New POBICS Seminary: Guy Debord and Society of the Spectacle

Our next and last seminary for this year will be about the most popular theory of Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle.

We will close our cycle of seminaries with this lecture because we think it could be an important contribution for our recent image analysis. In this sense, we could compare and counterpouse our classical authors used to analyse images (Deleuze, Gillian Rose...) with an author with another interesting and important theory related with images and society in general.

For everyone who don't know Debord's work, we will post the report about our seminary when we hold it. But meanwhile, you can read a little bio about him and his book, extracted from Wikipedia:

"Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

The seminary will be hold on June 15th at 12:00 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), in the Social Psychology Department (Martín Baró's room). The entrance es free and open for everyone. 

Photo Credit: Randy Lemoine

Ebola, images and DA analysis. Our last report

Seizing we are in Easter, we want to offer the report about our last seminary. In this case, wefor our research: a master' tesis about ebola, images and Discourse Analysis. Here you go:

discussed about a very interesting topic

Public health has become into a national security matter: what to do with the first one, now has to do with the latter.

"Viral forest": the monster tree from Africa that sends us occasionally diseases from animals (monkeys, bats, etc ...).

Global Health should move towards a system of global surveillance. (it remind us to Caduff): Each failed epidemic does not mean you have to rethink the parameters from which we think, but it means we have to improve these systems.

Distinction between: 1) Global health as development and 2) Global Health as a global health security. 

What do we mean by global? In Global Health, biopolitics and geopolitics come together. The conception we manage is important in order to understand what is exactly our topic.

From what mediations occurs the shift between the local to the global? Ebola is described 1) in different scales (viral, viral forest, forest-city relationship, etc ...) 2) how we move from one scale to another, and 3) by or from what translations this is possible.

In ANT, the global sense only is conceptualized by operators that upgrade or "enact" the global in a concrete regime and in a concrete sense. Ebola, for example, is a way to enact global, through public agencies, private sector, philanthropic organizations, academic institutions, health institutions, etc.

An effective response would require ebola "Staff, Stuff, Space and Systems". Interesting sentence.

Global health does not look (or at least not today) humanitarian aid, but the security. (interesting idea for a paper); or a derivative: in the first part of the 2015 Global Health, safety was sought, to make investments, but now it is looking for safety within, by the threat of contagion we shift to a global security, and any more for a Global Health.

Another interesting concept appeared in this document is the "Biological turn".

Finally, the name of the master' dissertation was: Ebola Exceptionalism: On the Intersecting Political and Health Geographies of the 2014-2015, and was written by Margaret M. Wilson.

Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey

New paper in process: Ebola and images

After our last paper delivery last december, we have start another project in order to write a new paper, titled: "Ebola, experts and population.  A graphic study about the Spanish case". Although it is still a draft paper, we want to share with you some abstract ideas in order to discuss them:

"Two years ago, ebola outbreak appeared as a real threat to Europe due to its closeness to Africa (and particularly in Spain with the nurse-infection controversy), the place where ebola is endemic. In that moment, it emerged several information (news on TV, newspapers, Internet, European Governments…) with a common and “invisible” element: images surrounding this virus. In this paper, we aim to analyse the role that these images performed on the enactment of ebola pandemics. We set out these images are a new kind of scenario in which the biological and legal expertise are undifferentiated, but with which lay people is affected. In order to unfold our arguments, we will show some samples about our study case, based on a) focus groups with lay-people, and b) images gathered and analysed from diverse ebola-related material."

As always, when the paper is finished, we will upload to academia.edu, so you will check it deeply. Until then, we want your discussions about this first ideas!

Photo Credit: CDC Global

1st Seminary about Images: A first approach

Yesterday, POBICS held the first meeting about some image's papers and books. It was a first approach because next week we will hold another gathering in order to carry out a deeply discussion. 

In this first meeting, we several extracts from three books: 1) "De la Investigación Audiovisual", by M. Jesús Buxó; 2) "Compendio de Fotografía para Uso de Sociólogos", by Sylvain Maresca and Michaël Meyer; and 3) "La Antropología Visual", by Ana Martínez Pérez. 

We made a joint reading about the threebooks, highlighting some keypoints:

-Images as scenario

-Images as a "affective" action, and not a comunication function.

-Images and mediation (here and here) concept in ANT.

-Images and ebola.

Comments and ideas were intermingled for all the questions, so we offer a joint remark about the seminary:

We can't consider images within the classical Jakobson theory. Indeed, images have its own meaning without textual or discursive process. As Deleuze says, we are affected by images, and they "enter" (or cofunction) with our personal universe of meanings. We capture some ideas and we translate it from a indistincton zone (similar to the Agamben conception but upgraded with our own meaning). This indistincton is shaped by the image and us, and from it emerges a new knowledge or affection. And that is the scenario idea we manage.

In this sense, images are not a classical (inter)mediator quasi-objects, but a more complex issue. To think images as a ubiquitous stuff that are connected with some other elements in concrete moments is not enough. However, we can say that a image was a mediator after we analyse them, that is, in a second moment (and not previously). Then, an ebola image has acted as mediator if we can describe and go over the network that enacts (or "make sense") to that ebola image; but not before it occurs.

Photo Credit: lettawren

Francisco Tirado's Seminary at CEHIC - UAB: POBICS, Pandemics, Scenarios, Early Warning-Systems and Images

As we were announcing this weekend, here is the recording about our seminary at the CEHIC, presenting our research group, our inquiries, and our research. There are two parts, and in the next post, we will publish the public questions made by the assistants:

(Note: video is in Spanish and probably you must turn up the volume).

Part I:

Part II:

 

Video Credit: POBICS Staff.

Summary of our Deleuze reading: Cinema I

Yesterday, we held a new seminary where we had the chance to read the first book by Deleuze about images. Here you can read a brief summary about our meeting:

Bergson thesis:

The film really does not represent the movement. It would not exactly reflect or capture the real movement, but creates the movement-image. It is a way of reinventing the movement itself (Chinese pictures are first but they are different).

(P. 90) ancient philosophy: the film exists only when it is equidistant from images (any kind of images). The modern cinema invented the frame: always the same images, one after another, without priority, preference or distinction between them.

The moment is a motionless cutting movement.

The movement is a mobile cutting of length.

At the duration there is a whole, and the duration is also a transformation. The movement, which we usually consider translation, is transforming everything, affects everything, and it has nothing to do with the space (the tiger when it moves and eats zebra, then there es one zebra less, and this changes the whole result of the forest).

What is a picture-motion?

Bergson called images to what in philosophy is called phenomenon: the image is what appears, is the phenomenon, the idea.

The subject wants to know the noumenon that can never be known. The phenomenon is the encounter between the subject and the noumenon. The film brings a new conception of the image: the picture-motion.

The motion-picture is the main brick with which it is mounted or built the rest, is the atom. These bricks are expanding, in constantly movement, making a gap. Each frame, each image, has movement, and this establishes relationships with previous and the later frames and frames. That is the essence and the novelty of cinema: we hold the movement in a image.

There are three levels of analysis or elements:

-Framing: Framing is to build an artificially closed system, a system of things artificially closed.

-Plane: The plane is made determining the relative movement between the objects that have been determined by the frame. The plane is inseparable from the movement of the camera, and then what we have is a permanent sequence of shots.

-Assembly: The assembly is the way in which the relative movement is composed (a plane), and gives meaning to everything else.

There are types of motion-picture, and besides, this is different from the memory-image:

-Perception-image: is the image that reaches the indeterminacy center (IC).

-Affection-image: it is what is installed in the indeterminacy center.

-Action-image: it is what comes out of the indeterminacy center.

The indeterminacy center (in principle) is the brain, this introduces a mismatch between an action and a reaction. If we had no brain, everything would be directly action-reaction-action-reaction, constantly.

The image is displayed. What appears is the phenomenon. What appears is moving.

The brain is an interval, makes a change. The image, when it abuts on an IC becomes a affection-image, and it subtracts something (perception-image - something). In the sense that I can perceive something, I can catch something, I stick with it, the arrest occurs, (the theft of something). If that something would not been subtracted, all will pierce me without leaving a trace in me. And it not only passes by me but it affects me and also produces feelings in me (affect me).

The same imbalance is what generates the affection, then this is what makes possible the action-image.

Perception-image:

Faciality, pure condition. We must eliminate communication, the exacerbated expression of emotion. (Whether or not a face, a close up of a watch is also faciality).

Affection-image:

The image-affection is the foreground image, the face. The face is the foreground. The foreground does not have to be a face. The affection causes only within the whole, but in isolation, in the foreground isolated (in a frame for example), it does not cause affection.

Affection is a common potential to two opposites (the scary-the grounding) or a common quality (the vampire and his victim)

Action-image:

What comes out is different. The curve is the angle that allows us to what comes out would different. What comes out has a difference with what came in (diffraction of light, the angle at which the light enters the water, it makes what comes out (the rainbow) is different from what came in (the white light of al lightning). This concept is similar to the "clinamen" concept by Michel Serres.

Almost all the current cinema is action-image.

The movement-image reaches a limit where it overflows into something new: the optical-noise image (together with music): suddenly, there are two planes, image and another plane that is the sound, and this throws the image to another dimension. The movement-image is the motion, and time is the image-volume. Both are consubstantial, and it occurs when we reach the pure affection.

There are other kind of images:

-Time-images.

-Memory-images.

-Remembrance-images.

Photo Credit: By ourselves, part of the POBICS staff.

New cycle of readings by POBICS!

Yesterday in our last meeting, we set a new cycle of readings for this spring at the success of our cycle of seminaries about Deleuze. Concretely, we have to split the cycle in 3 courses. They will be every week at Wednesday, 15:00 at the Martín Baró Classroom (Department of Social Psychology, Autonomous University of Barcelona), but there are some exceptions (like the first meeting in the next week, that will be Monday and not Wednesday, at 15:00). The courses are:

a) A biopopolitical review beyond Foucault: Empire, Homo Sacer and Ethopolitics.

b) Semiotics of the image: Visual Methodologies, and Cinema I & II.

c) Compilation about Gabriel Tarde. 

As we have said, the seminaries will begin next Monday with the reading of Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. You can consult the whole list here:

NEW WAYS OF BIOPOLITICS

- April 13th: Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

- April 22th: Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben

- May 6th: Policies of life. Biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the XXI century by Nikolas Rose

 

REGIMES OF IMAGES IN CONTEMPORARY

- May 13th: Visual Methodologies by Gillian Rose

- May 20th: Cinema I. Bergson and images by Gilles Deleuze

- May 25th: Cinema II. Signs of movement and time by Gilles Deleuze

THE END OF THE SOCIAL. GABRIEL EVENING READING

- June 3th: Monadology and sociology by Gabriel Tarde

- June 10th: Beliefs, desires, societies  byGabriel Tarde

- June 17th: The social laws by Gabriel Tarde

All the sessions are opened and are free. You can come wherever you want and only to those you are interested (if you cannot come to the complete cycle). You can invite and tell everyone that could be interested.

If you need more information, contact with us in this email:

portraitsbioscontemporary@gmail.com 

Thank you so much!

Photo Credit: By ourself, one of our last meetings.

About maps

As I pointed out in the last post, movement is a key concept in the new regime of (bio)politics, becoming a central issue of what we conceive as cinepolitics. Thus, the topic of today is about one source of information understudied yet in social sciences: maps.

We are studying maps as a technology-as-mediator as Latour says, that is, we conceive maps as an element inside of a net where the actant (in this case, biosurveillance), is constituted. We are currently managing several theories in order to analyse maps, as the Panorama Concept by Latour, or the difference between observation andsurveillance that Michel Serres proposes. We are also trying to apply the Deleuzian concept of diagram in order to explain how maps works as an element that folds scales between a very local event and a global issue, deterritorializing and reterritorializing the cinepolitics entanglement and completing the management process in a total-surveillance-world. We will write about an interesting topic soon, called Global Assemblages.

However, what kind of maps and why this kind of illustrations? Inside Actor-Network Theory there is a large tradition of social studies of sciences where images, maps and graphics have an important role as an immutable mobile, that is, as a key form to translate the knowledge created in a laboratory to expand it outside and with the purpose of connecting with other laboratories, sources of fund, citizenships, power positions, etc. This kind of information are very important in ethnographical studies as Latour or Law as we can read in the classic study of how a scientist works in order to achieve a graphic where is gathered the whole knowledge, practises and others elements that shape a heart’ rat performance.

Hence, we have collected several CDC and WHO maps in order to study infectious vectors movement (ebolavirus, N1H1, AIDS, SARS…). I cannot advance much conclusions, but what we are inquiring is a shift in the form as biosurveillance works from this spotlight in the movement at the beginning of XXI century.

References:

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. New York: Oxford University Press.

Serres, M. (2008). The Five Senses. London: Continuum. 

Tirado, F. (2008). Michel Foucault: biopolítica e intuición de la cinepolítica. Congress: Aportes de Michel Foucault al pensamiento contemporáneo. Barcelona.

Photo Credit: Flickr user, Ann Martin.