periphery where neoliberal policies have been applied Mouzelis, but also where social movements tried to resist the implementation of the policies in question. During the s and the s these movements grew first in the build-up to, and then again following the rise to power of totalitarian governments Mexico and dictatorial regimes Greece. Mexico was faced with severe economic crisis in and then again in that intensified after the WTO order ii , and despite the veneer of development given to the country in the early nineties, at the prospect of it joining NAFTA iii They contributed to the increase of social inequalities while at the same time fuelling policies of surveillance and control, as well as para-statist organisations Toussaint, Mexico has a long tradition of resistance: From onward in particular, this tradition was articulated through movements that would not only contest, but also put their claims into practice: These movements managed to surpass bureaucratic trade unions and party organisations alike.
During the same time period and following the World Trade Organization WTO order , Greece appeared to be in a direction of development, yet a type of development that was strongly dependent upon neoliberal decision-making centres and international organisations that were pushing for the privatisation of public corporations. This situation lead to a sharp decrease in the standard of living and provisions in health, education and public services; an increase in social inequalities and the emergence of neo-fascist groups. From onward in particular, a multiform movement started to emerge with major mobilisations Douzinas, that far surpassed bureaucratic trade unions or party organisations v.
From the s onward, Athens and Mexico City saw some intense urbanisation with serious consequences for the environment and socio-spatial segregation, while at the same time maintaining a level of social mix in their centres Hiernaux, , Ward, , Leontidou, After the s, and despite the maintenance of such social mixing in central neighbourhoods, these divisions become more intense in the peri-urban space, while their centres started to become gentrified. Yet from the s on, the most important RttC movements concerned the claims to public space and common goods, while at the same time opposing privatisations Petropoulou, So far, the response above appears to have carefully omitted any reference to the idea of the spontaneous.
In the following pages, I will attempt to tackle and overturn this approach. The notion of spontaneity and its variations in the city and in the right to the city movements. This period of primitive accumulation gave birth to capitalist relationships, and immediately followed the colonial era Wallerstein, They also refuse to put their thought to the service of political choices and relationships that do not concern them. The limits between the spontaneous and the organised are fairly blurry, hence referring to the social construction of difference x Bourdieu, and being related to habitus Bourdieu, That it is more related to people inclined to create relationships of solidarity in order to respond to living needs, forming cracks in the compulsory relationships of exploitation and of their overall understanding as machines, as imposed to them from the outset of the birth of capitalism.
I explain this further on. The relationship between the spontaneous and human economy in the city. Yet in reality, the two are not antithetical to one another: In these, the highest goods are relationships and quality of life; not the accumulation of money and power through it.
Cracks are left over, in other words, that may at points create revolts and overthrows xii. On the other hand, the development of a flavour of capitalism lacking any clear political or economic adjustment in these countries has led to an entire network of clientilist political relationships that reproduce the space and often-times obstruct the formation of social movements. But how was this debt created in the first place? Through this particular way of development of capitalism: These movements are concerned with claims toward life and toward common public spaces; they oppose large-scale works that take place in the midst of crisis, during which a policy is heightened, holding as its central characteristic the selling-off of public and community lands and the creation of large projects without environmental studies and without the study of their potential social consequences.
Social movements and s pontaneity in the so-called semi-periphery. Regarding the relationship that politicised, anti-systemic actors may hold to these movements that were originally spontaneous, but consequently very much organised-from-below, and the discussion that has recently opened up Leontidou, , Dalakoglou, I will agree more with the approach of Zibechi who extracts his knowledge from the movements of Latin America. These approaches would be particularly useful for the comprehension of contemporary movements that have taken place in the Mediterranean in recent years. According to Zibechi then, the main characteristics of the contemporary movements of Latin America are as follows: At the time when this article was written, creative resistances that practice social economy have been on the rise Wallerstein, ; Tsilibounidi, ; Petropoulou, The act of these collectives, which sometimes form social movements, resembles the movement of the so-called Zumbayllu: Conclusions, thoughts and directions for a most comprehensive research.
As shown above, major structural politico-economic changes and tendencies led the international organisations have played a key role in local change, and vice-versa. In order to respond to the question more fully, a type of a treatise would be required that would pose the following questions: The repression of the structures of human economy and community structures of participatory democracy which were formed during the periods of national-liberation revolutions, and the social revolution of Mexico in particular, happened in many and various ways exactly following the respective revolutions.
And so, these revolutions never fulfilled their key demands among which were matters concerning land, labour, housing and real democracy which were instead skewed by the status quo and turned into an instrument of control of the everyday lives of the people. This, of course, has happened in most countries around the world. Naturally in Mexico this whole process was much more intense, since anything popular would be related to the long history of the indigenous peoples Maya, Mexica, Zapotec, Huichol etc.
How the revolts of re-opened the matter in another way, speaking in different terms about the spontaneity in Europe. Inspired by the libertarian traditions of people of the world, these revolts commenced from the areas of Western Europe and the USA where the most severe repression of the spontaneous had become socially accepted. During this same period the critics of Leninist thesis about spontaneity Lenin, ; Luxemburg, by existentialists Sartre, and others and many libertarian authors Debord, and others are intensified.
The question is how th e conversation about spontaneity was transferred to the countries of the so-called semi-periphery amidst great repression Mexico and the dictatorship Greece , and how it was used for an analysis of the everyday life Lefebvre, a, b; Gramsci, How, on the other hand, the so-called spontaneous resistances became, or may become, under certain conditions, dangerous cracks Holloway, ; Villoro, The common elements between all these revolts is that they make decisions through open assemblies that do not have permanent representatives toward the outside something that destabilizes the normal certainties of the status-quo and its politicians , that they have global characteristics, while at the same time being rooted in places of resistance where women play a determinant role in the organisation of everyday life, and that they continue their activity through new, multiform collectives.
Christian Metz 19 and so forth. But the kind on which I have insisted seems to me to be exemplary of the whole domain. In all photographs, we have this same act of cutting off a piece of space and time, of keeping it unchanged while the world around continues to change, of making a compromise between conservation and death. The frequent use of photography for private commemorations thus results in part there are economic and social factors, too from the intrinsic characteristics of photography itself.
In contrast, film is less a succession of photographs than, to a large extent, a destruction of the photograph, or more exactly of the photograph's power and action. The fetish is related to death through the terms of castration and fear, to the off-frame in terms of the look, glance, or gaze. The child tries to maintain its prior conviction that all human beings have the penis, but in opposition to this, what has been seen continues to work strongly and to generate anxiety. The compromise, more or less spectacular according to the person, consists in making the seen retrospectively unseen by a disavowal of the perception, and in stopping the look, once and for all, on an object, the fetish—generally a piece of clothing or underclothing—which was, with respect to the moment of the primal glance, near, just prior to, the place of the terrifying absence.
From our perspective, what does this mean, if not that this place is positioned off-frame, that the look is framed close by the absence? Furthermore, we can state that the fetish is taken up in two chains of meaning: It is remarkable that the fetish—even in the common meaning of the word, the fetish in everyday life, a re-displaced derivative of the fetish proper, the object which brings luck, the mascot, the amulet, a fountain 9 Freud, "Fetishism," S.
Without them nothing can happen. Let us return to the problem of off-frame space. The difference which separates film and photography in this respect has been partially but acutely analyzed by Pascal Bonitzer. The off-frame is taken into the evolutions and scansions of the temporal flow: Furthermore, the very existence of a sound track allows a character who has deserted the visual scene to continue to mark her or his presence in the auditory scene if I can risk this quasi-oxymoron: If the filmic off-frame is substantial, it is because we generally know, or are able to guess more or less precisely, what is going on in it.
The character who is off-frame in a photograph, however, will never come into the frame, will never be heard—again a death, another form of death. The spectator has no empirical knowledge of the contents of the off-frame, but at the same time cannot help imagining some off-frame, hallucinating it, dreaming the shape of this emptiness.
Christian Metz 21 theory of the fetish. For Barthes, the only part of a photograph which entails the feeling of an off-frame space is what he calls the punctum, the point of sudden and strong emotion, of small trauma; it can be a tiny detail. This punctum depends more on the reader than on the photograph itself, and the corresponding off-frame it calls up is also generally subjective; it is the "metonymic expansion of the punctum.
It marks the place of an irreversible absence, a place from which the look has been averted forever. The photograph itself, the "in-frame," the abducted part-space, the place of presence and fullness—although undermined and haunted by the feeling of its exterior, of its borderlines, which are the past, the left, the lost: The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.
Film is much more difficult to characterize as a fetish. It is too big, it lasts too long, and it addresses too many sensorial channels at the same time to offer a credible unconscious equivalent of a lacking part-object. It does contain many potential part-objects the different shots, the sounds, and so forth , but each of them disappears quickly after a moment of presence, whereas a fetish has to be kept, mastered, held, like the photograph in the pocket.
Film is, however, an extraordinary activator of fetishism. It endlessly mimes the primal displacement of the look between the seen absence and the presence nearby. Thanks to the principle of a moving cutting off, thanks to the changes of framing between shots or within a shot: This combination is particularly visible, for instance, in the horror film, which is built upon progressive reframing that lead us through desire and fear, nearer and 11 Barthes, p.
Phil Patton, Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg New Haven, Conn. Leete's Island Books, More generally, the play of framings and the play with framings, in all sorts of films, work like a striptease of the space itself and a striptease proper in erotic sequences, when they are constructed with some subtlety. The moving camera caresses the space, and the whole of cinematic fetishism consists in the constant and teasing displacement of the cutting line which separates the seen from the unseen.
But this game has no end. Things are too unstable and there are too many of them on the screen. It is not simple—although still possible, of course, depending on the character of each spectator—to stop and isolate one of these objects, to make it able to work as a fetish. Most of all, a film cannot be touched, cannot be carried and handled: As pointed out by Octave Mannoni, 13 Freud considered fetishism the prototype of the cleavage of belief: The spectator does not confound the signifier with the referent, she or he knows what a representation is, but nevertheless has a strange feeling of reality a denial of the signifier.
This is a classical theme of film theory. But the very nature of what we believe in is not the same in film and photography. If I consider the two extreme points of the scale—there are, of course, intermediate cases: Its poverty constitutes its force—I speak of a poverty of means, not of significance. The photographic effect is not produced from diversity, from itinerancy or inner migrations, from multiple juxtapositions or arrangements.
It is the effect, rather, of a laser or lightning, a sudden and violent illumination on a limited and petrified surface: Where film lets us believe in more things, photography lets us believe more in one thing. First, there are presentations, like this one, which are less "psychoanalytic" than it might seem.
The notion of "fetish," and the word, were not invented by Freud; he took them from language, life, the history of cultures, anthropology. He proposed an interpretation of fetishism. This interpretation, in my opinion, is not fully satisfactory. It is obvious that it applies primarily to the early evolution of the young boy. Incidentally, psychoanalysts often state that the recorded clinical cases of fetishism are for the most part male. The fear of castration and its further consequence, its "fate," are necessarily different, at least partially, in children whose body is similar to the mother's.
The Lacanian notion of the phallus, a symbolic organ distinct from the penis, the real organ, represents a step forward in theory; yet it is still the case that within the description of the human subject that psychoanalysis gives us, the male features are often dominant, mixed with and as general features. But apart from such distortions or silences, which are linked to a general history, other aspects of Freud's thinking, and various easily accessible observations which confirm it, remain fully valid.
It is impossible to use a theory, to "apply" it. That which is so called involves, in fact, two aspects more distinct than one might at first believe: I feel that psychoanalysis has this power in the fields of the humanities and social sciences because it is an acute and profound discovery. It has helped me—the personal coefficient of each researcher always enters into the account, despite the ritual declarations of the impersonality of science—to explore one of the many possible paths through the complex problem of the relationship between cinema and photography. I have, in other words, used the theory of fetishism as a fetish.
Psychoanalysis, as Raymond Bellour has often underscored, is contemporary in our Western history with the technological arts such as cinema and with the reign of the patriarchal, nuclear, bourgeois family. It is possible to consider psychoanalysis as the founding myth of our emotional modernity. After this long digression, I turn back to my topic and purpose, only to state that they could be summed up in one sentence: Plon, ; translated as Structural Anthropology New York: This apparent paradox between still and moving images has been noted by nearly all accounts of cinema, but resolving this exchange between stillness and motion, or rather the transformation of one into the other, still eludes both empirical scientific explanation and, I feel, reflects deeply rooted ideological prejudices.
I want to explore the complexities of the introduction of the moving image in the nineteenth century and the limitations that come from seeing simply as an illusion. Vision and Its Fallacies Jonathan Crary has claimed that nineteenth-century visual devices focused on the question of the body and the senses, emphasizing defining and measuring the processes of the body and the senses and thereby disciplining them. Thus the nineteenth century approached vision in a new mode: From the beginning of the nineteenth century a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the physiological make-up of the human subject, rather 1 Previously published in Eivind Rossaak ed.
Film, Photography, Algorythms Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, and republished here with courtesy of Tom Gunning. Close attention to this subjective phenomenon exemplified the new attitude towards perception that Crary describes. The way afterimages were described and the role they played within the optical devices known as philosophical toys, which produced moving images, vividly reveals the assumptions generated and the tensions raised by the moving image in this new intellectual and technological context.
Contemporary perceptual psychologist R. By means of an afterimage we paradoxically see an object even in its absence. This phenomenon had been observed for centuries, including discussions by Aristotle, Ptolemy, Ibn al Haytham and Leonardo da Vinci. Studying and demonstrating this phenomenon led to the first proliferation of optical philosophical toys. MIT Press, p. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing London: World University Library, , p.
MIT Press, , pp Tom Gunning 27 persistence of vision as the means of creating an illusion of apparent motion. Few concepts have been evoked so often in relation to visual devices and especially moving images, and yet so disputed as this one. As an explanation of the phenomenon of apparent motion it has now basically been dis- carded, but still must be dealt with as a revealing historical and cultural legacy and one that displays its own phantom persistence, as perceptual psychologists like Joseph and Barbra Anderson have lamented.
The attraction of the theory for the nineteenth century, I believe lies largely in its essentially mechanical view of the human sensorium and its persistence in some accounts of cinema to this date indicates how much a mechanical view of perception and cognition still underlies the assumptions most people maintain about vision. Persistence of vision and the optical devices I discuss here form a circular logic in which the devices are the cause of visual illusions as well as demonstrating their explanation. Besides spawning images of motion, these devices forged a new dependent relation between the still and the moving image, as each enacted the trick of a transition from a static image to a moving image.
However, we might claim the real trick lies in making the moving images appear as nothing more than a peculiarly tricky modification of the still image, an epiphenomenon founded in the inert and reliable still image. LIT, , pp From the Flip-book to the Cinema. Persistent afterimages offered a theory of perception which parsed movement into static phases and still images, an attempt thereby not only to discipline the moving image, but to dissolve its movement into its opposite.
So what is this theory in which movement is paradoxically explained through persistence? The theory is founded on the fact that motion picture devices whether the first nineteenth-century devices such as the phenakistiscope or zoetrope or the later motion picture films all employ a continuous series of still drawings or photographs depicting separate phases of an action on some sort of material support. A dancer dances, a horse gallops, a man walks. How does this happen? How They Are Made and Worked provides an especially vivid description: Suppose, for instance, that a series of pictures depicting a man walking along the street, are being shown on the screen.
In the first picture the man is shown with his left foot in the air. Though the picture has vanished from the eye, the brain still persists in seeing the left foot slightly raised. One thirty second part of a second later the next picture shows the man with his left foot on the ground.
The shops, houses, and other stationary objects in the second image occupy the positions shown in the first picture, and consequently the dying impression of these objects is revived, while the brain receives the impression that the man has changed the position of his foot in relation to the stationary objects, and the left foot which was raised melts into the left foot upon the ground.
The eye imagines that it sees the left foot descend. The afterimages were responsible for the fact 9 Frederick Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked London: Lip- pincott Co, , p. Tom Gunning 29 that no interruption was noticeable, while the movement itself resulted simply from the passing of one position into another. What else is the perception of movement but the seeing of a long series of different positions?
If instead of looking through the Zoetrope we watch a real trotting horse on a real street, we see its whole body in ever-new progressing positions and its legs in all phases of motion; and this continuous series is our perception of the movement itself. Yet it was slowly discovered that the explanation is far too simple Contemporary theories have broken the motion into multiple interrelating factors, whose complexities still allow some degree of controversy and uncertainty, even if the in- adequacy of the old theory cannot be disputed.
As the Andersons show, the phenomenon of persistence of vision as the explanation of the continuous moving image can be broken into two issues: Why is the image continuous, and why does it move? In other words, why do the separate frames appear continuous rather than as the intermittent flashes of light which we know them to be? And why do the figures on the screen appear to move about in smooth motion when we know they are in fact still pictures?
A Psychological Study New York: Appleton and Company, p. Wertheimer attributed apparent motion to three factors, summarized by the Andersons as: The first is persistence of vision, and the second the so-called phi phenomenon. The Thaumatrope Picking up and playing with a nineteenth-century optical device allows anyone to re-experience the transformation of a still image into Beyond demonstrating the phenomenon of the afterimage or apparent movement, the fascination these images draw from us endures.
A true phenomenology of that experience may be sharpened through attention to successive theories of vision, but it also exceeds the context of the history of science. The moving image breaks out of its intended context when its playfulness triumphs over its philosophy. The Thaumatrope, one of the earliest optical philosophical toys, has a somewhat indirect relation to apparent motion, but demonstrates the flicker fusion aspect of persistence of vision quite dramatically, through its ability to fuse a continuous image from two rapidly alternated separate images.
Tom Gunning 31 was a distinguished medical doctor and scientific author who had used his philosophical toy to demonstrate the principle of persistence of vision to the Royal Society in This book so popular it went through several editions and revisions embeds these devices into a very revealing discourse of popular nineteenth century science. Its title says it all: Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest: An attempt to illustrate the first principles of natural philosophy by the aid of popular toys and sports.
The chapter he devotes to the Thaumatrope opens with a clear argument for the educational use of illusions: According to Paris, the trick of the Thaumatrope lies not just in the hand, but lurks concealed in the eye itself, whose nature is revealed by the device. The Cartesians maintained that the senses were the great sources of deception; that everything with which they present us ought to be suspected as false, or at least dubious, until our reason has confirmed the report.
Anyone could see that each side of the disk presented only a part of the composite image which spinning produced. An attempt to illustrate the first principles of natural philosophy by the aid of popular toys and sports London: John Murray, , fifth edition , p. The classic Thaumatrope composite images e. The Thaumatrope displays the fascination produced by an optically produced image. The spinning disc is faster than the eye. This image is the product, Paris seems to claim, of a collusion between the device and our eye, or, alternatively the tricky device has taken advantage of the weakness of our eye C.
But to understand this new form of image, I think we must let the movement speak rather than concentrate exclusively on the explanation. When I twirl a Thaumatrope, although I do see a composite image, I do not mistake it for the equivalent of the images imprinted on either side of the disk. The 19 Talbot, p. Ceram, Archeology of the Cinema London: Thames and Hudson, , p.
Tom Gunning 33 image has an unfamiliar quality. It is less material than the printed images, and, as Paris stresses, less opaque; I can in effect see through it. I am inclined to think of it as visual rather than tactile, something I can see but not touch. And yet I am very aware of its production and my manual role in producing it. Mary Ann Doane, one of the few film scholars who attempts to describe the image produced by optical devices, captures its odd nature which she indicates aligned it with the possibility of deception and trickery: The toys could not work without this fundamental dependence upon an evanescent, intangible image.
As simple as the device is, the Thaumatrope cannot function without someone serving as simultaneous viewer and manipulator. The image appears as the result of this interaction. Mannoni reproduces a Thaumatrope with a painter before a blank canvas on the one side and a small portrait of a lady on the other. Archeology of the Cinema Exeter: University of Exeter Press, pp. I experience the production of this virtual image as extending my conception of vision rather than experiencing some sort of failure to maintain the distinction between the two images.
After all, this is a toy, a device to give pleasure, not cause frustration. We certainly feel as we twist the thread of the Thaumatrope and watch the image it produces that we are escaping the ordinary, which we are seeing in a different manner; we glimpse a virtual world.
Although the superimposed image may not necessarily produce an image of motion, it is an image in motion and therein lies its uniqueness.
What it does not resemble is the fixed and static image that constitutes the norm of pictorial expression a norm, I believe, we could claim that the art of picture-making also constantly challenges and reconceives. To claim that the Thaumatrope-produced image does not exist or exists simply as an illusion, reveals a prejudice towards perception as a static process, veracity as something viewable only from a fixed and stable perspective, vision understood as a still picture.
I am claiming that the moving image fascinates partly because of its constant impulse to exceed what is already known and already grasped, in favor of mobile possibilities. Flickering Moving Images The optical devices that succeeded the Thaumatrope produced not just super- imposed virtual images, but images that moved, using revolving wheels or drums with slots or indentations through which the viewer peered. The aperture provided by the viewing slot not only turns what would otherwise be a continuous blur into a stable visible image, but also inscribes the viewer into the apparatus, setting a place and means for observation and controlling it with precision.
The breakdown of a continuous movement into a series of flashes or flickers — basically the creation of shutter effect — was essential for the production of motion in nearly all cinematic devices to come. The complexity of effects triggered by this simple device is worth extensive contemplation. Stampfer indicates the role of the aperture and shutter in aligning image and viewer and exposing the still images to a brief view in such a way that the transition between images is occluded.
Like a mechanical conjuror, the shutter hid the moment of change when one image re- placed another from view. This persistence of the still image as the true substance of the moving image is the specter that haunts the nineteenth-century understanding of the moving image. While the explanations of vision offered by Lord Brougham resolve motion back into still images, the toys more commonly ran the other way, as is seen in the Phenakistiscope, invented by Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau and basically identical in principle and manufacture to the Stroboscope invented and presented about the same time by Simon Stampfer.
The name of the device, derived from the Greek phenax — cheater or deceiver — marked the view it offered as deceptive. When the disc is rotated about its center facing a mirror, and looking with one eye opposite the opening The slots punctuate the vision of images on the moving disc as Stampfer described, converting the passing figures into a flickering series of individual images or rather producing a single moving image rather than a continuous blur.
He had also demonstrated the apparent stillness of a rapidly revolving device with a repeated identically drawn figure. As the wheel revolved with some sixteen figures of a standing man drawn on its periphery, the figure appears within the viewing slots as a single static image. Mannoni theorizes that the example of the Thaumatrope may then have inspired Plateau to the next crucial move. Now the figures drawn on the periphery portrayed a single figure engaged in the successive stages of a simple repetitive motion: The movement portrayed here is posed between brevity and endlessness, an instant of action or an eternity of Sisyphean repetition, the first appearance of the cinematic loop that evades the linearity of action through its circular technology.
Like most of his contemporaries, Plateau believed the device demonstrated the natural outcome of optical afterimages, as for the first time explicitly subsumed under persistence of vision: If several objects that differ sequentially in terms of form are represented one after another to the eye in very brief intervals and sufficiently close together, the impression they produce on the retina will blend together without confusion and one will believe that a single object is gradually changing form and position.
Rather than an image with a single material base it is a perceptual image produced by motion, and thus virtual. Motion is necessary for the trick, but the trick does not have to yield a moving image. Deslandes, Histoire comparitif du cinema Vol. Casterman, , p. Consider what takes place in an image on the retina when we actually witness a man in motion; for instance, a man jumping over a gate, in the first moment he appears on the ground, in the next his legs are a few inches above it, in the third they are nearly on a level with the rail, in the fourth he is above it, and then in the successive moments he is seen descending as he had previously risen.
A precisely similar effect is produced on the retina, by the successive substitution of figures in corresponding attitudes as through the orifices of the revolving disc; each figure remaining on the retina long enough to allow its successor to take its place without an interval that would destroy the illusion. The Phenakistiscope generated a number of offspring, all of which similarly animated drawn successive figures in loops of repetitive motion when viewed through revolving devices. Tom Gunning 39 The Moving Image: More than an Illusion It is worth pausing at this threshold in the nature of imagery that the Phenakistiscope and its successors crossed.
Since the beginning of culture, movement has played a role within art works through the physical movement of actors and dancers, puppets and automatons, or shadows and pictorial figures. But with these mechanical devices we actually see moving images produced optically. I maintain this marks a revolutionary moment in the history of the image — one we have not fully appreciated or explored. To describe the perception achieved by these devices without recourse to the mechanical description of how they operate remains a challenge, precisely because their effect overturns our dominant concept of representation as a picture.
We are more comfortable describing how the devices work than how they affect us as viewers. Let me be clear. These devices do not represent motion; they produce it. For perceptual reasons, which we still understand only in part, we actually see movement, provided the apparatus is properly made and operated. Earlier devices represent, or allude to, movement through multiples pictures. Magic lantern slides, protean or transforming pictures pictures showing different images depending on a change in light and even Thaumatropes could represent different phases of an action, although in a limited number usually two.
A trick lantern slide showing a dancer in two successive poses could be manipulated rapidly and smoothly and give an impression of motion through this alternation. But a viewer is always aware of the individual static phases and the gap between them. The Phenakistiscope generated a new sort of image, an image that moved. But I am not willing to say that when the wheel is spun and I look through the aperture I do not see a figure of a dancer moving.
My position is obviously phenomenological; that is, I maintain that perceptions need not be dissolved into their physiological process I am not against doing this — if we are studying physiology rather than moving images. The riddle of the perception of the moving image lies in the fact that no one can explain it purely physiologically and the psychological explanations are still debated.
In other words, we have a true challenge to explanation here. Yet the phenomenological description, while still difficult, is, I think, possible. We see motion, and yet it is somehow truly different from a physical dancer or puppet. We see a moving image, two dimensional in appearance.
As an image, it has something of the virtuality of the composite picture in the Thaumatrope, provided, as I believe we do, we sense the flicker fusion occurring. A moving image delights us with its novelty, because most images do not move; but also for its familiarity, since it recalls for us the way we perceive the world, which is primarily moving. Recent investigators of perception claim the greatest distortion in our understanding of visual perception comes from assuming it is founded on static images, pictures, to which somehow movement is superadded.
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As the ecological and phenomenological-minded perceptual psychologists such as J. Gibson and Alva Noe have demonstrated, movement provides the norm for visual perception, because our eyes are moving, our bodies are moving and the world around us moves as well, in concert and independently of us.
The static retina image is a myth created in the perceptual laboratory. I believe our investigation of the discourse surrounding the early moving image devices shows that the mechanistic worldview of the nineteenth century was determined to see human perception in terms of machines. Thus the education offered by philosophical toys included not only the disciplining of the body that Crary finds embedded in these devices, but a worldview in which the viewer identified his and others!
This is an education with social and political consequences. Sometimes the greatest trick lies in claiming something is only a trick and that one can unmask it easily. However, I would maintain that reexamining the experience of the moving image, even in these devices; need not to be limited to this lesson. While I resist describing the moving image as an illusion, I think one might still see it as a trick, a trope, a turn, a transformation that surprises, partly because we do indeed see it, not simply mistake it.
The moving image is an illusion only if we assume our eyes are defective. If we think of seeing as a multifaceted way of exploring the world and indeed of delighting in it , then a trick need no more be an illusion than is a difficult gymnastic or acrobatic turn or a feat of juggling. This apparatus, while it subjects our vision and behavior to a specific regimen necessary for the transformation into a moving image to take place, also remains very much in our hands and within our sight.
The productive gestures are highly visible rather than concealed; we operate the Phenakistiscope and Zoetrope with the flick of our hands or fingers. We see the whole apparatus and it parts and can observe the still images before we set them into action. First, it displayed a dialectical relation between still and moving images. This reduction of motion to an illusion served philosophical ends. In this scenario, maintained by many to this day, the eye is deficient and weak, while the machine is powerful.
As Mary Ann Doane emphasized and Crary indicated optical devices present the machine as a toy, unthreatening and inviting. Part of its attraction lies in the manipulation of the apparatus itself, which one holds 36 Crary, p. NLB, , pp. No longer restricted to the myths of archaic culture or the fairytales of the nursery, we now dwell with- in a environment enlivened by moving images, even though the new dimensions implicit in this modern revolution in image has now been rendered banal by its omnipresence. It is our duty as theorists to rediscover and pay attention to it.
While not denying that narrative, in this chapter I tried to show the deeply dialectical relation between still and moving images which these devices reveal, especially when approached phenomenologically, rather than simply technically. A strong prejudice against recognizing the mobile nature of visual perception is revealed by this discourse, a prejudice that the cinema and media studies must still labor to overturn. An Introduction still promotes this view, claiming in its opening pages: Mc Graw Hill , , p. Although Birdwell and Thompson simply invoke this perfect Vision as a rhetorical heuristic it reflects the distrust, and indeed pedagogical discredit of the senses that much of film studies has adopted from the nineteenth century.
My investigation of the moving image offers another take on the theory and history of the apparatus. Although being vigilant about the nature and method of ideological deception remains a duty of the theory of media, assuming an Enlightenment critique of perception seems to me a distraction rather than a foundation for a political praxis. However if the optical devices serve as a mode of disciplining subjects and workers and citizens, I find the realm of the moving image provides equal opportunities of criticism and analysis. And I do not believe that delight necessarily cancels those possibilities out.
The proliferation of devices of the moving image demands a critical history of their uses and experiences. But if a utopian celebration of new media can blunt the edge of criticism and produce an amnesia about what we have learned from previous practices of visual images , puritan suspicions of the senses and their playfulness seems to be an equally deadly route to take. There may yet be uses for philosophical toys. Their encounter is fictional and theoretical, forged by the artifices of the researcher and justified by the questions she addresses - the genealogy of a problem: The two artists have never met and lived in different times and places.
They practiced distinct arts, photography and film. However, both experimented interactions between the two. One is regarded as the pioneer of cinema in Portugal, more due to the will of others than for his own will, in an attempt for succeeding generations to affirm the new cinematographic medium through the establishment of an autonomous history and a corresponding paternity2.
The other is seen as an unusual conceptual artist who practices deconstructionist art, which is self- 1 The english revision of this chapter was funded by FCT - the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Teresa Mendes Flores 45 reflective and politically committed. However, if we take a stance in terms of the cultural history and genealogy of a problem or of a desire - that of movement and memory, of photography and film - , I believe we can find common ground that will cater for these intersections. According to Gabriela M. Cinemateca Portuguesa, , p He bought instead a Kinetograph from Bedts to which he personally introduced some modifications4.
The summer of , the newly created French Automobile Club was finalizing its preparations for the first Paris-Marseilles-Paris intercity car race, which would depart on 24 September and return on 3 October. Movement and speed became, increasingly, something that could be experienced, although the horse-drawn carriages still dominated the streets of Paris. The train was the fastest means of transport. The photographs, in particular in their stereoscopic mode, were the most affordable way to travel without leaving home, with our bodies being virtually mobilized by our gaze 5.
Planes were still a project that some illustrious Parisians supported, as was the case with the photographer Nadar, a member of the Aeronautical Society and defender of the possibility of objects "heavier than air" flying6.
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But the terminal from Orly airport, that Chris Marker would shoot, did not yet exist. But Oporto was his hometown, and whose social life he photographed intensively. Paz dos Reis was a florist and owner of a shop in town. Republican, a Mason and photographer, who would receive an international award 7 , he almost exclusively practised stereoscopic photography that he distributed among friends and provided to a few publications of the time which reproduced them in monocular versions.
Applied to cinema, see Friedberg, Anne. Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley and New York: University of California Press, Teresa Mendes Flores 47 and stereoscopic views". Nowadays, his collection is deposited in the Portuguese Centre for Photography, located in the city of Oporto. It consists of about glass negatives of gel-silver bromide, from the A. The majority are stereoscopic plates, used in the Mackstein camera, which he also used, though more rarely, to produce panoramic photographs8.
Of these, in only four were restored and are housed in the national moving images archives, under supervision of the Cinemateca Portuguesa - Film Museum More film titles directed after this session include: The first four films mentioned are the only films from Paz dos Reis film works to have been found and preserved. The other titles were identified through the press, mainly advertising posters. His work as a photographer, the identity he would claim for himself, still has an empty and imprecise place in the Portuguese historiography of photography. One of the reasons that might explain this erasure from the history of photography is, probably, the fact that Paz dos Reis devoted himself to stereoscopic photography, which has been interpreted as a pro cinematographic device, and is thus situated in the first chapter of the histories of cinema.
Another reason may be the dissociation between monocular photography and those technologies, like stereoscopy, that made a stronger appeal to immersion and to the apparatus involving the spectator. Indeed, this more positivist camera obscura model enjoyed greater acceptance within academic works that ended up disregarding stereoscopy The fact that most of the stereoscopic creations are examples of popular culture and amateur practices may have also contributed to this disregard, as academic works have tended to concentrate on works of high culture.
The industrialization of the gaze and memory The "modern" desire to free the body from the law of gravity, crossing space and time with no boundaries and to rethink movement and its perception and ways of representation, both scientifically as well as artistically, seems to have dominated the nineteenth century, which sought to industrialize the whole experience - the experience actually lived as much as that lived imaginarily, which acquired a growing social importance.
Remembrance binds directly to the photographic technologies - and indirectly to writing in its ability to record and symbolize the lived experience, bringing it back as past before our eyes, looking at it in the present moment and reimagining it through our memory. Through this register, memory is performatively constructed. The actual past establishes itself through these indexical automatic representations. Time and memory were not the same before these modern forms of representation.
This memory was not independent of photographs; it was constructed by them. Of course, he had other non- mediated memories that, sometimes, could even contradict those remembered through photographs. However, the experience of the photographic act was completely merged to the living experience, to that wandering around Paris. In fact, his photographs were part of his life in its different dimensions: They are simultaneously a form of constituting and sharing the lived world.
Although there are indexical uses of writing, these uses do not concern the primary representation of objects but relate to the context of sign use itself. There is a feeling that the photographs of Paz dos Reis were part of his family, their rituals, their interactions: These photos constitute the automatic construction of a memory, a present time that is lived as a memory inscribed in his own present experience. Images that help appropriate the present. Although there was a clear awareness, at the time, of the historical dimension of the photographic record, photography was taken as a practice, at once historical and recreational.
Historical because of the recognition of its ability to preserve the many things that industrialization was leaving behind, producing a document for the future, and recreational for the pleasures of looking at things known and unknown in a different way and to produce, in the present, a public image of those things, of the self and the others. In short, his photos were not made for us, here in the future, but for his own time. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the modern audience as a historical category16, one directly addressed by the critics of Parisian Salons, that Portuguese critics took as role models.
In this essay the modern artist is described as "a man of the world", who mingles with the crowd though rising before it, nonetheless being very close to the audiences to whom his work is addressed: Teresa Mendes Flores 51 … a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses; … His interest is the whole world; he wants to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe. This same experience was cultivated and given ready-made by those various apparati that industrialized the gaze, such as the stereoscope.
This modality of the gaze, so often described and related to nineteenth century vision technologies, imports both the motion of the observer and the obsession for detail. The succession of images or views is just as important as this temporary possession. It was nice while it lasted, or better, as Baudelaire put it, because it did not! Its viewing process almost always involves the ideas of series and repetition: As well as the possibility of seeing in a different way.
Memory has become an external material device that one can own and appropriate, suitable for the modern audience. Stereoscopy promised variability, but the idea of a certain vertigo contained within it was also a benefit. It afforded a sense of immersion and of material possession of the memory of represented objects. Stereoscopic viewing endures, deepening the length of the view, enhanced by the individual control of the apparatus, as it was an individual private experience even if often shared among a 17 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. Phaidon Press, , p.
It was a divertimento, a diverse set of images, which constituted memory itself. Memory is not the store of recollections of a particular consciousness, else the very notion of a collective memory would be devoid of sense. Memory is an orderly collection, a certain arrangement of signs, traces, and monuments. It is that memory. To display, recreate and understand the real seem to be fundamental impulses behind those photographs, at a time when recreating the real was a way to understand and, simultaneously, intervene in its manufacture, both in a technical and in a political sense.
These abilities interested Paz dos Reis. Paz dos Reis and the stereoscopic option Although there is a lack of written primary sources on his activity19, his taste for stereoscopy seems to indicate that he was not simply a realist, faithful to the imitation of nature. This imitation, which was appreciated, was part of a broader interest in the manufacturing of the real, more real than real, hyper-real.
In the technological and cultural context of the nineteenth century this was more about simulating than simply imitating20; secondly, it also has the sense of fun and entertainment, namely a pure scopic and playful pleasure. Bloomsbury Academics, , p. Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. From Ovid to Hitchcock Chicago: He seemed to particularly appreciate the effect of relief which was so produced. This nuance felt by Siza is significant.
It indicates that this realism is inscribed in an instrumentation of the real and in a search for technological effects that do not intend to repeat our natural vision but rather to improve and transform it. This technological equipment was expected to produce visual and cognitive gains when compared to natural vision. In other words, using both the objective realistic information recorded from the visible, and the viewing effects procured by the stereoscope, photographers like Paz dos Reis are, in fact, associating both the ideas of realism and the fantastic, and in a way weakening its opposition.
Stereoscopic photographic views allowed a greater sense of empowerment to the spectator than monocular versions, due to the feelings of relief and immersion they provide. They constitute a subjective experience to the extent that the image resulting from the mental junction of two separate photographs is not really there, as it is not a given supplied by the device. In this respect, it is very similar to what happens in film apparatus concerning the effect of movement. The resulting mental picture is an individual production by each observer.
Finally, the succession of images was part of the viewing mode and its feeling of empowerment. Each spectator seldom saw only one image: The succession and replacement of images one after another, at the pace that the observer wished, was part of the experience. This technology offered the feeling of full power over the objects, and over the world, relating to the encyclopedic organization of knowledge and to an imperial political view, popularized throughout nineteenth century Europe.
The fictional genres of stereo views were equally popular. There were stagings of famous plays or short comic or burlesque scenes, sometimes somewhat erotic. In fact, the realism and the documentary character that are highlighted in most of the bibliography published on the photographs and films of Paz dos Reis do not explain his preference for stereoscopy. We believe that he was not only moved by realism but also the production of technological effects of surprise, amazement, attraction, immersion, fiction, etc.
It probably explains why he also became interested in the cinematograph. Teresa Mendes Flores 55 Industrialization has tended to undermine the concepts of space and time and its chronological classical linearity. Cinema makes things move back and forth, and everywhere. It is not surprising that, in that same year of , in Paris, when Paz dos Reis obtained his camera, Henri Bergson published the first edition of his Matter and Memory.
Essay on the Relationship of the Body with the Spirit26, where he criticizes the rigid positions of both philosophical realism and idealism and proposes new concepts of matter, memory and image around the notion of movement- image. Perseus became a hero by using a reflecting shield to turn that power against Medusa herself The Pygmalion myth tells the story of a sculptor who fell in love with his statue that represented the ideal woman.
Aphrodite, the divinity of love, turned the statue into a real living woman While Medusa hated and feared humans, Pygmalion was a misogynist and moralist towards real women. The freezing of movement was the prevailing desire in the technological evolution of photography. The first daguerreotype obtained with an exposure of about eight hours, made passers-by invisible. Which immediately unsettled the first photographers. Only the client of a shoe- 26 Henri Bergson.
Matter and Memory New York: From Ovid to Hitchcock. All that was moving had simply disappeared! The first pictures showed deserted cities and skies filled with clouds, leading, in order to solve this latter case, to resorting to montage techniques as soon as collodion glass negatives started being used since The ability to retain the transient and the moving constituted a triumph over the unrepresentable, and belongs to the history of photography as much as to the history of cinema. Stereoscopic photography, due to the reduced size of its plates, was one of the first achievements of snapshot photography and, therefore, the conquest of fast movement.
Stereoscopy was also the most effective format for the circulation and mass consumption of photographs, given the difficulties of their reproduction in printed form. Until the last years of the nineteenth century, the reproduction of photographs demanded their transformation into engravings. Only in the early twentieth century would the technology of the halftone invented around overcome this drawback in most of the Western countries.
Stereoscopic photography emerged as the best display form for the dissemination and enjoyment of photography. The stereoscopic image — more than another images — has the virtual dimension of a memory. The experience of stereoscopy, in particular that which uses viewing devices, makes us be aware of the very act of viewing while we are 30 Cf.
World History of Photography New York: Teresa Mendes Flores 57 viewing. This awareness happens because we feel the tridimensional effect occurring before our eyes, the moment the two images merge. Immobility is an objective given by the photographic image. There are no multiple frames passing by. However, stereoscopy involves the association of two simultaneous images only slightly different in terms of point of view, corresponding to the interval between each of our two eyes.
In regular usage, this interval is not time sequential but spatial. It is up to the observer to synthesize these differences in a new unique mental image that is not given ready-made. Something similar happens in the case of cinema in which every spectator perceives movement where in reality there is but a set of sequential frames in a film. He considered that photography of movement, chrono-photography, was the reduction of the immanent dynamism of movement to static poses, which are transcendent and ideal, which confuse movement with the path traversed.
Film is understood as a false mechanization of the movement due to being a mere quantitative and sequential accumulation of frames. Bergson never valued the effects of acceleration which, in fact, are responsible for a qualitative change in the nature of the static images that constitute the material reality of film.
The cinematograph, in Henri 32 Gilles, Deleuze. Motion is not for Bergson the displacement of an object from a point A to a point B, as in Euclidean geometry and classical physics. It is not a linear trajectory. According to Bergson, movement is also not a simple perceptive effect of a conscience. Bergson affirms the identity between matter, image and light. He considers that movement is the expression of changes in light matter. It is the universal variation of all things, in a universe in infinite expansion, which he calls the "plane of immanence" or "duration".
The essential aspect of this universe is not space but time. Space results from the expansion of matter in time. Subject and consciousness are momentary effects within the universal transformation of all things. A centre means the creation of a logical articulation that acts and reacts in certain ways, transforming the expansion of the light-matter according to a centre that may be a subject. The great interest of his analysis lies in the fact that he ceases to consider cinema technology according to the humanistic model, which is perspectivist and subject centred, and with which it has always been envisaged.
The nature underlying all cinematographic forms has been dislocated towards a technological non human centered perception. Photography, because of its immobility, is somehow outside of these conceptualizations about movement, although, as we have stated above, movement is also a central concept to it. Accessed on 4th July Teresa Mendes Flores 59 embedding within the perspectivist tradition.
Moreover, in stereoscopy what is under discussion is a central aspect of renaissance tradition, the very model of monocular vision. In fact, the proliferation of photographic images is a remarkable event in the universal variation that is the plan of immanence. If it is certain that photography does not directly produce the immanent movement, considered essential to the movement-image, movement is still a central problematic to photography.
Stereoscopy introduces still more issues. By producing a deepening space, the possibility of a temporal depth arises and, with it, a certain awareness of gaze at the moment of looking. The cinema of the time- image is aware of its own filmic nature of pure movement, already without the sensory and motor action to determine montage, i. In time-image films nothing happens but the image: Then, a mutual recognition of the multiplicity of gazes present is produced. Another example of the time-image are the films of Italian neorealism.
There is, therefore, in the theory of the time-image a relation with depth of field and a look that lasts longer. Hence, although without a temporal dimension fixed by the "author" of the image, the deepening of a fixed image space in stereoscopy allows us to think of it as a time-image. In fact, unlike cinema, in stereoscopic photography time modelling depends on the wishes of the viewer and I am not here considering scientific uses, involving a more disciplined spectator.
It is true that there is no guarantee that this look lasts longer, especially because, as we have already stated, it was part of the stereoscopic experience to find the image of the next card! The collections of stereo views served this purpose of a modern wandering: However, stereoscopy calls for a focused and in-depth look. Photographers discovered ways to "attract" that look and condition the "scopic pulsion" of viewers.
Photographing in stereoscopy required the mastery of a visual thinking distinct to that implied by the monocular tradition. A visual thinking that implies a special sensibility to the ways of deepening space: Alongside these spatial effects, a deepening of time within the fixed image was conveyed. Although we find this pattern of time deepening in the technological device of stereoscopy, images and photographers are not all equal.