On the Actuarial Gaze

Since the first Gulf War, we have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and techniques of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public culture. Examining perceptual systems of global risk, this essay asks: what is the visual structure of the historical catastrophe as mediatic event? How do visual cultures and technologies of risk and threat perception stratify sensory experience? How do visual cultures of risk affect how perpetuators and victims of violence and human rights violations depict their political experience as historical truth? Keywords: visual culturepolitical violenceAbu Ghraibcatastropheaestheticsrisk Notes Ocular aggression, in the form of beliefs concerning the 'evil eye' is a mainstay of the Anthropology of the Mediterranean and is usually classified as an involuntary gesture of the body. Thus, despite its pre-modern antecedents, the practice of ocular aggression and the modern visual ideologies this essay addresses share certain traits: automatism, a reaction to spatial impingement, and ideologies of pollution and purification (see Gilmore , pp.175–205 for further discussion and bibliography). Since many of the tendencies being discussed in this essay are associated with an ideology of compulsory democracy, I should call attention to one of the major studies of early democracy and media, Jean Starobinski's Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789, which discusses the relation of utopian democratic spaces and the aesthetic of visual transparency, particularly in relation to Rousseau's notion of the Festival (Starobinski ). 'This is the politically visible, that horizon of actors, objects and events that constitute the worldview and circumscribed reality of the political emergency zone – the gathered and linked components of crisis … By a scopic regime I mean the agendas and techniques of political visualization: the regimens that prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility and that proscribe or render untenable other modes and objects of perception. A scopic regime is an ensemble of practices and discourses that establish the truth claims, typicality and credibility of visual acts and objects and politically correct modes of seeing' (Feldman , pp. 29–30). Claude Lorrain's (b.1600, d.1682) 'Black Glass' or 'the Claude' was used to filter out certain colours in landscape prospects in order to achieve a unity of tonal intensity in the painting of the scene, The Claude was used to fashion a moralized and sentimentalized landscape. Later European painters used the instrument to Europeanize alien colonial landscapes in accordance with romantic aesthetics. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was the major world event of the period to be repeatedly subjected to panoramic display and commemoration by a variety of pre-cinematic technologies throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These exhibits pioneered the fusion of disaster reportage and panoramic optics as both news and recreation