Abstraction as Resistance to Racialized Surveillance: The Intersections of Art, Technology, and Identity in the Age of Computer Vision

Abstraction as a representational and cognitive apparatus has received a great deal of criticism in much critical theory and in a number of academic disciplines within the social sciences and humanities.Feminist and antiracist scholars in particular have been at the forefront of the charges against abstraction for its tendency to evacuate lived specificities and the multiplicity of reality in favor of simplified and universalized models which are ostensibly objective and rational, but in practice have a tendency to privilege a white, male, western subject position. 1Theorists such as Philip Brian Harper are increasingly giving attention to the necessary and potentially recuperative aspects of abstraction.His book Abstractionist Aesthetics begins by detailing the ambivalent history of abstraction towards "black persons and populations," often used as a method of marginalizing black people culturally as well as socially and politically through genericizing and commodifying them according to an abstract, reductive, and ultimately arbitrary calculus which presents itself as objective, logical, and infallible.This entails a translation of the embodied subject into informatics such as tallies and plots on grids for summation, a form of effacement that produces them as an object of exchange.The artistic reaction Harper identifies is one towards a figurative, referential, and realist aesthetic affect to invoke positive depiction of "blackness" per se within "African American expressive culture" which he defers to conventional notions to define as "works and practices that both originate among and in some way represent the experiences of African American people." 2 Harper by contrast advocates for a deliberate strategy of "abstractionist aesthetics" to both co-opt abstraction's historically adverse relationship to black identity, as well as counter the realist empirical tendency which he views as stunting the polemic compelled by African American culture insofar as such cultural production adheres to the previously given definition and thereby "forces the perennially contestable question of how best to make a racial-political stand." 3 This agonistic rationale is solicited by the demands of such culture to elucidate the "racial-political" context in which African American experience occurs, a discursive horizon structurally unavailable to Realism as it merely brackets off the historic and ongoing hegemonic strategies of abstraction applied to the black subject rather than meaningfully engaging them.It is these considerations which cause Harper to cite Fred Wilson's 2011proposed work E Pluribus Unum as a paradigmatic example of abstractionist aesthetics' distancing qualities through its "metarepresentational quality," that is, its indexical representation of the signifying apparatus. 4rhaps counterintuitively, the figural character of the work is key to its productively abstractionist quality for Harper, as it elicits critical questions about the contingency of paradigms of representation.This emphasis on engaging the aesthetic sensibilities of an audience however is myopic if one's aim is to trigger a reassessment of how identity formation is hegemonically shaped, and misses entirely the role surveillance plays in such formations, as well as the role abstraction plays in surveillance.As Simone Browne outlines in her book Dark Matters, the surveillance of blackness is overwritten with strategies of analytic fragmentation and deterritorialization, all with the aim of reifying the black body as a highly "readable" object.Citing Fanon, Browne highlights the advent of "digital epidermalization," the imposition of race on a body; a process now made high-tech in the digital age but which she traces back to the practices of slave surveillance InVisible Culture Issue 37: