The Wretched of the Screen

by Hito Steyerl, Brian Kuan Wood (Illustrator), Liam Gillick (Illustrator)

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.

Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.

Genres: Art, Theory, Philosophy, Film, Nonfiction, Essays, Design

166 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2012

About the author

Hito Steyerl (sometimes spelled Štajerl) is a German filmmaker, visual artist, and author in the field of essayist documentary video. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a Ph.D in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

version 1.0

One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then - please, anybody - show me this real thing.

This stuff is so fresh it hurts. I am shocked and shaken and overstimulated. I've stumbled into someone else's too-real dream. It's so exciting that someone with the perceptiveness, sensitivity to language and willingness to look behind what's being pushed in front of us as Sara Ahmed is at work at the screenface of art and the biopolitics of disaster capitalism, determinedly seeing things differently. The conditions of crisis are taken as read. Franco 'Bifo' Beradi writes in the introduction

The year 1977 was a watershed: from the age of human evolution the world shifted to the age of de-evolution, or de-civilization. What had been built through labor and social solidarity began to be dissipated by a rapid and predatory process... in the second decade of C21, post-bougeois dilapidation took the final form of a financial black hole. Adrainage pump started to swallow and destroy the product of 200 years of industriousness and collective intelligence...

Indeed. But I'm finding it difficult to process my feelings about the positions Steyerl takes in relation to this situation.

I have repeatedly argued that one should not seek to escape alienation but on the contrary embrace it as well as the status of objectivity and objecthood that goes along with it

(I think I read a review of one of Roland Barthes' books recently that expressed astonishment at the profundity of his parenthetical remarks - Steyerl's most startling conclusions, including this one, are often found in her footnotes, like Einstein's E=mc^2) But what am I to make of this? Where do I begin my response? Well, as always I will have to begin from where I am. And I have a sneaking suspicion that Steyerl has described the terrain around me, white female disgruntled freelance worker, all too accurately...

I can't claim to have understood all this, no way, it went past too fast, like a ride. And when I read it again as I will have to, maybe in a year's time, it will be like taking the ride again; it can’t slow down for me.

But... as it flew past I saw this: colonialism was once horizontal. Steyerl eloquently elaborates the HORIZONtality of colonialism as expressed and enmeshed in the artistic tradition of linear perspective. Only now there are no edges to the colonial project, and the perspective has changed; now we have the strategy game, the CCTV god's eye view, we have 3D. Colonization as 3D surveillance. 'Vertical sovereignty' means power is stacked in layers, class war is waged from above. And the gaze (of this war) is outsourced to machines, it is disembodied. And we are all falling in this space, but there is no ground. Help! But Steyerl never panics, disconcertingly she keeps prodding me to... enjoy it, interact with it, find the possibilities for solidarity and freedom that might be hidden in it (And... this isn't wallowing in privilege is it? Existential nausea is privilege (escape it in housework). It's a more effective resistance. Nausea is immobilising after all. Liberal politics produces denial, worthless apologies and delusions of purity. Steyerl has the formidable courage of her frightening convictions. Here is the structure and here is my complicity. Now what am I going to do? Apologise?)

Work to occupation. Art as occupation. Steyerl pushes the two meanings of this word together, like a fertility therapist stimulating a ball of embryonic cells to divide. What will this concept grow into or give birth to? Well, gentrification and its role in the military industrial complex, for one thing? In fact, it looks like contemporary 'semiocapitalism' as envisioned and enversioned by collaborating art and its army of unalienated un(der)paid female strike workers, connects everything so comprehensively that its probably impossible to make a really preposterous connection, everything is permitted or just done anyway and however many times Steyerl makes me spit out my tea I end up conceding the point.

History, as [Walter] Benjamin told us, is a pile of rubble. Only we are not staring at it any longer from the point of view of Benjamin's shell-shocked angel. We are not the angel. We are the rubble. We are this pile of scrap

[Salma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got assigned a reading by Hito Steyerl every year of my undergrad - I’m glad I finally got to read a full collection. The essays that really stood out to me—not because they are necessarily better structured but because they align with my current interests—are “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” “In Defense of the Poor Image", and “Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy.” Since I first read it, I have not stopped thinking about the poor image whose substandard resolution is correlated to a vaster, lower-barrier distribution. These ideas on the circulation of poor images are very very relevant now. Thank you to my library for letting me renew this six times; maybe seven - they stopped counting, so did I.

[Joana Pestana · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are 3 mandatory essays in this reader on visual-digital literacy: "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective"; "In Defense of the Poor Image"; "The Spam of Earth: Withdrawal from Representation".

[Bookfreak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Συλλογή άρθρων με ποικιλία θεμάτων από την αναπαράσταση/εικόνα στη σύγχρονη ψηφιακή κοινωνία, το σπαμ και τη σημασία του, το θέμα των αγνοουμένων που βρίσκονται στο μεταίχμιο ζωής /θανάτου κα. Πολύ ενδιαφέρον και πυκνό, θέλει ξαναδιάβασμα.

[blanca rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

la hito steyerl es una crack que decir, hay algunos capítulos mas asequibles que otros(el de shrodinguer ni te lo leas vaya toston) pero muy bien una persona muy lista coherente que hace discursos teórico sobre el mundo digital sin ser una tecnofoba👏🏻👍🏻👏🏻👍🏻👏🏻👍🏻👏🏻👍🏻siempre con la imagen pobre te amo hito

[Eugenio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me encantó, una fusión de deep social con visual works

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic essays about art, media, biopolitics, cinema, representation and a lot more. These dense texts are not only beautifully written, but in their creative approaches seem very appropriate to the current hypercapitalist world, we live in.

[blank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hito, while largely escaping classification as artist or philosopher or activist, strikes me, especially in the case of The Wretched of the Screen as a philosopher of film. Such as the case, her work would be extraordinarily valuable for filmmakers looking to experimental film or gallery bound short film (or factory bound short film); essentially it is valuable for producing an object that resonates with the subjected. And this is precisely where I found the most insight in this collection of essays: Hito's essay "A Thing Like You and Me". This essay appears as a refreshing recalibration of subjection. She writes, and I paraphrase,

Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations. . . . But as the struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a different possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a change? . . . A desire to become this thing--in this case an image--is the upshot of the struggle over representation. Senses and things, abstraction and excitement, speculation and power, desire and matter actually converge within images.

I am deeply interesting in shifting the conversation from 'subjected subjective unrepresented' to 'objective represent', and explore the implications of such a change not only within the inner representation of the world but in the very interactions with the world, and between world-objects.

In the essay "Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy" Hito plays on Godard's (in)famous musing, "The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically." She affirms Godard,

Here is the bad news: political art routinely shies away from discussing [labor related and immediately present] matters. . . . the conditions of its own production and display remain pretty much unexplored. . . . If politics is thought of as the Other, happening somewhere else, always belonging to disenfranchised communities in whose name no one can speak, we end up missing what makes art intrinsically political nowadays: its function as a place for labor, conflict, and ... fun

It really does seem to be the case that the present generation is experiencing their political awakening, and we are finding ourselves without any figure or generation with which to mimic; it therefore becomes imperative that we stop looking elsewhere and realize that we are always, in fact, somewhere--and this somewhere is always political. Yet, this point has been shaped for some time and I’m not sure that post-democracy is the right word for it, why not just democracy? Rather, why bring democracy into it? It seems as if conforming to a shape in theory is obliged before conforming to a shape in actuality, which is exactly Hito’s point.

However, sometimes it really seemed that Hito was occupying two (or more) very different places throughout her production of these essays, there is a lot of room for critique or merely critical conversation about such essays as "Freedom from Everything: Freelances and Mercenaries" (it perhaps posits an invincible free subject with which to identify, apart from all objects, i.e. healthcare and imperative social securities/networks) and there is lots to discuss pertaining to "Missing People" and "The Spam of the Earth", two essays with very similar core ideas yet radically different ways of enchanting the reader into their spheres. The interesting thing about those essays is that they take each of two polar positions in respect to the absence of presence. In one form, the spam image, junky and non-representative, altered and filtered, is an event akin to a strike and thus properly absent. In the other, disappeared dissidents, dead and alive participants, unequivocal family members are products of fascistic determination and annihilation, the most regrettable of the absent.

From “Missing People”, “the twentieth century also perfected observation as a method of killing. Measurement and identification became tools of murder.” I think that this is a direct reference to her conception of Einstein as the purveyor of the continuance of the Cold War. However, she lists such examples as “Phrenology. statistics. Medical experimentation. Economies of death.” It is compelling material, in the sense that it provides a reader with broad fields of study and attenuates them as death machines. And I can’t argue with her there—this Goodreads review is a death machine if one can understand that we are both “dying” as it occurs. I relish her reflections on remains as things, never to be fully apprehended, "The indeterminacy of remains universalizes family relations. They rip the order of family and belonging wide open."

From “The Spam of the Earth”, “Image spam is addressed to people who do not look like those in the ads . . . [rather to] People who might open their in-boxes every day waiting for a miracle, or just a tiny sign, a rainbow at the other end of permanent crisis and hardship . . . it speaks to them.” And yet, “they seem to physically vanish . . . Thus image spam becomes an involuntary record of a subtle strike, a walkout of the people from photographic and moving-image representation.” As if leftist guerrillas voluntarily and actively walked out of the picture into unmarked mass graves, the oppressed masses are actively in exodus from representation. It seems that the silver lining provided for, the exchange of the given frame of representation for some other frame is at the least not being defended on its own grounds. The positivity is somewhere implicitly resting between the mass grave site and Facebook, but never explicitly reflected upon.

Perhaps, these incongruous conclusions are the product of being “In Free Fall”, but I really am failing to see any reason to hold two attitudes towards annihilation: one vaguely positive and the other negative. I’m not sure what such mysticism(?), schizophrenia(?), antirealism(?) will get us—besides perhaps that aporetic film that we agreed to salivate about. It may be really important to gather that Heidegger’s groundless ground was just that, a ground.

At bottom, I do not think Hito delivers these essays in the hopeful anticipation of yes-saying and cheerful, or tearful, camaraderie. I think readers and creators need to conceptualize their own works and must necessarily remain open to the interdisciplinary collaborations that can make such projects feasible.

[Julia Hannafin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt a similar way reading Hito's writing to how I felt reading Clarice Lispector -- like the sentences aren't two-dimensional but three, that you step halfway into an idea or a phrase before having to turn around and re-orient yourself. Her words aren't flat on the paper and neither are her ideas; they're rooms into which you step, graph-paper sculptures of space and time and constructs that might fly as invisible if you don't look closely enough. Hito's writing makes me see the invisible constraints around art and culture and human behavior that much of the art world (and western society) has pretended do not exist.

[Fany · Rating 4 out of 5]

No es solo que la mejor crítica de la imagen se haga desde la izquierda, sino que es imposible pensar una crítica del capitalismo sin pensar en la imagen.

[Isa]

“In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools for representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.” Pg. 168

[Logan Yuhas · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that changes your life, especially the art as occupation chapter. Will come back for sure. I want to take her classes at UdK

[Anthropo cackia · Rating 5 out of 5]

(την ελληνική έκδοση "Της οθόνης οι κολασμένες", από εκδόσεις Τοποβόρος)

μου εξερράγη ο εγκέφαλος 3-4 φορές

πολύ πυκνό, από τη μία φορές ένιωθα ότι θέλω περισσότερη ανάλυση κάπως
ίσως για να με καθησυχάσει και να βεβαιωθώ ότι κατάλαβα σωστά
αλλά δεν εξηγεί περαιτέρω, αντίθετα με ό,τι κατάλαβες σε πιάνει απ'τα μούτρα και σε πάει στο επόμενο μάιντμπλόινγκ πόιντ
ίσως όμως ακριβώς γι αυτό να με κράτησε τόσο στιμιουλέητιντ

σίγουρα θα ανατρέχω ξανά σε κεφάλαια του ανά διαστήματα

[Montse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parla de temes molt interessants de la societat contemporània, fent connexions amb altres àmbits (cinema, economia, museus, física quàntica...), tot i que a vegades de forma molt enrevessada. En alguns capítols/assajos m'ha costat força seguir el fil (segurament, per falta de coneixaments).

[Ølivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

she is so brilliant, couldn't have written my bfa thesis without her http://thej2.com/o/olivia_fox_stateme...

[Forino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a minecraft redstone computer

[Elías Casella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mucho humo, esperaba más.

[Ric]

i laughed really hard, then cried

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like most of Hito Steyerl's works, whether it comes in the form of essays, video installation or performance lecture. The Wretched of the Screen is perhaps one of the references that I will be revisited again and again to gain a better critical understanding of image and contemporaneity. In this collection of her essays, Steyerl brilliantly pointed out the relationship between an image and immortality that I think important to discussed in the age what she called 'post-production.' Steyerl points out an interesting fact on the phenomena of computational images. Computational images as a post-representation strategy for capitalist megastructure. Her arguments on images and what she called Circulationism are always fascinating to me, however, not all of these essays particularly strike my interest—some aspect, like the social reproduction in the art world and her critics of the connection between art infrastructure and military complex, is striking to read.

At some point, I was intrigued by her proposition in quoting Boris Arvatov's Socialist Object; 'that the object should be liberated from the enslavement of its status as capitalist commodity. Things should no longer remain passive, uncreative and dead, but should be free to participate actively in the transformation of everyday reality.' I found this argument is helping me to understand Steyerl's views on the politics of the image—and her theory of the image is wittier compare to others philosophical cinema or visual study theory. Fully recommended for anyone who is interesting in the theory of image circulation and representation as well as the role of the art in the contemporary age.

[Nate Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like several other comments have stated, “In Defense of the Poor Image” and “The Spam of Earth” are the definitive takeaways. I’ll be reflecting on this collection of essays for a long time. As a reader relatively new to philosophies surrounding images previous readings in the realm of architecture theory were very complimentary, namely phenomenologists like juhani Pollasmaa and other theorists like Foucault and Keller Easterling.

Steyerl’s discussion of post-production really blew my perception of architectural rendering wide open. Untapped social classes of images influence much of the discussions around the “Money-Shot” and the redundant production of conceptual drawings, diagrams and images. There’s a paternalistic approach to the communication with the client that the author really taps into; as the images communicate with us as much as an architect communicates to their employer(though the debate of architecture as a service rather than an artistic medium changes this communication greatly). Even current innovations in crypto-currencies, NFT’s, and blockchain introduce even more classes of images, more streams of communication and more “spam” for Steyerl to observe.

As a designer and artist I’ll surely have a lot to recollect on, and hope to come back to these essays again!

[Aylin Gökmen]

“Imagine somebody from the past with a beret
asking you, ‘Comrade, what is your visual bond
today?’ You might answer: it is this link to the present.
Now!
The poor image embodies the afterlife of
many former masterpieces of cinema and video art.
It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise
that cinema seems to have once been. After being
kicked out of the protected and often protectionist
arena of national culture, discarded from commer-
cial circulation, these works have become travelers
in a digital no-man’s-land, constantly shifting their
resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes
even losing names and credits along the way.
Now many of these works are back—as poor
images, | admit. One could of course argue that this
is not the real thing, but then—please, anybody—
show me this real thing.
The poor image is no longer about the real
thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its
own real conditions of existence: about swarm
circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible
temporalities. It is about defiance and appropria-
tion just as it is about conformism and exploitation.
In short: it is about reality.” (44)

[Hannah Baklien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Läst i bokens klubb jan/feb 24!

Utmanar hjärnan!!! Mindblown av vissa tankar och förstår 0 av andra. Filosofi, politik o konst. Arbetsförhållanden o kvantfysik. Övervakning, klass o kapitalism.

Kommer tänka länge på: lågupplöst existerar inte i analogt eller fysiskt material, utan bara i den digitala världen.

”Jump cut to Cobra helicopters hovering over mass graves, zebra wipe to shopping malls, mosaic to spam filters, SIM cards, nomad weavers; spiral effect to border detention, child care, and digital exhaustion.”

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

In contrast to many of the other philosophical essays I have read, those in this volume were written in a refreshingly accessible manner without a lot of overly convoluted fluff thrown in. However, not all of them struck me as making particularly profound arguments. One in particular on quantum superposition as a metaphor was very memorable, and another on image spam was quite interesting as well, but the rest didn't do as much for me. Video artists may get more mileage out of some of the others, though.

[César Terrazas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un libro que no supe apreciar y que leí por compromiso. No era para mí en el momento en que lo confronté. Si bien es cierto que esta obra me dio pie para reflexionar sobre el arte, las imágenes y lo que representan, no sentí un punto claro que resonara en mis circunstancias. El estilo de Hito, que muchas veces combina conceptos y distintas definiciones de un sola palabra, me pareció que no aterrizaba a tesis sólidas.

[Celluloid Doll · Rating 5 out of 5]

its great, still pertinent if a little outdated in certain parts but that's just the risk you run talking about such constantly evolving topics as culture and technology. I found the ideas of cultural and political instability leading to a fixation on the image as a pretty telling precursor to some of the more bizarre forms of fascism spawning in the underbelly of cyberspace. Her take on Man with A Movie camera was low-key bogus

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books you read and are like "oh, yeah, I get all this, this is all just, like, part of the discourse" and then you are like "wait, is this book one of the main reasons this is part of the discourse?" An essential essay collection on visual culture in the digital age.

[Mtume Gant · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s really one of the great texts of the 21st century. It should be vital reading for anyone trying to understand our world that is dominated by the visual and the politics of it all. I’ll revisit every single one of these essays for the rest of my life. Genius work.

[Thomas Mackell · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautifully hyper referential, super entertaining philosophy, art theory, media studies essays on oppression in technological post-capitalist times hence the clever Fanon referencing title

[Larry Ggggggggggggggggggggggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

disassociated and overwhelmed

[Levi · Rating 4 out of 5]

a lot to take in: horizontality, freelance work, autonomy of art, and many others