The burning tower: Grenfell as the ‘optical machinery’

Abstract

The burnt frame of Grenfell is a site of sacrificed lives. Employing the imagery of the charred remains of the burnt-out tower as an ‘optical machinery’, this paper examines the iconography of the condemned tower block through its forensic remains. Grenfell as an inferno of suffering is a site of ‘visual hysteria’ locked through the screams of death and carnage of flesh, blood and bones. In the process, the iconography of the charred tower is a slippage of chronotopes, unresolved human anguish, austerity politics and a spectacle of interrogation through public enquiry. This archive of the tragic functions as a site of multiple renderings of temporality, testimonies and the ‘hauntology’ of the death event imagined both in real time, through flesh witnessing and as a repository of death narratives online. Coding it as an ‘optical machinery’, this paper deconstructs Grenfell as a mutilated iconography of necroaesthetics consummated through the flesh of the ‘blackened’.