Race as techno-politico-aesthetic category in the past and present of visual representation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My article extends the thought of thinkers such as Beth Coleman, Wendy Chun, Robin James, and Falguni Sheth, who argue that race is itself a kind of productive technology. I claim that material and epistemological developments in technology served not only to embed race within the Western subject of representation's 'enframing' apparatus (early modernity and the dawn of industrial capitalism), but also served to reveal the embeddedness of race as such (late modernity, the worker’s movement, civil rights and the crisis of representation), thus making it possible to put race on display in the visual arts as a dis/assembling component of the social order. To make my claim, I use Heidegger's theory of the modern world-picture, which frames the limits of visual representation for the modern subject of representation (the European man); but against Heidegger, I claim that the technoscientific means by which the world-picture is developed are the same means by which race is rent from this frame to be critically disassembled during modernity's crisis of representation. I argue that instead of Heidegger's ontology of aesthetics, which understands art as a saving grace from the enframing of the modern world-picture, Deleuze's ontology of the nonrepresentational Figure is preferable; with it, we can understand artworks which are race-critical as aestheticizing the forces of violence or joy from which the racialized Figure emerges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".