Abstraction Today 

Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)

A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision

This talk will try to explore the sense in which Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as ‘a practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organise relations within and between the planet's sovereign political territories,’ can be articulated in terms of visual regimes and artistic practices. To this end, I will dwell on how Stuart Hall’s account of the violence of racial abstraction – formulated in critical dialogue with Louis Althusser – informed his writings on the visual, and explore how Hall’s insights can be mobilised today, as racial regimes of vision become increasingly abstract and automated, spawning new modalities of hierarchy, displacement and violence.