Making Globalization Visible? The Oil Assemblage,the Work of Sociology and the Work of Art

Introduction

In writings on globalization, whether political, economic, social or cultural, there is one recurrent theme: the idea of the invisible, couched in terms such as ‘flows’, ‘globalizing forces’, and ‘surface appearances’ (for example: Bauman, 1998; Harvey, 2005; Sassen, 2007). Part of the work of the sociology of globalization is to render that which appears invisible visible, a revelatory gesture, which as is the case for example with Michael Burawoy’s (2005: 264) description of ‘organic public sociology’, is often tied to the hope of transformation. In this, it is close to a form of artistic practice that offers oppositional strategies to the invisibility of ‘globalizing forces’. This article takes up the question of the relation between the sociology of globalization and this form of artistic practice, using as a case study selected cultural responses to the oil industry in its broad cultural, social, economic and technological contexts, to what we could call, drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1988), the ‘oil assemblage’. Throughout this article, the intention is to reflect upon the relationship between sociology and art through the lens of what art works ‘do’.

Classical sociological theory takes up the question of the nature of the connection between sociology and art in a number of ways (Tanner, 2003). Notably, sustained reflection on this relationship occurs in Simmel’s writings on sociological aesthetics (De La Fuente, 2008), which has at its core an argument about the similarity between social structures and the structure of particular artworks (Kracauer, 1920/21: 307). These observations are most acutely developed in Simmel’s full-length study, Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art, in which he sought to demonstrate how attending to the individual instance in the form of the ‘primary experience of a work of art’ (Simmel, 2005 [1916]: 3) offers a means of grasping the nature of general socio-cultural problems (Kösser, 2003: 440–1). Today, despite anxieties about the admissibility of producing a ‘sociology of the artwork’, ¹ some of the most stimulating work in the field of the sociology of art proceeds from an engagement with the artwork itself (Witkin, 1995; Becker et al., 2006; Alexander, 2008). Indeed, the ‘strong program in cultural sociology’ poses a question that derives directly from Simmel’s reflections, setting out to examine the extent to which ‘art can provide a window into social life’ (Alexander, 2008: 1). Meanwhile, new methodological approaches, such as the burgeoning fields of visual anthropology and visual sociology implicitly draw upon Simmel’s understanding of the possibilities available to the sociologist prepared to employ artistic contemplation as method (as distinct from engaging in the contemplation of art). Finally, in a related move, we find artists seeking to define their artistic practice as a qualitative method yielding social scientific insight in its own right (Sullivan, 2005), through techniques such as the ‘experimental engagement with social and material mediation that has become such a prominent element of creative practice in the arts, music and media in recent decades’ (Born, 2010: 199).

In these examples, it is striking that the artwork is conceived not as object but as process. In other words, as exemplified in the sociological approach taken in Becker et al’s Art from Start to Finish (Becker et al., 2006), the focus is on the work that art does, rather than the analysis of the completed artwork. As Michael Harris (2006: 213) notes in this collection: ‘Art works. It does things, evokes things, is a catalyst for things; it is the articulation of human needs.’ To be sure, this view of art, which understands its work to lie in the act of articulating that which might otherwise remain hidden or unvoiced, and in so doing, potentially offering a transformative function, is not new. Proceeding from the assumption that art matters, this view involves reflecting upon how it matters, as is found, for example, in Heidegger’s (1977 [1936]) reflections on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which, in turn, was influenced by Simmel’s sociological aesthetics. In the field of cultural anthropology, meanwhile, this is the central theme of Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency, whose arguments have recently been taken up in the sociology of art (Osbourne and Tanner, 2007; Born, 2010; De La Fuente, 2010).

In contrast, Jacques Ranciere’s novel take on the question of how art matters has not yet made a significant impression on the sociology of art, although his writings are extremely influential in the realm of contemporary art (Funcke, 2007). This omission is certainly understandable, given Ranciere’s (2003: 165–202) dismissive account of sociology in general, and his polemical critique of Bourdieu and the sociology of art in particular. This does not, however, justify ignoring his writings on art, nor does it justify taking his provocative anti-sociological stance at face value, since some of the issues he raises – such as whether sociology can (or should) develop a theory of the aesthetic – are also matters for internal debate in the sociology of art (Wolff, 1983; Born, 2010; De La Fuente, 2010).

Jacques Ranciere on the Work of Art and the Work of Sociology

Ranciere takes up the question of how art matters in his long-standing interest in the field of aesthetics, and the ways in which it intersects with politics and history (Rockhill, 2004: 4). His resultant theory of aesthetic experience constructs a framework based on the existence of three ‘regimes of art’: the ethical, the representative, and the aesthetic (Ranciere, 2002: 135), each of which describes a particular mode of relating to art (Robson, 2005: 83). Of these regimes, the most pertinent for the present work is the ‘aesthetic regime’, which ‘calls into question the very distinction between art and other activities’ (Ranciere, 2004: 81). Ranciere describes this ‘calling into question’ as art’s oscillation between autonomy and heteronomy (2002: 150), which means that ‘art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or is something other than art’ (2009: 36).

Apprehending art in this way provides the basis for understanding the role that Ranciere assigns to art in his cultural theory. According to Ranciere, it is art’s simultaneous autonomy and heteronomy that enables it to work by staging critical interventions in what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. By this, he means the distinctions between the visible and the invisible, and the sayable and the unsayable, which govern the perception of any given common world (Ranciere, 2004: 12). The ‘distribution of the sensible’ may appear natural and immutable, Ranciere argues, but the constructedness of sense perception can be demonstrated through artistic practice that is revelatory. This view of artistic practice, of course, brings it close to the essence of the work of sociology, which opens up ways of understanding the common world differently. This affinity between the work of art and the work of sociology offers a starting point for re-considering the relationship between the two.

Writing critically about the sociology of art, Georgina Born (2010: 199) observes that since the 1960s: ‘the terms of [sociological] critical and theoretical discourses have lagged behind … far-reaching changes in creative practice.’ In this article, I approach the implicit challenge in this statement by considering the extent to which taking ‘creative practice’ – the work of art – seriously might shed light on the work of sociology, both in terms of its possibilities and its limits. This is to take up Ranciere’s attempt to rethink the hierarchical relationship implied in the grammatical possessive ‘the sociology of art’, which he does by arguing that the procedures employed by social science to carry out its ‘demystification of literature and aesthetics’ are actually themselves derived from literary form and literary theory. On this basis, he maintains that

a poetics of knowledge might prove more useful to understand the theoretical procedures and the political implications of social science, than social science to understand the procedures of literatures and the social implications of art. (Ranciere, 2005: 17)

This claim is explored here by reflecting on the connections and disconnections between the sociology of globalization and what we might call ‘the art of globalization’, by which I mean artworks that take globalization as their subject, revealing, implicitly or explicitly, the constructedness of globalization as process. ² In other words, the remainder of this article is devoted to comparing and contrasting the work of art and the work of sociology, exploring the connections and disconnections between the critical approaches to globalization offered by these distinct yet complementary forms of knowledge construction. In so doing, I make an argument for understanding not only the ways in which artistic practice might be said to be ‘proto-sociological’, but also, crucially, the role that aesthetic categories might play in producing sociological understanding.

I approach this task by developing a particular case study, which takes the global oil industry as an empirical referent of globalization, and explores the way in which art engages with aspects of that industry. Initially, the case study focuses on the ways in which sociological understanding might be ‘translated’ into visual form, drawing on a view of translation derived from Walter Benjamin’s (2004) reflections on the ‘Task of the Translator’. Here, what is at stake is not a question of fidelity towards the original (in this case, sociological theory) but rather how a focus on ‘translatability’ allows us to grasp both the similarities between different forms of expressing knowledge (sociological theory and artistic practice) and something of the way in which both forms can potentially be changed through being brought into a relationship with one another. This will be demonstrated by drawing out differences between the work of sociology and the work of art, before finally taking up the question of sociology’s appropriation of particular poetic or artistic concepts through a critical analysis of the use of the term ‘presence’ in Saskia Sassen’s (2006) work on the sociology of globalization.

The Oil Assemblage and the Art of Globalization

To turn to the case study itself, at the time of writing, millions of gallons of oil continue to spill into the Gulf of Mexico after the explosion on the BP offshore drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, which took place in April 2010. This event provides a devastating demonstration of the ‘socio-political dynamics of energy [which] bring to the fore the myriad agents, relations, and precarious assemblages that give oil its political substance’ (Toscano, 2007: 21). This is to suggest that oil, in terms of its production and consumption, can be best grasped as the central node of a particular ‘assemblage’, which overlaps clearly with the two ‘great alloplastic and anthropomorphic assemblages’ that Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 564) identify in A Thousand Plateaus: the war machine and the state apparatus. While this overlap appears to support Toscano’s emphasis on oil’s ‘political substance’, however, the 2010 oil spill brings the wider ‘cultural substance’ of oil sharply into focus, making visible the vast extent of the assemblage of which it is a part. Myriad economic, social, cultural and ecological consequences of the disaster are evident. As Naomi Klein (2010) has pointed out, the oil spill affects the way of life of entire communities based around the Gulf coast and beyond.

Klein’s article forms part of an ongoing set of cultural responses to the oil spill, which aim not only to draw attention to the immediate effects of the disaster, but also to make visible other less immediate connections, such as links to other geographic regions (for example, the Niger Delta) or to past events (such as the Piper Alpha tragedy in the North Sea). ³ At their best, such cultural responses offer detailed insight into the oil assemblage, picking up on connections among oil as material object, technology, economics, society and culture. This kind of complexity is, however, difficult to grasp, and even more difficult to communicate; frequently, the responses offered by the art world comprise no more than a straightforward critique of a single issue. There are, however, examples of cultural responses that do not lose sight of the extent of the oil assemblage and of art’s place in that entity. Installation artists such as Gary Hill, Ernst Logar and Andrei Molodkov, and art collectives such as the Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), for example, foreground in their work the fact that almost all art encounters oil as material object, through the near inevitability of using oil-based materials to produce artworks. ⁴ At the same time, these artworks seek to reveal the construction of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as it relates to ‘oil culture’; the work of this kind of art is, above all, to demonstrate the nature and fluidity of the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, and the sayable and the unsayable, that structure the way in which we perceive and experience globalization (Ranciere, 2004: 12).

The Black Sea Files as (Visual) Sociology?: Rendering the Invisible Visible

The desire to intervene in the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is a central characteristic of the artwork to which I now want to turn: the Black Sea Files (2005) by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann. This film essay is the result of Biemann’s desire to reveal the socio-cultural dimension of oil and its infrastructure through a close engagement with the contested Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyan pipeline, built by British Petroleum (BP) to carry oil from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Filming took place during two field trips to the area in 2003 and 2004, at which time the pipeline was still under construction and therefore fully visible to the naked eye. Indeed, BP was concerned to emphasize its desire to retain the pipeline’s visibility, in an effort to differentiate its undertaking from the secretive and yet visible (for example, in the form of pollution) oil works of the Soviet era (Barry, 2006). While the plan was for BP’s pipeline eventually to be buried, minimizing its social and environmental impact, information about the pipeline and its construction was to remain widely available. In this way, Barry comments, ‘the pipeline would be made visibly invisible’ (2006: 239).

Reflection on the relationship between visibility and invisibility forms a central part of the Black Sea Files. The work, which is presented as a series of ten double video ‘files’, casts the film-maker/narrator as a ‘secret agent’ in pursuit of what she describes in her voiceover as the ‘hidden and restricted knowledge’ for which the pipeline itself is the referent. As described in the Black Sea Files itself, and in an accompanying catalogue text, when producing the work, Biemann was fascinated by ‘flows’ – flows of energy and capital, flows of people and flows of fossil resources – describing the whole region as having changed from ‘a politically unsettled and impoverished post-Soviet periphery, hosting a million displaced people, to a space where energy and capital flow at a rate that is remarkable, even by global standards’ (Biemann, 2008: 64). Biemann conceived the Black Sea Files as an undertaking that would allow her to reflect on a specific instance of globalization as process. Her artistic practice seeks to uncover the invisible flows of globalization, and this intention demonstrates clear connections to the sociology of globalization with its intention to render the invisible visible.

Timothy Mitchell (2009: 422) argues that the appropriate method for revealing the complexity of oil culture involves ‘closely following the oil’, since:

By tracing the connections that were made between pipelines and pumping stations, refineries and shipping routes, road systems and automobile cultures, dollar flows and economic knowledge, weapons experts and militarism, one discovers how a particular set of relations was engineered among oil, violence, finance, expertise and democracy.

The method proposed here, which emphasizes the importance of processes of ‘discovery’ – of uncovering that which usually remains hidden – provides a useful description of the work of Biemann’s art. Following the flow of oil along the BTC-pipeline, the Black Sea Files offers a phenomenology of the oil assemblage. This article now sets out to trace similarities between the work of art and the work of sociology in approaching the oil assemblage, juxtaposing Biemann’s film essay with the writings of Saskia Sassen (2007) and Arjun Appadurai (1996).

File 1 of the Black Sea Files is labeled: ‘[Field Record] Bibi Heibat Oct 04; [Site] Oil Extraction Zone Baku Azerbaijan’. The label is superimposed on an image of flowing oil, which splits in two, offering complementary shots of a working oil extraction plant. Then these images fade and we cut to a sequence that shows a different kind of spatial practice on the site, focusing on those who live rather than work there. It begins with a man appearing on the left-hand screen walking across a landscape that is marked by electricity lines and pylons, rusted storage tanks, and oil wells. As the man disappears out of shot behind an oil drum, the camera cuts to a long shot of a football match that is taking place in the same landscape. The right-hand screen, meanwhile, offers a mid-shot of two men, again in the same landscape, talking and gesturing to the camera. Their interaction is intelligible only to the extent that their gestures can be understood; language barriers and sound quality (as well as the overlaying of their remarks with a voiceover) deny them the possibility of communicating through verbal language with the viewer. In the voiceover, the narrator asks:

What will it take to write the hidden matrix of this political space, when transnational relations increasingly take place in the invisibility of electronic spaces, off-road terrains and classified zones? And when international media only features elites and large economic stakes in the region, offering little insight into local textures?

As the second sentence is spoken, a series of ‘headlines’ flow across the screen from right to left, detailing the main steps in having the pipeline approved at the level of transnational institutions and nation-states, while on the right-hand screen the camera pans round to reveal a group of children, then cuts to a shot of the children traversing the landscape, following a man carrying a shovel. Both screens then cut simultaneously to new images of the same landscape. The right-hand screen shows a close-up of one of the two men who had earlier addressed the camera, this time gazing directly at the camera in what has become a stock (and much criticized) image of the documentary genre. Meanwhile, the left-hand screen shows a ‘nodding donkey’ behind an oil storage tank. The camera then pans round to reveal a second storage tank attached by a series of ladders to the first, and a figure walking between the tanks. This provides a telling visual commentary on scale; the appearance of this tiny figure forces the realization that the storage tanks (and therefore the ‘nodding donkey’) are much larger – more monumental – than they had first appeared alongside the close-up on the other screen. Both the impossibility of the close-up and the importance of scaling are visually foregrounded here.

In this first File, Biemann presents a view of globalization that, through visualizing its sensitivity towards scale, demonstrates its dissatisfaction with approaches to the subject that reject the multi-scalar nature of globalization, to focus entirely on transnational institutions – approaches that, as Sassen (2007) points out, can only ever represent a partial engagement with the topic. While the development of the BTC-pipeline was often presented in the media and elsewhere as a story of transnational institutions, Biemann’s film shifts the focus to what Sassen (2007: 6) terms the ‘second dimension of globalization’: localized processes often understood at the level of the nation-state but that ‘are part of globalization in that they involve transboundary networks and entities connecting multiple local or “national” processes and actors’. When examining the ‘second dimension of globalization’, Sassen seeks to highlight, in particular, ‘noncosmopolitan globalities’ by which she means ‘forms of politics and imaginaries that are focused on localized issues and struggles shared by other localities around the world’ (2007: 6). This is an apposite description of Biemann’s subject matter, as she focuses, in subsequent files, on the way in which the pipeline connects dispossessed farmers, Kurds stranded on the margins of Ankara, or prostitutes working in Trabzon; on those who, to use Ranciere’s (1999) terminology, appear to belong to that part of the global community that has no part.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 1.

Black Sea Files, 2005. © Ursula Biemann.

Throughout the Black Sea Files, the landscape assumes a central role; Biemann’s geopolitical commentary is expressed through ‘geopoetics’, demonstrating just how ‘an analysis of geopolitical relations … can be elaborated within the framework of the theory of aesthetics, as an artistic practice itself’ (Huber, 2008: 171). As art critic Brian Holmes (2008) notes, here ‘geopoetics’ supplements social scientific understanding by ‘add[ing] to the classical formats of geographical representation’ – the maps, satellite imagery, and survey data, all of which play a role in the Black Sea Files in casting and recasting perspectives on the area. Essentially, ‘geopoetics’ adds:

an inquiry into the texture and temporal depth of the relations that produce the videographic flux itself – dialogical texture, brimming over with contrasts and differences, yet always somehow uncertain or inconclusive, and partially opaque even to those who bring it concretely into being. (Holmes, 2008)

To understand what Holmes might mean by ‘dialogical texture’, it is instructive to bring to bear upon Biemann’s piece the framework of relationships among five ‘landscapes’ or ‘dimensions of global cultural flows’ developed by Arjun Appadurai (1996) as a means of grasping the complex and disjunctive nature of globalization: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. A central tenet of his model is that these landscapes ‘are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision, but rather … are deeply perspectival constructs’ (1996: 33). The Black Sea Files thematizes the relationships among these ‘landscapes’; its open-ended, inconclusive structure makes it an ideal vehicle for such a dialogical undertaking.

The central structuring feature of the Black Sea Files is the technoscape, represented by the pipeline designed to bring Asian oil to Europe, and other elements of the architecture of the global oil industry. Appadurai (1996: 34) describes the technoscape as ‘the global configuration of technology … and the fact that technology … now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries’. In Biemann’s film, the recurrent image of the ‘nodding donkey’ provides a clear visual reminder of the way in which oil technologies cross boundaries, linking the region with other oil-producing areas across the globe. Meanwhile, the juxtaposition in the film of the dirty material architecture of oil with the satellite technology and other similar ‘technologies of seeing’ employed to gain a new perspective on the region, provides a clear sense of the disjunctions within the technoscape.

The technoscape also finds itself in a disjunctive relationship with other elements of Appadurai’s model, such as the ‘financescape’, which describes the ‘mysterious, rapid and difficult … to follow’ flow of global capital (1996: 34). In the Black Sea Files, Biemann visualizes the financescape through the technique of running stock market figures across the screens. By superimposing these figures on images that foreground the materiality of the landscape and the pipeline, the disjunction between the flows of global capital in electronic space and the embedding of technology in physical space are highlighted. A similar technique is used to reflect on the ‘mediascape’, which is brought into close relief in File 4, where the filmmaker/narrator find herself witnessing an ‘event’ – the forceful eviction of a group of Kurds from a communal recycling compound on the outskirts of Ankara. She uses this footage to reflect on the construction of images for consumption, questioning in the voiceover whether she can distance herself through the employment of self-reflexivity, from the role of journalist or, indeed, from the role of the ‘embedded artist’. Meanwhile, ‘ideoscapes’, described by Appadurai (1996: 36) as ‘concatenations of images [that are] directly political’, are explored from the outset when File 0, for example, juxtaposes shots of public space and monumental architecture in Baku and Tblisi, making clever use of colour to highlight the considerable ideological differences within the region under investigation, while also suggesting that these differences are, ultimately, insubstantial.

The major focus of Biemann’s film, however, is the ‘ethnoscape’, the ‘landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live’ (Appadurai, 1996: 33). This is not surprising, as much of her work focuses on processes of migration and the lot of the dispossessed. ⁴ In the Black Sea Files, the ‘landscape of persons’ include farmers whose land has been ‘sold’ to make way for the pipeline, prostitutes, pimps, Colombian migrant workers who have been with BP for 20 years, engineers, housewives, displaced Kurds, Kazakhs from Turkestan who fled Maoist China and arrived in Istanbul after a perilous journey along the route the pipeline was later to take, oil workers and others. Biemann’s construction of this particular ethnoscape, framed in terms of its interactions with the other four ‘scapes’ identified by Appadurai, allows her to present a clear and detailed account of the region’s considerable ‘non-cosmopolitan globalities’ (Sassen, 2007: 6).

Biemann’s artistic practice, then, appears to make visible the oil assemblage as a complex landscape of disjunctive global cultural flows in a manner that mirrors the intent of Sassen’s sociology and Appadurai’s social anthropology. So should Biemann’s work be understood primarily as a form of sociological analysis, an exercise, perhaps, in what Grady (1996) terms ‘doing sociology visually’? The narrator’s claim that ‘this is not an aesthetic project’ might seem to give weight to this proposition, as would comments from the art theorist Jörg Huber (2008: 177) on the status of Biemann’s ‘aesthetic-artistic practice as a theory-practice’. In a similar vein, the art critic Dominic Eichler (2008) described the Black Sea Files – somewhat reductively – as ‘a compelling study of social geography consisting of interviews with farmers living on the Caspian oil pipelines [which] gives voice to those who are normally silenced and marginalized’.

Differentiating the Work of Art from the Work of Sociology

The Black Sea Files, however, was conceived, presented and received not as an example of visual sociology but as an artwork, as can be seen if we pay attention to the techniques and operations of art. It adopts a ‘form of visibility’ that draws on techniques such as the use of the split screen and soft montage, aligning itself with the work of other video artists and film essayists such as Haroun Farocki or Valie Export. In terms of circulation, it was first shown in 2005 at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin, a leading art institute devoted to the production and presentation of discourse-oriented contemporary art, as part of a group exhibition entitled ‘B-Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond’. The Black Sea Files was presented in the form of a double screen installation on synchronized pairs of video monitors, lined up on a long black plinth, which ran diagonally across the whole gallery. The names of the individual files and their contents were reproduced on one wall, and the installation also included a separate video of Azeri oil workers projected onto another wall, and a large-scale oil cartography co-designed with an architecture bureau in Zurich. It has since been installed in a number of other locations. In 2007, it was shown at the International Biennial in Istanbul and the Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, and could also be seen in Aberdeen at Peacock Visual Arts. More recently, it formed part of a group exhibition at the Arnolfini in Bristol (2009). ⁶ It is also a piece of work that is taken up and discussed in the art world. Indeed, the critics that praise the Black Sea Files for being ‘non-art’ belong themselves to the world of contemporary art: Eichler (2008), Holmes (2008), Huber (2008) and others.

Not only that, the Black Sea Files continually seeks to demonstrate its self-understanding as an artwork – for example, in its self-conscious construction of ironic distance from the dominant traditions of documentary film-making offered in File 4, or in the way that File 6 challenges the boundaries of ethical discourse. In File 6, Biemann engages in conversation with two prostitutes and two pimps in a hotel room in Trazbon on the Turkish Black Sea. As the conversation unfolds, subtitles grant the (non-Russian and non-Azeri speaking) viewer insight into the complex layers of translation and mistranslation that characterized the encounter. Gradually it is revealed that the prostitutes’ testimony has inadvertently been procured under false pretences – they have been told by the men who control them that Biemann is not a journalist, just a ‘woman making home-videos’. Choosing to include this scene in the finished work is to overstep the boundaries of ethical discourse, as Biemann (2008: 70) acknowledges in her own commentary on the Black Sea Files. And yet she does choose to use this material, providing one clear demonstration of the difference between the social scientist, bound by professional and institutional commitments to ethical codes of practice, and the artist who claims relative autonomy. One effect of deciding to include this material in the Black Sea Files is to foreground important questions about assumptions structuring the ethics of the encounter between the Self and the Other. In this case, then, there is an indication of one way in which the work of art might challenge the work of (visual) sociology even as it engages in that work. As Douglas Harper (1998: 38) puts it, this is to understand how artistic practice might ‘without rejecting sociology … extend the boundaries’.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 2.

Black Sea Files. Exhibition View, Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, 2007. © Ursula Biemann.

Returning to Ranciere’s aesthetic theory offers us a way of better understanding this challenge. As we have seen, Ranciere argues that in the ‘aesthetic regime’, art is grasped in terms of its simultaneous autonomy and heteronomy. Peter Hallward (2005: 35) neatly encapsulates this way of thinking when he maintains that, for Ranciere, ‘genuine art is what indistinguishes, in newly creative ways and with the resources peculiar to a specific artistic practice, art and that which figures as other than art’. In defending her decision to include the prostitutes’ testimony in her film essay, Biemann makes a claim for art’s autonomy, but how does this manifest itself in the work and in our response to the work? To begin to answer this question, I would like to return to Holmes’s (2008) definition of ‘geopoetics’ – that which supplements social scientific understanding – as a phenomenon that remains ‘somehow uncertain or inconclusive, and partially opaque even to those who bring it concretely into being’. This might seem to sit uncomfortably with the analysis of the Black Sea Files offered up till now, which has focused on the way in which Biemann set out to make the invisible visible, emphasizing art’s transparency, or readability, and the similarities between its work and the work of sociology. While there is no doubt that Biemann’s work does indeed grant visibility to the invisible, to focus solely on this aspect is to deny a second dimension to her work which functions, as we will see, to challenge the idea that understanding of a particular process or phenomenon is exhausted through making it visible or rendering it legible. In order to explain this point, I would like to return to File 6 of the Black Sea Files.

Initially, File 6 seems to conform to the revelatory principle upon which the work is predicated, offering an image of the prostitutes readable in terms of their place in the larger ethnoscape of globalization. This is underscored by the images on the right-hand screen, which present – through a series of long takes, linked by dissolves – the experience of mobility, and a constant reminder of the conjunction between presence and absence, with the road testifying to the absence of the pipeline itself, and to the invisibility of the flow of energy that it facilitates.

For most of the scene, these images of ‘flow’ contrast sharply with the stasis presented on the other screen, which depicts a group of prostitutes sitting on a bed in a hotel room – their dream of mobility undercut by this distortion of dwelling, dwelling in the abstract, interchangeable ‘non-place’ of the hotel (Augé, 1995; Kracauer, 1995: 173–85).

Yet the formal control of the scene in the hotel room has already been undermined from the outset of the scene, where the camera swings wildly, attempting to capture the unruly movement of the prostitutes in the room, and unsure of its focus (Biemann, 2008: 70). Formal control is also undercut in the distorted communication between the filmmaker and the prostitutes. Seen from the point of view of art’s autonomy – paying attention to the artwork as aesthetic object – the effect of the these images is, arguably, not merely to further underscore the subjection of these women to global capital and existing power structures. ⁷ Instead, it also places in question the assumption that it is possible to ‘know’ these women through making them visible. Legibility, Huber (2008: 176) argues, is ‘ultimately a gesture of disempowerment’. Resisting legibility, the prostitutes’ stubborn presence presented in Biemann’s film resides in the gap between visibility and sayability with which the viewer is confronted.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 3.

Black Sea Files, 2005. © Ursula Biemann.

In this scene, the visualization of globalization, which employs the image of the prostitutes (rather than the prostitutes themselves) as an ‘empirical referent’, becomes a disruptive presence that interrupts the easy flow of globalization and resists transparent legibility through what Ranciere (2007: 13) describes as the image’s ‘obstinate silence’ that allows it to elude representation. In his reflections on ‘critical art’, Ranciere (2009: 46) maintains that ‘negotiation between the forms of art and those of non-art … make it possible to form combinations of elements capable of speaking twice over: on the basis of their legibility and on the basis of their illegibility’. In the Black Sea Files, the combination of legibility (non-art) and illegibility (art) that becomes evident on close analysis of File 6, serves not only to foreground the processes of subjectivation that shape social relations along the route of the pipeline, but also, through the presentation of disruptive presence, to show how the relation between the visible and the sayable – the ‘distribution of the sensible’ – upon which such social relations are predicated might be placed in question.

The work of art, then, in staging critical interventions in the ‘distribution of the sensible’, is not only to make visible (that which identifies it with non-art), but also to present presence. This is a key part of the argument in The Future of the Image, where Ranciere (2007: 121) states categorically that in the aesthetic regime, art ‘does not make visible; it imposes presence’. To ‘make visible’ suggests the indexical relationship between object and image upon which the documentary form, and much visual sociology, is predicated. To ‘impose presence’ is a rather more ambivalent undertaking. On the one hand, it indicates a process of appropriation or objectification which sociology would seek to criticize. In the case of the prostitutes, this would be to question the commodification of their experience in the form of the artwork. On the other hand, however, for Ranciere the act of ‘imposing presence’ also allows the preservation of illegibility that allows a subject to avoid objectification by resisting the imperative to be fully knowable.

The Sociological Appropriation of ‘Presence’

It is at this point that we are able to move to the final stage of the argument, which proceeds from Ranciere’s account of art ‘imposing presence’ to focus on the role that aesthetic categories might play in producing sociological understanding. In her recent work on globalization, focusing on civil society and the global city, Sassen (2006: 314–21) employs the concept of ‘presence’ as a way of thinking about making ‘informal politics’, to reflect on political agency. Writing about those she describes as ‘the disadvantaged’, she observes that, ‘in the context of a strategic space such as the global city, [they] are not simply marginal; they acquire presence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of the formal polity’ (2006: 319, emphasis added). It is this last remark that first reveals a line of argument similar to that derived from our reading of File 6 of the Black Sea Files; if presence is acquired in a process that evades formal restrictions, then it is acquired in a process that works by eluding legibility. What is more, according to Sassen, this presence ‘signifies the possibility of a politics’ (2006: 319), which also describes the achievement of the presentation of the disruptive presence of the prostitutes in the Black Sea Files.

What does Sassen understand by presence? One of the major methodological questions addressed in her historical take on globalization is how to study what she calls the ‘illegibility of social change’ (Sassen, 2006: 12). ‘Presence’ is employed as a concept to describe trends in changing forms of citizenship that are ‘elusive and difficult to nail down but contribute to [the] lengthening distance [between the citizen and the state]’, that, she argues, is characteristic of the contemporary stage of globalization (2006: 319–20). Despite the centrality of the concept of presence to her undertaking, she offers little in the way of sustained theoretical reflection to justify its use, or to clarify the provenance of her understanding of the term, which appears to be related, first, to the way that it is taken up in the new media, relating to her recent interest in ‘global digital assemblages’ (Sassen, 2006: 325–98), and, second, to presence as an art-theoretical category (Sassen, 2008).

The way in which ‘presence’ remains under-theorized in Sassen’s work is related to an uncertainty in her use of the concept. This reveals itself above all in the shifting language she uses to describe what can be done to ‘presence’; while at times it is conceived as something to be ‘acquired’ (Sassen, 2006: 319) or ‘produced’ (2006: 315), at other times it figures as something to be ‘given’ (Sassen, 2008: 11). This last observation appears in a short article in which she reflects directly on the work of art in aiding our understanding of globalization, maintaining, in a sentiment not unrelated to Walter Benjamin’s (2003) account of the ‘optical unconscious’ in his ‘Work of Art’ essay, that ‘art can make present that which is not clear to the naked eye in ways that rational discourse cannot’ (Sassen, 2008: 10). This statement glosses over a number of fundamental questions in thinking about the operation of art and the nature of presence, questions that are taken up in some detail by Ranciere and others such as Jacques Derrida (1997), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) and Martin Seel (2005). It does, however, suggest a challenge to our understanding of the work of sociology, which is not merely to render the invisible visible, but also to adopt the artistic gesture of imposing presence upon the invisible, which also allows the preservation of illegibility. It suggests that any sociologist who seeks, as Sassen does, to utilize the concept of ‘presence’ to access those who are invisible, elusive, or illegible without, however, objectifying them, needs to acknowledge and understand the complex operations and understandings of art from which it is derived. In other words, to return once more to Ranciere’s account of the work of art, we can also now begin to grasp what he understands by its potential for shaping our understanding of the ‘theoretical procedures’ of social science.

Conclusion

This article has traced connections and disconnections in the work of art and the work of sociology, focusing on their approaches to globalization. Drawing on Ranciere’s description of the way in which art, in the ‘aesthetic regime’, oscillates between autonomy and heteronomy, it has been possible to show how a particular example of the ‘art of globalization’ – Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files – constructs sociological knowledge in visual form while also probing the limits of this form of understanding. Rather than embracing the hierarchical relation implicit in setting out to write a sociological account of the Black Sea Files, this article argues for the importance of seeking to think from the perspective of a dialogue between sociology and art, in the course of which we can grasp how sociological ideas might be translated into artistic practice, while artistic practice is also translated into sociological theory.

The figure of translation as it is proposed by Benjamin (2004) in ‘The Task of the Translator’ offers a useful heuristic device for understanding the relationship between sociology and art proposed here, which proceeds from an assumption that both are imperfect ways of attaining and expressing knowledge. Rather than rehearse here important sociological critiques of art, or indeed, aesthetic critiques of sociology, then, this article has sought to underline how these forms of knowledge creation can also be understood to complement one another. While sociological theory, such as that put forward by Sassen (2006, 2007) or Appadurai (1996), can offer a form of textual commentary that makes sense of Biemann’s artistic intervention in globalization, artistic practice understood as the process of ‘imposing presence’ has been seen to provide sociology with a means of grasping what we might call the powerless power of illegibility, or the decoupling of agency from power. In other words, to grasp a phenomenon as complex as globalization, or indeed even to understand a particular manifestation of globalization, such as Sassen’s (2006) global cities, or that which I have called the ‘oil assemblage’, collaborative work between different forms of knowledge construction plays a crucial role.