REVIEWS

Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen

Sternberg Press: Berlin 2012, 12, paperback
198 pp, 978 1 934105 82 5

Tony Wood

RESERVE ARMIES OF THE IMAGINATION

One of the most striking features of the recent wave of global protests,
from Athens to Occupy, Tahrir Square to Taksim, has been the profusion of
images and slogans they have generated, a creative ferment that has fired
radical imaginations in one country after another. Yet the successes that
many of these movements have achieved in the realm of discoursethe
concept of the 99 per cent, for example, is now common currencyfor the
moment far outstrip any actual political gains. There are several possible
explanations for this disparity: the sheer weight of elite power and privilege,
the absence of fully worked-out programmes for radical change, combina-
tions of co-optation and repression. But is it possible that the gap between
the two forms of representationpolitical on the one hand, cultural on the
otheris a constitutive feature of contemporary reality? And that the explo-
sion of communication enabled by new technologies and social media, as
well as bringing ever more people onto the political stage, is simultaneously
a mechanism for the exclusion of millions of others? According to the art
critic and film-maker Hito Steyerl, the link between political and cultural
representation, never straightforward, has become profoundly unstable in
the image-saturated neoliberal era; we live in an age of unrepresentable
people and an overpopulation of images, in which a growing number of
unmoored and floating images corresponds to a growing number of dis
enfranchised, invisible or even disappeared or missing people.

136 new left review 82 july aug 2013

 wood: Steyerl 137

The observation is characteristic of Steyerls critical writings, which

address the politics of the image from a variety of acute angles. Born in

review
Munich in 1966 to a JapaneseGerman couple, Steyerl grew up in Bavaria
and trained initially as a filmmaker. In the late 1980s she went to study
cinematography at the Japanese Academy of Visual Arts, where she was
taught by two of the countrys leading directors in Imamura Shohei and
Hara Kazuo. In the 1990s she worked on featuresshe was for a time assis-
tant director to Wim Wendersand then, back in film school at Munichs
hff, made several documentaries. Her 1998 film Die leere Mitte (The Empty
Centre) is a multi-layered historical exploration of the changing physiog-
nomy of Berlin, focusing on Potsdamer Platzs transformations from
symbolic heart of the Second and Third Reichs to Cold War no-mans land
to gleaming corporate enclave; Steyerl also weaves into the film reflections
on Germanys colonial past and the tensions traversing its present, notably
those between organized labour and migrant workers. The films she has
made since the turn of the century are perhaps best known from art-world
contexts: works such as November (2004), Lovely Andrea (2007) and After the
Crash (2009) have notably featured in the biennials and festivals that consti-
tute the globalized art circuitManifesta, Documenta, Shanghai, Gwangju,
and so on. At the same time, Steyerl has combined her documentary prac-
tice with critical writing, scholarship and teaching: in 2003 she completed
a doctorate on relations between documentary film and art, subsequently
published as Die Farbe der Wahrheit (The Colour of Truth, 2008), and is cur-
rently based at Berlins Universitt der Knste.
The Wretched of the Screen comprises eleven essays, the bulk of them
published between 2009 and 2012 in the New York-based art monthly e-flux
journal, though many originated as lectures given in English in one or other
art venue. In several cases they are companion-pieces to Steyerls films. It
is interesting to speculate on the points of overlap between her work in the
different media: both essays and films share, for example, a use of montage
techniquesconceptual leaps, jump cutsthough arguments and formula-
tions are of necessity made more concrete in the prose. Her writing style is at
once free-ranging and lapidary, combining an engaging humourone piece
not included in the collection is titled Can the Subaltern Speak German?
with thought-provoking metaphors and logical turns. Her modus operandi
often involves taking a deadpan, seemingly literal-minded stance on a given
concept or question in order to shed light on its contradictions, before then
making an unexpected dialectical reversal. The presiding theoretical spir-
its in the book are Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer, though references are
more often drawn eclectically from film, art and popular cultureJ. M. W.
Turner, David Bowie, Jean-Luc Godard, among many others. The main
focus of discussion is always resolutely contemporary, however: Steyerl is
 138 nlr 82

interested above all in exploring the combined impacts of digital technolo-

gies and intensifying class war from above on a number of realms, from
review

cinema and the museum to ideas of representation, from the circulation of

images to questions of subjectivity and political agency.
The opening essay, In Free Fall, explores the implications of an appar-
ent shift in visual perspective, from the linear to the vertical view. Steyerl
moves from the development of vanishing points in Renaissance painting
to their destabilization in the 19th century; the swirling chaos of Turners
Slave Ship represents the beginnings of a process that was then radicalized
in the 20th century by developments in cinema, modernist painting and sci-
ence, as montage, cubism and relativity helped to further dismantle linear
perspective. The advent of flight had meanwhile produced the aerial view,
which has proliferated since the arrival of satellites and digital imaging; in
the panoptic present of Google Earth and the like, we inhabit a visual culture
saturated by military and entertainment images views from above. Where
linear perspective posited both a stable horizon and a viewing subject located
within the landscape, the birds-eye view establishes an imaginary floating
observer and an imaginary stable ground. Thus, according to Steyerl, the
former distinction between object and subject is exacerbated and turned
into the one-way gaze of superiors onto inferiorswhich she describes as a
perfect metonymy for a more general verticalization of class relations. This
vertiginous shift coincides with a condition of disorientation, of groundless-
ness. But at this point Steyerl argues that what needs to be overcome is the
notion that a stable ground is necessary in the first place; following Adornos
lead in Negative Dialecticscognition that is to bear fruit will throw itself to
the objects fond perdushe holds that groundlessness should be seen not
as dislocation but as free fall, a condition of indeterminacy and openness to
be embraced. In the realm of cultural production, the possibilities created
by the new technologies that have been integral to the verticalized visual
regimethe multiple perspectives of 3-D animation or multi-channel instal-
lations, the twisting of cinematic space and time made possible by digital
montagesuggest that what seemed like a helpless tumble into an abyss
actually turns out to be a representational freedom.
Although Steyerls arguments in some cases unfold at a relatively
abstract level, several of the essays address more directly the character
of the art world itself, and its role in beautifying neoliberal capitalism.
Contemporary art feeds on the crumbs of a massive and widespread redis-
tribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, Steyerl writes, adding that
it lends primordial accumulation a whiff of post-conceptual razzmatazz.
Art also mirrors the forms of present-day capitalism itself: on the one hand
the figure of the artist offers a flattering model for autocrats and financier-
patronsunpredictable, unaccountable, brilliant, mercurialwhile on the
 wood: Steyerl 139

other, the production of art depends on increasing amounts of precarious

labour. In Steyerls view, unpaid interns and part-timers form a reserve

review
army of imagination that makes the mega-shows and Guggenheims of
the worlds oligarchies possible. Exploitation within the art world tends to
remain invisible in the art that is produced, however; even in political art,
Steyerl observes, politics is always happening elsewhere.
In other texts included here, Steyerl discusses the implications of changes
in the forms of cinematic production. One consequence of the rampant com-
mercialization of film distribution has been a migration of avant-garde films
into the art sphere, to be exhibited in museums and galleries. This in turn
has affected the kind of audience and attention these works secure; for as
Steyerl observes, the vastly expanded presence of film and video in art spaces
often means that no single viewer could possibly watch all the material in
a given showat Documenta 11, for example, all the film pieces included
could be viewed in full only if the night guards and various spectators
worked together in shifts. The distended duration of such time-based art
has two notable consequences, Steyerl suggests. Firstly, it precludes shared
experience on the part of the audience, dissolving the common frame of
reference that helps constitute a public; the museum is not a public sphere,
but rather places its consistent lack on display. Second, it produces a frag-
mentation of the audience on a deeper level: to multiply cinematic duration
means to blow apart the vantage point of sovereign judgement. Since the
single spectators view is inadequate even to the task of taking in this abun-
dance of visual material, Steyerl argues that cinema inside the museum
calls for a multiple gaze . . . incomplete but in process, distracted and singu-
lar, but which can be edited into various sequences and combinations. As
with the dismantling of linear perspective, she finds creative possibilities in
the splintering of the film spectator: the disappearance of the self-deluded
sovereign calls for forms of editing that would interpellate what she terms a
missing, multiple subject.
Montage is another recurrent motif in Wretched of the Screen. In an essay
titled The Articulation of Protest, Steyerl explores the political implications
of different approaches to film editing, through a comparison of a 1999
tv documentary on the Seattle wto protests and Godard and Anne-Marie
Mivilles Ici et ailleurs. The former was conceived as counter-information,
and presents images of the protests in line with the standard formulae of
mainstream tv production, but with the political valences reversed. The
range of speakers who appear on screen are shot in similar fashion; the dif-
ferent statements are thus transformed into a chain of formal equivalencies,
simply adding their demands together into a single voice of the people. Ici et
ailleurs, by contrast, thoroughly problematizes such additive methods. Made
in 1976, it is a radical self-critique of footage shot by Godard and Jean-Pierre
 140 nlr 82

Gorin in a plo camp in 1970, intended for a propaganda film to be called

Until Victory. A man and a woman discuss the film fragmentsscenes of
review

combat training, exercises, plo agitationand reflect on what they do not

show, the contradictions they omit or obscure. The additive and of the mon-
tage is far from innocent and unproblematic, Steyerl argues: What if the
and should really be or, because or even instead of? She warns against any
seamless integration of demands, posing a question that has only become
more timely since she wrote the text in 2002: What are the prospects for
the articulation of a protest movement based on the model of an andas
though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal?
The question of representationwhether political or aesthetic, or an
intertwining of the twois central to most of the essays in Wretched of the
Screen. Its Fanonian title derives from an essay on poor images, a term
Steyerl applies to low-resolution image files that circulate in abundance
in the virtual realm: bad, illicit copies, these jpegs or avis constitute a
lumpen proletariat in the class society of imagesin contrast to the cin-
ematic sheen of high-quality commercial imagery. The distinction might
at first seem to map onto earlier calls for a Third Cinema that would reject
the reactionary perfection of bourgeois production. But Steyerl is careful
to note the ambiguities of poor images today, which offer a platform both
for creativity and for incredible amounts of porn and paranoia, at once
countering the fetish value of high resolution and demonstrating a capac-
ity for seamless integration into an information capitalism thriving on
compressed attention spans.
One partial way out of this contradiction, for Steyerl, seems to lie in an
insistence on looking at images both as representations and as material
objects. Images, too, are produced by social, political and economic rela-
tions; they are fragments of the real world. This applies equally to the digital
image, which bears the bruises of its crashes [sic] with politics and violence.
In some cases the image is not so much damaged as unresolvedpuzzling
and inconclusive because of neglect or political denial, because of a lack
of technology or funding, or because of hasty and incomplete recordings.
The enforced low resolution of certain images relative to others becomes a
question of justice; indeed, Steyerls insistence on the thingness of images
is in part motivated by a desire to make them bear witness even in their
mute, indeterminate state. In the essay Missing People, she touches once
more on the subject of her film November: the fate of her friend Andrea
Wolf, a leftist militant who joined the pkk and died in combat in south
eastern Turkey in 1998. Her remains supposedly lie in a mass grave, but no
excavation or investigation has ever taken place; bones that would be highly
scrutinized official evidence in some places are abject debris elsewhere, an
anonymous poor image.
 wood: Steyerl 141

But the emphasis on thingness also appears to be a possible alterna-

tive, for Steyerl, to the dilemmas of subjecthood. Struggles for emancipation

review
have often aimed at the establishment of autonomous, sovereign subjects,
but for Steyerl this comes laden with contradictions: though the position of
the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is one of being subjected
to power relations. Why not, she suggests, instead identify with the object?
What she intends by this is not a relapse into passivity, but an identification
with the potential agency of the object, as a fossil in which a constellation
of forces is petrified; activating the thing would involve unfreezing those
forces, in a reimagined world in which objects would be liberated from their
status as commodities (she cites Rodchenkos famous exhortation: our
things in our hands must be equals, comrades). However, the revolutionary
energy behind Steyerls identification with the thing is shadowedif not
countermandedby a more melancholy moment of objecthood, revealed
by a sudden reversal of perspective: History, as Benjamin told us, is a pile
of rubble. Only we are not staring at it any longer from the point of view of
Benjamins shell-shocked angel. We are not the angel. We are the rubble.
Steyerls essays often pose deceptively simple questionsWhy not be
a thing?, What is the image of a protest movement?with far-reaching
implications. What questions might be asked in return? In some cases her
arguments rely on a metaphorical parallel that seems a little too direct, as in
the essay on Art as Occupation, which links the idea of occupation as time-
filling activity with notions of invasion and seizure, in order to discuss both
the forms of labour prevalent in the art world and the spreading aesthetici-
zation of life. But then Steyerls method and style rely on such conceptual
leaps, and some readers will step readily across gaps others may find too
wide. It might also be mistaken to respond to essays intended as thought-
experiments as if they were proposals or programmatic statements; yet The
Wretched of the Screen does prompt the question of what it would mean to
take Steyerl at her word. What would be the gainsconceptual, artistic,
politicalfrom identifying with the object, for example?
The notion of objects possessing a kind of agency has received much
attention in the art world recentlyin part a reflection of the spreading influ-
ence of Bruno Latours work, including actornetwork theory. In Steyerls
hands, these concerns produce, as noted above, an uneasy aporia: on the one
hand the liberatory promise of a revolution spanning the worlds of political
subjects and objects; on the other, a bleak refraction of Benjamins thesis on
the philosophy of history. The thought that we might be the rubble implies
that history will advance without us, protagonized by other subjects; we
would be left in the position of Kafka, who maintained that there was plenty
of hopebut not for us. Would this seeming abandonment of agency really
be desirable? Steyerl might counter that the very phenomenon of subjective
 142 nlr 82

agency is beset with contradictions; the purpose of identifying with and

activating the thing was to skirt them. But the appeal to the objects inert
review

potential arguably relies on a reification of the subjectobject split, whereas

it would surely make more sense to retain a sense of the mutually interwo-
ven, fundamentally mediated character of both; as Adorno put it in a late
essay On Subject and Object, the difference between subject and object
slices through subject as well as through object. The goal might then be not
so much to identify with the object, to become the rubble of history, as to
gain a demystified, non-alienated knowledge of its differentiation from the
subject. Adorno again: Knowledge of the object is brought closer by the act
of the subject rending the veil it weaves about the object. It can do this only
when, passive, without anxiety, it entrusts itself to its own experience.
Something like this paradoxical gesture of trust underlies Steyerls con-
clusion, in the essay In Free Fall, that we should accept the condition of
groundlessness: that we should welcome a fall towards objects without res-
ervation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original
stability and sparks the sudden shocks of the open. If Steyerls explorations
of the contemporary image world can seem to be describing a series of
traps or impasses, she is also insistently inventive in her attempts to find
exits from them. Elsewhere in the book she evokes the possibility of a mass
withdrawal from representation, as people increasingly seek to evade the
eye of cameras, phones, surveillance devicesreversing Warhols dictum
in their desire to be invisible, if only for fifteen minutes. (Even fifteen
seconds would be great, she adds.) On this reading, the surfeit of digital
image-productionspam advertising being the most abundantis neither
the swarm of wish-fulfilment fantasies nor the tool of domination it is often
taken to be. Rather, it is a series of screens and masks behind which a walk-
out of the people from photographic and moving-image representation is
taking place; a negative monument of resistance to the given modes of
image-making. In an age dominated by spectacle, the gap between political
and cultural representation might then turn out not to be a lag, a deficit,
but rather an interval of freedom, in whichoff-screen, out of sight
possibilities for transformation might take shape undisturbed.