Race as techno-politico-aesthetic category in the past and present of visual representation

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.