Machines of Articulation: Reading Politics through Aesthetic Operations

This article is articulated in three voices of scholars who have worked on questions of war, visual culture, and contemporary political aesthetics that also relates to art and film practices. Media theorist Jussi Parikka, literary scholar Anders Engberg-Pedersen, and visual culture researcher Daniela Agostinho address the relations between images, aesthetics and operations through the lens of two books published concomitantly, Parikka’s Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual and Engberg-Pedersen’s Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form. Both books expand the scope of what Czechoslovakian-born filmmaker Harun Farocki termed “operational images” in his experimental documentaries and theoretical writings from the early 2000s. Through his analyses of the politics of imagery in the military-industrial context, Farocki notably defined “operational images” as images that do not depict or represent but rather perform tasks such as tracking, surveilling, detecting, and targeting. For both Parikka and Engberg-Pedersen, Farocki’s central concept of operational images forms a point of departure for writing media archaeologies of the present. In a three-voiced dialogue, the authors unfold operations as a “machine of articulation,” a conceptual and analytical device that reveals surprising linkages and frictions across different themes, techniques, scales, and historical periods.