Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ever since Plato’s Republic banned the poetics of mourning from the ideal polis, political power has been thought in relation to images of death. In recent years, theorists such as Foucault, Mbembe, and Derrida have examined the inextricability of sovereign power and the field of the visible, yet, their specific linkages remain undertheorized. In response, Taking Life draws on intersecting fields of photographic, critical race and poststructural theory, as well as curatorial practice, to develop an account that connects sovereignty to images. I demonstrate that the concept of sovereignty we have inherited from political modernity is “phantasmatic” insofar as it imagines itself as pure life cut off from death. This phantasm is governed by a double logic that I aim to expose through an analysis of images of death circulating in contemporary art and media. My account shows that sovereignty is made possible by the alterity of death and time, which it nonetheless attempts to repress and control when it “takes life,” for example, by executing a death penalty or by representing death in spectral images. Yet, images also amplify death and finitude in ways that render sovereignty fragile and precarious. \n \nI formulate this double logic as general infrastructure that, following the work of Derrida, I call the “optic of spectrality.” I use this optic to read a series of discrete visual provocations, including death penalty photography in the analogue era and beyond; bystander recordings of antiblack police violence circulated on mobile platforms; and works by Harun Farocki that interrogate image operations in the context of global electronic warfare. These counter-histories of visuality agitate for an understanding of sovereignty that is exposed to death and spectral time. In exploring intersecting themes of sovereignty, spectrality, finitude, and technicity, I argue for the continued relevance of deconstruction for debates in visual cultures about visibility and violence, spectacle and surveillance, and the aesthetics of necropolitics. Focusing questions about the status and power of images in our post-photographic era of global media, Taking Life contributes to debates about capital punishment, drone warfare, and the trajectories of radical Black politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".