Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies

Bredekamp, Horst

doi:10.1017/ccol0521836670.002

Cited by 65 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Yet upon closer inspection, the king's body is not entirely his own given that his torso and arms are curiously comprised of the tiny bodies of hundreds (300+) of persons (Bredekamp 2007, 38). A full range of subjects appear to be present in the sovereign's body: women, men, children, adults, soldiers, and civilians (Skinner 2008, 191).…”

Section: The Sovereign Strides Forth: the Frontispiece As A Picture Of Male Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes'sLeviathan

Boucher

2021

Hypatia

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The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan is justly renowned as a powerful visual advertisement for his political philosophy. Consequently, its rich imagery has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary. Surprisingly, then, its gendered dimensions have received relatively limited attention. This essay explores this neglected facet of the frontispiece. I argue that the image initially appears to present a hypermasculine sovereign. However, upon closer inspection, and considered alongside Hobbes's economic theory, it yields to a reading of the sovereign as an ambiguously gendered figure. Reading the frontispiece through the prism of gender and the economy reveals not a static image of unwavering male power but rather one of an equivocally-sexed creature teeming with life, contradictions, and complexities worthy of continued examination.

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Section: The Sovereign Strides Forth: the Frontispiece As A Picture Of Male Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes'sLeviathan

Boucher

2021

Hypatia

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“…The artificial state and artificial vision came together in the famous engraving made by Bosse to depict Leviathan as a sea monster from the Book of Job, emerging from its element as a single figure containing all its subjects. As Horst Bredekamp reminds us, Hobbes imagined the Leviathan as a “mortal god,” a figure equivalent to Hercules and other creatures of legend (Bredekamp 2007 : 33). Hobbes saw the formation of such “compound creatures” as he called them, as a special instance of the power of colonial imagination, or what he called “Fancy.” Fancy was not simply an artistic or creative attribute: “whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe , from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the workmanship of Fancy .” Fancy created images, meaning “any representation of one thing by another” (in Tralau 2007 : 65–9).…”

Section: Artificial Surveillance: Leviathanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial vision, white space and racial surveillance capitalism

Mirzoeff

2020

AI & Soc

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This first half of the paper outlines the formation of racial surveillance capitalism across the longue durée of settler colonialism, with special attention to the formation of artificial vision. This artificial vision is deployed in the erased territory, creating a white space in which to see from platforms, ranging from the ship, to the train and today’s drones. The second section examines the Eurodac digital fingerprint database created by the European Union to monitor and control asylum seekers and refugees as an “artificial life system,” to use a phrase coined by its administrators. In this automated form, artificial vision is distributed rather than centralized.

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“…Such an infrapolitics of subtle visual intelligence does not pertain to the sphere of the open struggle with authority, but rather to the sphere of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat 2009). Its field of study pertains neither to the political iconology of the dominated (Boidy 2014), nor to the political iconography of domination (Theweleit 1987; Michaud 2003; Bredekamp 2007; Parotto 2007; Mitchell 2009; Coladonato 2014; Garofalo 2016), but rather in the grey zone crossing both fields. Such a ‘secret iconology of visuality’ would embrace the secret, off-stage and therefore infravisible forms of ordinary resistance, performed in the tension between hyper-exposure and spectacularisation, between self-concealment and invisibility, and intertwining individual and collective action.…”

Section: Visual Infrapolitics In the Secret Visualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual infrapolitics: gender performance in the Italian entertainment industry, between secret visuality and postfeminist resistance

Tagliavia

2018

Mod. Italy

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This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, avelina,challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to thevelina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.

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Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies

Cited by 65 publications

References 0 publications

Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes'sLeviathan

Masculine Power? A Gendered Look at the Frontispiece of Hobbes'sLeviathan

Artificial vision, white space and racial surveillance capitalism

Visual infrapolitics: gender performance in the Italian entertainment industry, between secret visuality and postfeminist resistance

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