20 January 26
Location
Online (Zoom)
Alberto Toscano: “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”
This talk will try to explore the sense in which Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as ‘a practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organise relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories,’ can be articulated in terms of visual regimes and artistic practices. To this end, I will dwell on how Stuart Hall’s account of the violence of racial abstraction – formulated in critical dialogue with Louis Althusser – informed his writings on the visual, and explore how Hall’s insights can be mobilised today, as racial regimes of vision become increasingly abstract and automated, spawning new modalities of hierarchy, displacement and violence.
Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of “The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze” (Palgrave, 2006), “Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea” (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), “Cartographies of the Absolute” (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), “Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía” (Meier Ramirez, 2021), “La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital” (Palinodia, 2021), among others.
Participation via Zoom link
Part of the International Lecture Series
Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary
From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.
Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.
Further Program
January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”
For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1
Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).
With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.
