Théâtres de la mémoire

Séminaire

Operative imaginaries and The Public Secret

The paradigm of the operative image has been recently popularized by film and media scholars seeking for ways to theorize an expanding assemblage of images that traverse the logic of the visual. For film and media studies, operativity was a way to broach new visual regimes, relaying image technologies, whose production, application and circulation traversed the traditional location of the image as art or entertainment. Thermal vision, aerial images, ultrasound, algorithmic media, all proposed a whole new encounter with the world through a techno-scientific, purpose-oriented perspectives. In addition, broadly understood as images that act, or participate in an operation, such definition condensed logistical and epistemic aspects to the surface of the image. With that, the paradigm of operativity helped tracking processes of automation and with them the shifting division of labor and sentient capacities between the human and technological interface.

In this talk, I would like to take this conception one step further and probe the relationship between technology, knowledge, and sanctioned or unsanctioned acts. Focusing on military optics, state violence and public consensus, this talk is prompted by two lines of investigation. First, what is an operation and can it be contained by an image? Second, what kind of knowledge and evidence regimes operation-as-an-image facilitate? Operative images are socio-technological assemblages, determined not just by their technological design, but the political imaginaries that drive them. Against the backdrop a long-lasting understanding of images at the service of liberal democracy’s notion of transparency, operative images will be explored here as a dialectical site of secrecy, coverage and denial.

Laliv Melamed is a professor of Digital Film Cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She specializes in non-fiction film and media, emerging media, and questions of governance, affect, violence and their mediation in the context of Israel-Palestine. She is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023). Other publications appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, NECSUS, Discourse, World Records, Social Text and Millennium Film Journal among others. Melamed is also the editor of a recent special issue on Intimacies of Scale for the journal Feminist Media Histories (together with Tess Takahashi and Jennifer Schnepf) and of the anthology Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory (together with Philipp Dominik Keidl, Vinzenz Hediger and Antonio Somaini). Her current book project, tentatively titled Optics of Opacity: Operative Media and the Public Secret, draws on the paradigm of the operative image in studying military optics and their cultural imaginaries of security and secrecy and complicity.

Les doctorants non parisiens, qui voudraient assister au séminaire à distance peuvent demander un lien en écrivant au moins 24h à l’avance à : marguerite.vappereau@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

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