Operations, Operations, Operations

A key proposal throughout this book is to follow the implications of the term “operation,” suggesting that it is, as a part of the term “operational image,” as central as the other part, “images.” It also pulls operational images into resonating fields of concepts and themes in contemporary media theory and design and artistic practices. This chapter discusses how operational images can be read creatively across a theoretical landscape of concepts that have emerged from a suitably fertile soil of media and cultural theory scholarship. This mushrooming of references to operations can be read back to the historical role of the term as part of the cybernetic and even pre-cybernetic realization of the centrality of information, feedback control, and data integrated into decision-making. In addition to this historical track record, it has also served a role in different media theoretical discussions.

While there is a backstory as to how “operational” and “operations research” gradually became a central part of technological rationality throughout the twentieth century from military to management, there is much more to these terms.3 Bringing operational or “operative” images into a conversation with operative ontologies as it emerges in the scholarship on cultural techniques (like Bernhard Siegert’s work), as well as with “politics of operations” (Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s term) offers us an analysis of contemporary capitalism.

A whole field of uses of “operative” and “operational” could be mentioned, though: Brian Massumi’s reference to the “operative logic” of power and Jimena Canales’s take on the (visual) operational art. We should not forget Wolfgang Ernst’s persistent focus on the operative either: according to Ernst, media are media only when operational, and thus “active”—agential even.4 Recently, Kathrin Friedrich and Aurora Hoel proposed an “operational media analysis” that takes up the importance of operations. Focused on “image operations” within a broader ecology of “media operations,” they defined it as “a technologically mediated action or procedure where symbolic and virtual resources are gathered to effect changes in the physical environment.”5 Their example of image-guided robotic radiosurgery is perhaps an unusual case for media studies. But, according to their argument, it is precisely for this reason that it is part of the necessary expansion of methodological possibilities in accounting for not only remote sensing but also operations that intervene in their surroundings. Such are the image and media operations we are interested in: “Technical objects enact a new resolution of the human-world system, a material reconfiguration of the world that releases new potentials for perception and action.”6

The “operational” sometimes appears as a qualifying word for “what kind of images,” and sometimes in the limelight for its own sake. However, we are after the operational definitions of material interactions, and in the spirit of the endless chain of turtles as the ontological premise of the world, this means defining the topic of visual culture and its transformation at the level of infrastructure. It takes operations to bring about operations.

The cartography of this chapter helps us establish ways to read our main concept of concern through parallel tracks, turning the concept into a thematically interesting and methodologically useful one, and not merely a linguistic affiliation to the shared term of “operative/operational.” Therefore, we turn to a central part of this chapter and this book—namely, a discussion of the operative ontologies that define the material chains of cultural techniques as they effectively frame the conditions of their own existence. Concepts circulate in theoretical discourse, but they also hit the ground in their situated uses, institutional affordances, and circulation across different disciplines. They also help make sense of what other things hit the ground, from military operations to management procedures, where capitalism specifies itself from a generic, hazy term to site-specific violence and exploitation.7 This is entirely Farocki territory: operations of military targeting as part of the S/M (science and medicine, surveillance and military) histories of images8 and laboring, even enslaved bodies as conditions of existence of institutions of industrial images.9

This chapter develops an arc from a broader link between operative ontologies to the agential realism of Barad, then onto the specific questions where operational images are understood as instrumental grids that operate upon bodies, including a note on racial capitalism through the work of Simone Browne.

Operative Ontologies

“Operative ontologies” is a central term in the field of cultural techniques that emerged from the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) research center in Weimar, Germany, as well as from other scholars such as Thomas Macho, Cornelia Vismann, Markus Krajewski, and Sybille Krämer. In Berlin, the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik10 has been active since the early 2000s, with research on “technical images” as one of its core areas, led by Horst Bredekamp,11 while IKKM has been developed under the guidance of and work by Bernhard Siegert (cultural techniques) and Lorenz Engell (ontography) with a multidisciplinary research program that featured film, media studies, art, (media) philosophy, architecture, and history of science, among the many disciplinary fields of the fellowship program and core staff. IKKM also included Farocki among its visiting fellows. The reason for me to focus on operative ontologies is not because of the coincidence between the terms, or even that Farocki was involved in the work of IKKM for a brief period (his death coincided with his residency period in 2014), but because I believe that operative ontology offers a necessary point of reflection for a rigorous description of operative chains that have a material force: a media theory of the operational.

In Siegert’s definition, operative ontologies shift from metaphysical, ontological questions to more specific, even locatable, ontic operations.12 Methodologically, it does not start from universalizing idealizations, even if part of the work has been concerned with ontological distinctions often hardwired into the (Western) cultural mindset (inside/outside, masculine/feminine, sacred/profane, on/off, signal/noise). Instead, work focuses on unfolding how those seemingly stable binaries have come about. How do they become hardwired into material reality in the first place, and how do further, complex layers of distinctions become operational in, for example, technical media culture? How do symbolic operations become effective as transformers of material reality?

While the terminology includes a reference to the ontic/ontological pair that Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of Being was focused on, the emphasis and ensuing solution reflect a much more methodologically useful take for historical, situated, and material investigations. For Heidegger, the ontic/ontological was already an operationalization of the two terms in order to illuminate two aspects of the theory of Being; the ontic as the regime of the given (the spatiotemporally specific things in their materiality) and the ontological as the (hermeneutic) horizon of understanding and orientation.13 The latter often takes precedence in the readings and applications of Heidegger. For media theoretical uses, the peculiar follow-up term of operative ontologies—like ontologies taking place, spatialized, temporalized, durational, and processual—emerges as central.

As noted by Siegert and philosophers such as Krämer, the hybrid term (oxymoronic to some, as it hints that ontology is in motion instead of a stable reference point) takes place as a seemingly self-referential operation that bootstraps ontological investigations into concrete historical situations. We shift from lofty meditations that happen in the mind to an analysis of the ways in which (media) techniques are primary in the mobilization of objects and subjects in ways that become central to what only emerges secondarily as (metaphysical) concepts.14 The whole process is thus describable as a recursive chain of processes where the operations are serialized; they appear as a series, not as individual events. “So the operation of a door or a switch—these are all techniques that are producing a difference and thereby creating what they differentiate. It’s not given before, but it’s created by these techniques.”15 As per the anthropological influence (not least of which includes Leroi-Gourhan), bodies and technologies, habits, and their environments are interlinked and regulated and produced in specific, situated ways.16 They are recursively linked codetermining instances, where concrete things (organic and nonorganic) and abstractions switch places and regulate each other.

In many ways, this outlines one premise of the method of cultural techniques and how it brings together anthropological concepts (operative chains) and contemporary cultural theory alongside how advanced technological systems of abstraction and complex feedback systems work beyond human bodily techniques. On the one hand, the term “cultural techniques” refers to the materiality of living practices that are irreducible to the concepts that refer to such practices; writing comes before conceptualizing writing, counting before the concept of a number, and so forth per Macho’s definition.17 This is the anthropological trait in cultural techniques, which, however simple it might seem, considers the complex technical abstractions that define our contemporary media culture, from planetary infrastructures of AI to large-scale datasets and mass of images. On the other hand, and in other contexts such as Vismann’s influential take on law and media, cultural techniques as operations, such as drawing a line or plowing agricultural land, are fundamental to producing subjects—but also things like (property) law, as they mark territories, insides and outsides, and so on.18 So here we are, as per recent waves of critical legal theory, moving closer to a territory of law not as a text but as material dynamics existing in the world. And this can be further developed in relation to operative chains of data and abstract territories marked not only by tangible markers but also by immaterial regimes of control.19

Cultural techniques can thus, based on emphasis, relate to symbolic processes, including numbers or counting and then more complex mathematics and logical operations, as well as material transformations where the ontic becomes a literal placeholder for a dynamic set of operations that have the capacity to enact transformations in the real world.20 It becomes a hinge around which abstractions and concepts spin and amplify, and though ontological distinctions are being produced and maintained, they are also contested. In Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s words:

Once again, cultural techniques refer to processing operations that frequently coalesce into entities which are subsequently viewed as the agents or sources running these operations. Procedural chains and connecting techniques give rise to notions and objects that are then endowed with essentialized identities. Underneath our ontological distinctions (if not even our own evolution) are constitutive, media-dependent ontic operations that need to be teased out by means of techno-material deconstruction.21

All of this feeds into a methodology that addresses operations as ontogenetic forces that bring about realities: operative ontologies are understood as productive of material realities. They are thus, as observed later, instrumental to the dynamics of power too.

Operative ontology seems to harbor a reference to the Heideggerian terms already mentioned, but this is not entirely necessary. I would go so far as to claim that despite the terms, the conceptualization and ensuing methodology is not nesting (a secret) Heideggerianism, but speaks to other contemporary formations of material, posthuman, and politically interesting aspects of a situated form of emphasis that the operative/operational can help to frame, including mobilizing ontologies and specific instances such as “images” and, recursively, images about images, images about operational images, and operations that concern other operations. Indeed, other features in the existing literature on cultural techniques emerge from science studies and philosophy of science and technology, such as Bruno Latour and Michel Serres’s work and Karen Barad’s agential realism. For me, the latter is particularly interesting and will be referenced later in this chapter regarding the concept of onto-epistemology. Such approving nods to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and new materialism are in place for various reasons, including reading complex human–object relations, thus entering broader discussions of critical posthumanities.22 Likewise, terms such as “hybrid objects” start to populate the field in ways that seem familiar to decades of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and yet have particular methodological power in helping us think the pragmatics of operations.

For Siegert, rehearsing some core theses of ANT, the term “hybrid object” helps move away from binaries of active subjects versus passive objects. It includes an appreciation of how quasi-objects populate the ontic level of dynamic interactions of materials and signs, people and things. Furthermore, people and things can occasionally switch places based on situations and operations.23 Siegert refers to Serres’s arguments on the collective binding power of the quasi-object: a parasitical object that stands as the third in-between, but in so doing is also mobile and in circulation in dynamic ways, as Serres himself shows in The Parasite. Siegert brings these points into the discussion of media’s theoretically important underpinnings of the quasi-objects’ powers. Hence cultural techniques and the operations that produce ontological distinctions are not merely referring to seemingly stable structures such as architectural elements (like doors opening and closing) or organizing principles (like the grid as a tool of design and projection, addressing and data); they are also mediating middles that circulate with a gravitational pull and an antigravitational push. Operations are sustained by operations and their situated (but shifting) dynamics. Operations are meant to be persuasive.

Siegert points out that, for Serres, this mechanism of circulation of the quasi-object amounts to establishing a theoretical underpinning of the dynamics of collectives and sociability: no thing without a collective, no collective without quasi-objects or things. To build on this point, the quasi-object does the work that becomes central to the developing argument. In short, operative ontologies not only state and list the existence of ontological distinctions but are the engine that mobilizes them in the first place. In this mobilization, they thus become an approach that helps to map them as effective in institutional and other situations—and the techniques themselves (as mentioned) as generative operations. Specific analysis of material practices as reality-creating—both in the material and symbolic sense—has to (self-reflectively) acknowledge that those practices themselves may be in movement. The symbolic and the real are in a tight, interconnected operational link, also reflected in specific case studies of things in literal movements, like the ships that are of constant interest to Siegert as sites of media and cultural techniques.24 From architecture to ships to infrastructure to visual design, such material objects are ontological agents that shift the world through their operations. Operative ontologies imply ontologically weighty operators, subsequently useful to realize both for methodological considerations and their material, ontological significance. Epistemology and ontology go hand in hand.

The use of operative ontologies and the cultural techniques they refer to becomes ontogenetic in ways that are also intuitively present in the versions of STS and new materialism already mentioned. Of the various references mentioned in the development of what Siegert speaks of in terms of operative ontology, Barad’s agential realism has received less attention. I believe, however, it can be particularly useful as theoretical scaffolding for the topic at hand. Barad’s points are especially important as they feed into both a dynamic set of references of how “human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices”25 are entangled—and how this, too, is defined by the onto-epistemological stance to cultural/media analysis. So, while the field of new materialism is quite contentious—often due to misreadings or lumping it together with all things “non-human” or “vitalism,” or even Object-Oriented Ontologies—there is rigorous methodological advice to be found in how to treat matters of knowledge and knowledge of matter in operative ways.

The Operative Apparatus

To briefly pick up the concept of agential realism, it is useful to note that it continues some of the same work as Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of agencement. That concept (translated as an assemblage that does not convey all aspects of the original) designates the material and mobile forces that construct and shape the world in concrete situations without being reducible to mere things here and now. Assemblages are not just tangible things but constellations of semiotic, social, and material flows26 that act, in some ways, similarly to what quasi-objects do. Operative chains and agencement resonate in their ontological implications. As far as their pragmatics go, they enable a way to build up material ways of defining systems of knowledge that operationalize the material world (later examples in this book include geographical territories, colonial expeditions, smart urbanism of driverless cars, AI systems, and so on).

Hence it is easy to see how agential realism links up with the onto-epistemological stance, where knowing and being are inseparable. This is no longer the Heideggerian Being, but one that speaks to material practices in quantum experiments, the messy dynamic ontologies of apparatuses and the feminist materialisms of ethics and performative senses of the word. The scientifically and nonscientifically constitutive (cultural) techniques that have epistemological power are also materially present in this stance that helps to understand the stakes in mobilizing the terminology of operative ontologies: questions of how we know (including how we image, visualize, abstract, grid, map, and diagram) become part of the ontological register too: What objects and processes are involved in and produced by those operations of knowing?

Barad’s pithy definition of onto-epistemology is useful also in qualifying the “onto” in operative ontology: “Knowing is a material practice of engagement as part of the world in its differential becoming.”27 Cultural techniques are defined by intertwining material and symbolic registers of knowing. While Barad’s take is most focused on the scientific instruments of quantum physics as onto-epistemological interventions, the notion of the apparatus that is at play becomes a concept that gains a life of its own. It does this to the extent, I claim, that it specifies the stakes of operative ontologies as far as they also concern operational images as apparatuses. To quote Barad at length:

(1) Apparatuses are specific material-discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that embody human concepts and take measurements); (2) apparatuses produce differences that matter—they are boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced; (3) apparatuses are material configurations/dynamic reconfigurings of the world; (4) apparatuses are themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-activity of the world); (5) apparatuses have no intrinsic boundaries but are open-ended practices; and (6) apparatuses are not located in the world but are material configurations and reconfigurings of the world that re(con)figure spatiality and temporality as well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics (i.e., they do not exist as static structures, nor do they merely unfold or evolve in space and time).28

Naturally, this is geared more toward a science studies focus, but it implies a wider field of applicability of the terms as they travel from one discipline to another. This definition of apparatus that is rather different from the apparatus of classical film theory of the 1970s seems to have it all: apparatuses establish how the world is known but they also reconfigure the world; they produce differences while also being objects that can be known; they are dynamic and shape matter and meaning. This can work as a parallel definition of operative ontology as it starts to address instruments, images, diagrams, charts, tables, and more. In other words, we can start to refer to the operational image as one of onto-epistemological operations as well as cultural techniques, but which have this particular quality, specified in institutional operations when dealing with technical images. We will return to this topic in later chapters when focusing on AI and machine vision (in chapter 2), infrastructures of data and operational aesthetics (in chapter 4), and autonomous vehicles and operationalization of the city29 (in chapter 5) as one of the interconnected techniques of imaging and as skins, layers, and ecologies of traffic sensor data.30

Showing how these insights about the intertwined material and epistemic aspects are already nested inside cultural techniques literature can further emphasize some aspects that are useful to our question about the operational image. The particular pairing of aspects of real and symbolic, material and semiotic, is central to Siegert’s way of approaching the nature of techniques, which also includes discussions related to technical media, such as signal versus noise and how operations on the real/material turn into culturally relevant symbolic statements. While such themes are partly based on signal engineering, they are also questions that media theory has to deal with if we aim to understand quasi-objects that populate the operational field and infrastructure of electronic media.

Importantly, Siegert also addresses visual culture in various case studies of cultural techniques and their operative apparatuses through discussions of maps, diagrams, and grids (as well as paintings) that in many ways then facilitate the connection we must make between operative ontology and the operational image. It is true that one could sum this up with a reminder about the recursive nature of cultural techniques, that on a fundamental level, cultural techniques include writing about writing, singing about singing, but also images about images (referring to the operative chains that define the object/practice at hand).31 Operational images, as we encounter them, are images about images, a point that applies to many of Farocki’s works and Hito Steyerl’s videos too. This recursive pairing comes out also in this book: many of the examples (like the later discussion in chapter 4 concerning Geocinema’s Framing Territories) feature images about (operational) images about territories (that are made into images). This recursive chain skips between images and territorial interventions, where territory refers not only to land but to any planetary surface framed through Earth observation technologies, from satellites to sensors.32

Images can appear as concrete things to see and perceive in control rooms, in scientific papers, as screens, or as portable entities (as photographs have been on glass plates and other material surfaces). However, images also contain epistemic worlds beyond any representational function. They can mediate between concrete pictures and abstractions as diagrams and statistical visualizations do: an example could include visualizations of weather and climate data in analytical graphics since the nineteenth century.33

For Siegert, the abstractions enabled by particular kinds of imaging are where the operational nature of such media becomes most clear. This refers to images that are not necessarily looked at, like painting or art, but ones that are followed, offer guidance, and reveal multiple layers of scientifically relevant abstractions interpreted in pragmatic ways.34 For example, scientific, architectural, and even mathematical models could be seen as operations that are less about mimesis than they are about the pragmatics of following with a necessary “suspension of disbelief.”35

Another instance of following is maps, an example of the navigational image and a theme Farocki was interested in when engaging with computer graphics, games, and animation that facilitates a logistical way of dealing with bodies, media, and territories across virtual and actual space.36 As per Siegert, the map is the territory insofar as they are instruments that enforce epistemic order(s): “Maps are not just representations but also instruments. They are based on mathematical operations, and they constitute a substantial part of a cultural practice.”37 As per one of the core commitments of this book, the mathematics of the (operational) image starts much earlier than digital imaging. These commitments include a problematization of overly simple divisions between analog and digital practices of images. Looking at technical practices brings out this aspect well, articulating the interplay of continuities and discontinuities as the fundamental tension in our case.38 A contemporary architectural imaging environment that is able to integrate multiple scales of knowledge and interaction—not just spatial scales and generative forms, but energy consumption models, land value projections, environmental variables, and so on—is not of the same order as the projective calculation of a map or the photogrammetric measurement of an architectural façade circa 1900. But the longer-term history of the operational is of particular use when trying to understand its institutional role beyond technical capacities. In short, the operational image becomes understood through the frame of cultural techniques; it becomes understood as an operative ontology that establishes a pairing of epistemic and material, of symbolic operations that impact the world (or the “real”).

Such a dynamic link between material and epistemic aspects plays in the discussion concerning the grid, a fitting example in the cultural techniques repertoire of operationalization of ontology as far as mathematics and materiality (visual image/representation) are concerned. The grid sits well as a technique of scale that can mediate scalar shifts of the very reference points it builds up as meaningful units of data while its own structure allows for this fluid, shifting role as an epistemic hinge. For Siegert, following Foucault and Deleuze, the grid exemplifies the key modern concept of order as a spatial arrangement in establishing space as “data and addresses.”39 As Siegert puts it, “In other words, it presupposes the ability to write absence, that is, to deal equally efficiently with both occupied and empty spaces.”40 This ability to deal with binary-coded data or, for example, to encode space/territory into such terms, is an effective part of its pragmatic value. In media historical terms, the grid can be placed as part of the Renaissance-focused history of zero, accountancy, and the perspective of the three-fold of numbers, business, and visuality.41 In Siegert’s take, the focus is on later developments, after the Renaissance, ending up in a modern technological bureaucracy that rings familiar to anyone working with the operative grids of Excel, in those images not primarily meant for human eyes (and for many, for other reasons purely an inhumane practice of administrative media life).

As is obvious from the previous note on scale, there are multiple kinds of grids and their differing kinds of epistemic orders, to echo Foucault in The Order of Things, mostly paying attention to the logic of tables from the Classical period of ordering visibilities to the Modern period of labor, life, and language.42 Siegert’s argument includes examples of different techniques where a quasi-object, an operation that forms images, is employed: from the pictorial veil as construction of visual worlds (Alberti) to territorial control (colonial gridding in the Americas) to twentieth-century administrative grids (including spreadsheets). Indeed, Siegert acknowledges the underpinning question that I am keen to move forward to our discussion of operational ontologies and operational images too: “Can the expansion of Western culture from the sixteenth to the twentieth century be described in terms of a growing totalitarianism of the grid?”43

While this can be easily brushed aside as a generic rhetorical question concerning modern rationality (cue in “the age of the world picture”44), it implies a more specific follow-up task: to investigate the specific techniques that sustain such forms of power, knowledge, exploitation—and even extraction as capitalism and colonialism’s defining operations—that hit the ground in concrete situations.45 Thus the notion of assemblage as part of the operative ontology comes to the fore. Indeed, to discuss grids as navigational tools (longitude and latitude) that hit the ground and reformulate colonial forms of marking absence (where there was none) already condenses a massive story of media, ships, violence, and subjugation into an operational figure where images as maps and diagrams play a central role. They occupy a place as concrete images and as marking effective follow-up claims that are sometimes expressed as law and property, for example. Indeed, as Vismann points out, the Roman law and its variations of res nullius and terra nullius are also operative techniques of property as a special case of imaging—as marking a territory, a scratch, a line, a cut. Grids mark a spot that can be marked as absent and legally to be owned, implying the physical data regimes of property (which returns in the immaterial property that pertains to contemporary digital images in other ways).46 Capitalism loves such legally binding (colonial) fantasies, especially those that can be projected into existing territories and bodies through onto-epistemologically existing images. Contemporary legal theory on data and property would agree whether we deal with assetization or such productions of control regimes as NFTs as a special case of an operative ontology. These fantasies mobilize through symbolic actions, materially effective interventions, that, in the words of David Joselit, are the ready-made reversed: “Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form; the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information.”47 Perhaps the same can be specified to “images” and not just “art.”

Significantly, grids are produced while producing, combining the mathematical and the material elements significant for our case here concerning visual technologies and surfaces that work with or as data. They produce territories and places, as abstract and followed in the concrete—accurate or not, misguiding or not. Grids are defined by their media material sites and institutional uses. In Alberti’s description, the veil is a hybrid at the crossroads of what unfolds as the media technologies of textiles and print.48 Similar crossroads of vertical and horizontal grids define other hybrids that are important in the axis of operational ontologies-cum-operational images: the grid and topography, fantasy and territory, speculation and imaging, industrial production, and standardization. The and marks the spot of connection and combination, transformation and operation. Images work as more than content for eyes: they can have significant legal consequences (a special case of not just programmable images but images that program and format), and they have, as voiced throughout this book, a specific role in architecture and design. As Siegert points out, the significance of grids for modern architecture is demonstrated by such fitting crystallizations as Ernst Neufert’s Bauordnungslehre, “Architects’ Data” as the translation has it, published in 1943, in the midst of National Socialist Germany with Albert Speer’s endorsement. The book, a classic in its field, is shot through by the various operations of grids from drawing aids to space structures, perspective grids to planning grids.49

Standardization of units is a core feature in the history of rationalization of design, architecture, and construction. As Shannon Mattern points out, Neufert’s idea of standards might have emerged from his “experience as a bricklayer,”50 but it became applied to different materials, sizes, and scales. Standardization became a logistical view to space, meant to “facilitate the circulation of ideas, promote easy translation between disparate industries, save on storage space, and facilitate what he called ‘rapid design.’”51 Automation of architectural design becomes even further emphasized with platforms and software suites such as those offered by Autodesk, part and parcel of the contemporary versions of “rapid design.” The ability to model and speculate with geometric forms becomes part of the ability to consider operational images among brick, paper, software-based units, and broadly speaking, “data,” whether expressed as pixels or vectors, or underlying relational databases. Here, several types of lines and forms appear as potential commands, as (software) instruments for the composition of images: polylines, splines, rays, multilines, arcs, spheres, polygons, rectangles, points, helixes, donuts, and, for example, “modeling environments” such as in Blender, AutoCAD, or even SQL platforms for modeling data relationships. Operationality is thus not merely a quality of an image but of bespoke (design) environments too.

As far as grids are concerned, their role as instruments of imaging and visuality feature in the long wake of aftereffects that can be written into a story of data-driven operations: assigning a place for standardized things to be subjugated to, ordered to, removed from, guided toward, or potentially inhabited. Relational databases would be one interesting example in the history of grids, tables, and ordering that becomes integrated into contemporary data operations too. Furthermore, as a special case of what comes to haunt AI from chessboard grids to Go game grids, pixelated space becomes itself the hinge between different operational scales concerning space and temporality:

The fusion of matrix grid and GPS has ensured the global presence of the operationalized deixis first conceived of in connection with the grid- and register-shaped settlements of South America. Indeed, what better way to describe some of the basic aspects of our media culture than to point to the mutual translatability of cartographic grid, topographic grid, planning grid, and imaging grid? Linked with the convertibility of these diverse grids and with corresponding scaling techniques, grids—a formidable cultural technique—have become the basis of a mediatization of space from which hardly anything can escape.52

Such are techniques of the visual, where things are not merely seen but placed and counted and resolved.53 It’s not even clear if we should call it visual anymore—but let us leave that question for the next chapter. Of course, much does escape from the gridded mediatization of space. But people are often convinced of the rational superiority of the grid in the manner of the earlier quip: as much as the map is the territory, so too is the grid the territory, demonstrating the material powers of epistemic operations, including that powerful technique of random-access. Naturally, gaps between pixels, glitches in grids, and resolution hiccups reveal another layer in those visual operations. Maps and grids can be contested, debated, rejected even. Resolutions appear because of such instruments, but they are themselves produced as part of operative chains of resolutions that imply optical resolution and decisions made. In artist Rosa Menkman’s project “Resolution Studies,”54 a creative methodology of reverse-engineering of the forms of standardized visuality leads into proposals for “impossible images”: images that work against the standardized units of reference and constraints of space, time, energy, and signal, or noise or cost. Some are speculative and hypothetical, and some are real in the scientific contexts of images, even if they are not resolvable to the human eye.

So too has the notion of a table of calculation and knowledge undergone a shift when it comes to more recent dataset techniques. The grid of tabular data becomes instead a vector space mobilized in machine learning practices, for as Adrian Mackenzie puts it, “Vectorization remaps the grid of the table into the expanding dimensions of vector space,”55 which becomes a significant change in what data practices are effectively present in contemporary machines, and which ones deal with visualizable structures of data, or what is contained in particular representational surfaces: “In the vectorized and matrix-form practices of vector space, machine learning produces for the first time a meta(s)table volume that cannot be surfaced on a page or a screen.”56

Operative ontologies are thus ways to understand these shifts of register between visuality and data—different modes of addressability function in grid-based and other visual data systems, forming one basis for computation.57 Instead of merely focusing on when operational images became digital, we are dealing with a legacy of techniques of power that operate on territories, (literally) hitting the ground. When they do, they operate on bodies. While chapter 3 deals with similar themes in understanding space through established planes and lines, the final section of this chapter turns to the politics of operations, highlighting some existing work that has already tackled the political history of logistics of space.

Operations Hitting the Ground

Much of the discussion on and around operational images reveals a distinct interest in topographic territories and living bodies as they are defined in images that are not considered mimetic or even representational. Instead, such instrumental images work according to the onto-epistemologically effective apparatus of operations: guiding, putting in place, transforming into data, measuring, analyzing, diagramming, and so on.58 The history of photography has already mapped some of these operations in effective ways, from the Bertillon system of photographic identification for police to facial recognition urbanism, from military targeting systems to contemporary border surveillance drones, from hand-drawn maps to the Global Positioning System, and from the nineteenth-century invention of the statistical distribution of averages to the twenty-first-century machine learning and training sets. The infrastructures of imaging become grounded in a history of media that is one of extended grids and addresses all the way to the bottom. Grids are, as Sean Cubitt suggests, “visualisations of proto-data media.”59 Thus they are both concrete instruments as instrumental images—“spreadsheets, databases and geographical information systems”60—as well as infrastructures of knowledge. Furthermore, it is important to note the variety of other techniques of grids and resolution: as a special case of linking geography and climate data, climate model simulations, such as in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, is a further example where data enables epistemic projections that do not lend themselves to be rendered on the axis of “good” and “evil” politics.61

A political history of operational images needs to address the specificity of the cases as per timelines and dates, uses, and institutions. Now images might be automatically time-coded and stamped even if they circulate removed from a historical and located specificity, a theme noted by Farocki and even more so by Allan Sekula, who coined this as the fundamental characteristic of photographic images: traffic in images that is also traffic in currency—or as will be seen later in chapter 5 on autonomous vehicles, traffic as data and currency.62 As traffic concerns the interchangeability of goods and bodies, we see the potential to connect this body of research with analyses of racial capitalism and its longer histories, including the role of grids and diagrams as logistical media. This lineage of arguments can specify the (briefly mentioned) totalitarianism of the grid in ways that speak to a crucial area of interest to both operative ontologies and operational images.

In the contemporary context, much of this work gravitates toward operations of surveillance. This is understandable considering the amount of attention facial recognition systems have received and how their design—from training sets to institutional use—has built upon existing racial discrimination and other forms of direct and indirect violence and “engineered inequity.”63 As is clearly articulated in Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, questions of diagrams and the broader visual culture of surveillance are to be read against the racialized backdrop that also anchors image practices. But these are also nonrepresentational techniques of operative ontologies and act, like in such infamous cases as the Brookes slave ship image of 1787, as diagrammatic optimization mechanisms, part of the logistical plan of the Middle Passage. As Browne underlines, this is where the “violence of slavery crudely reduced to geometric units”64 becomes clear through the organizing description of an image of a stowage plan. Enslaved black bodies, ships, and routes become easily abstracted into a logistical operation—and a logistical image—while at the same time, those logical operations (can) become historicized, locatable, and in this sense, embodied. The one does not have to dismiss the other; an analysis of images as they incorporate logistical operations can include recursive reflections on what sort of images about subjects are in play. To quote Browne:

The Brookes diagram, “in serving the cause of the injured African,” offers an overview of the stowage plan of the slave merchant’s ship and forces me to reflect on my own surveillance practices in reading the archive of transatlantic slavery. The slave ship schematic is clinical in its architectural logic and provides an almost aerial viewpoint, overlooking the tiny black figures set to represent the enslaved drawn “like so many cartoon figures,” as Spillers describes. What does it mean that I now look to this plan, but not from the elevated and seemingly detached manner as it was first intended to be looked upon?65

While operational images are not primarily representational, they can also turn to fundamental questions of subjectivity and operations of knowledge, as Browne shows. For example, she refers to Donna Haraway’s description of the universalizing God’s eye trick of the view from above that is often associated with aerial photography but is also part of other objectifying practices of taking distance, of remote sensing. There is, too, another layer that cuts through such diagrammatic images. Instead of optical surveillance, images such as one sees in various kinds of diagrams are part of the operative chain of logistics and already represent a shift from optics of surveillance to calculated measurement and optimization. This also implies that an important aspect is not only what is in the image (and its condensation of centuries of the violence of slavery) but also how it is institutionalized: images that define, for example, the role of merchant ships and routes across the Atlantic, the West and East India Companies, or then the subsequent national institutions or other arrangements part and parcel of the logistics of racial capitalism.

Here, I am mostly narrating existing positions made clear by Browne, Ruha Benjamin, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten. Harney and Moten have argued that the link between the (Atlantic) slave trade and the birth of modern logistics is a central part of how we should look at operational aspects of capitalism. Their argument refers to specific practices, but also to how this becomes the ontic operation that defines modernity at large:

Modernity is sutured by this hold. This movement of things, unformed objects, deformed subjects, nothing yet and already. This movement of nothing is not just the origin of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity will have at its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this interdicted, outlawed social life of nothing.66

Without going into further detail, such arguments also resonate with others, including Anna Tsing’s writing about the plantation system as the production of colonial operations where enslaved people and plants were placed on grids of data, making them “self-contained and interchangeable units.”67

Grids, Grids, Grids

Logistical media of capitalism takes place in different material formations. Some of them are ships as part of diagrammatics that relate people to space and vectors of transport. Some are surface territories, grids linking labor and agricultural production. Such operations of data are central elements in a political history of cultural techniques of operational images: the grid marks both a place and nothing. The operations of data define this particular logic of the image as it defines the movement of nothing where unformed objects and deformed subjects are held. The operative lies in that link, too—the image as logistics, and the image as institutionally operationalized, as per one of the key arguments in this book. To be sure, this is not a claim that the logic of the diagram is determined and limited to racial capitalism or a generic issue with abstractions, but rather a statement that we can offer much more nuanced ways of understanding the shifting institutional uses for such concatenations that define how images and data are operationalized in a variety of historical practices.

Aptly, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson coin their proposal to analyze contemporary capitalism as a politics of operations. And while their arguments emerge from a slightly different direction than this chapter, which has been working through the centrality of operative ontologies in media theory, I want to claim there is a resonance here that can be teased out to facilitate some moves across media theory and the cultural theory of racial capitalism and analysis of (images of) territorial formations. Mezzadra and Neilson argue for the usefulness of focusing on operations; it helps to facilitate the back-and-forth between abstractions such as capitalism and their concrete events as they regulate, guide, and reconfigure bodies and territories. Their trope of the “image of capital ‘hitting the ground’”68 is central but in ways that imply that operations also format (reconfigure) the so-called ground instead of it being a metaphysical entity. The ground is ontic before it becomes ontological. Mezzadra and Neilson define the ground “in a sense that is at once material and prospectively constructed as an operative surface on which capital intervenes,” through different means that take into account “the specificity of spatial, social, legal, and political formations with which capital must grapple as it becomes enmeshed in dense constellations of flesh and earth.”69 The three main operations Mezzadra and Neilson focus on are extraction, logistics, and finance. None of these, as you can see, is particularly about images. However, Mezzadra and Neilson’s argument also becomes important when considering what the operative/operational is in the context of the broader landscape of contemporary theory. It maps onto the earlier discussions about operative ontologies and onto-epistemologies and includes one of the available routes to expand on operations of racial capitalism. Certainly, some of this comes close to what has already been mentioned and what will be developed in terms of the logistical image70 while also laying out some other coordinates for us.

Operations are complex. They do not imply a simple causal link or the application of generic principles to specific situations. On the contrary, operations incorporate feedback loops and complexity as they take place among a dynamic situation of living bodies and ground surfaces. Indeed, Mezzadra and Neilson argue that operations should not be “reduced to a device of ‘techno-economical organization’ [they here refer to Jean-Luc Nancy] as if it were a simple relation of cause and effect, or input and output.”71 While the conditional statement of “if/then” is easily seen as the backbone of the operational rationality present in the visual narrative offered by Farocki and cruise missiles, we cannot reduce the operational to being operationalized in such simple terms. Instead, as Mezzadra and Neilson continue, we need to see the operation as one that brings together activity and potential, facilitating a grounded view of the workings of capital.72 This also implies a certain notion of agency—an agential realism even perhaps—which does not dispense with multiple levels of abstractions but looks for situated hinges where operations take place as agencement: “capital in action . . . between conceptual skies and empirical battlegrounds . . .”73

For Mezzadra and Neilson, the argument about the politics of operations relates to discussions about capitalism both as an abstraction and a dynamic defined by local operations with planetary repercussions. This involves asking what the role of such abstractions is and how they relate to spatial and social practices and situations, arguments about geographical differences, and broader heterogeneity in ways that avoid universalizing notions—even if operating across vast scales. For Mezzadra and Neilson, the focus on operations allows for recognizing capitalism as an engine of difference while acknowledging the usefulness of such general terms of reference. One can see there is a similar background drive, as per the idea of the ontic and the ontological, with the ontological being defined only through actual ontic operations. The operative powers of the ontic are not mere actualizations of the abstract ontological, but this allows us to appreciate the constitutive power of what an operation is: it has an existence of its own across spatial, social, and technical components. In other words, it also becomes historicized in ways that start to sound like an STS-type of an analysis of the life cycle of a technical project or a dynamic of an institution (a stack of turtles that can be called infrastructure too):

However automatic or given the results of an operation might appear to be, when we look at it from this perspective, there is always a back story, a drama of frictions and tensions in which the efficacy of the operation appears far more fragile and elusive than might otherwise be assumed. Approaching the operation from the heuristic point of view of this interval provides a kind of freeze-frame that brings into relief the combination of social activities, technical codes, and devices that make an operation possible. Such an approach also allows us to look at the outcome of the operation without taking it for granted. For us, then, an operation is a process with a beginning and an end; a process that accomplishes something without necessarily yielding a material thing; and a process that impinges on others, affecting possibilities and establishing multifarious and not necessarily predictable connections. This is why, in the analysis that follows, we are not merely interested in focusing on operations in the singular moments but also consider how they concatenate to link up and contribute to the fabrication of the world.74

The recursive links between extraction, logistics, and finance are discussed as histories of labor, territory, and capital. Could these histories be the ones that frame operational images too? Operational images of labor, territory, and capital? In any case, these are also the histories of conflict, underlining that frictions underpin the operational smoothening of logistics, optimization, grids, and scaling. One can also observe the politically useful emphasis on reading points of inoperation and breaking down as sites of struggle,75 and even the analytical angle to the concatenation is useful. The recursive links between these operative spheres can be seen as an operative ontology, one where the media theoretical notion becomes incorporated into an analysis of contemporary capitalism that then becomes itself one “ground” against which operational images are to be viewed and reviewed.

In the broadest of terms, and what will come to define some arguments and angles later in this book, the trio of operations—extraction, logistics, and finance—are defined by how geographical territories are reformatted in histories of extractivism that proceed both as material property and data-driven operations, linking the two beyond metaphorical references: “New fields and quarries are opened in the landscapes and spreadsheets of contemporary capital.”76 Extractivism is linked to the production of material and legal territories in logistical terms giving rise to various spatial arrangements such as zones (e.g., Special Economic Zones) and (logistical) corridors that redraw borders and routes anew. The imprint of extractivism is doubled in the military and colonial histories of logistics that becomes a fundamental characteristic of the contemporary planetary condition, both in terms of material transport and the logistical media (data, software)77 underpinning this materiality. In Deborah Cowen’s words, “Logistics is not only about circulating stuff but sustaining life.”78 Financial operations are involved not only in the myriad ways discussed above but also with their own futurity as per particular trading and contract types like derivatives.79 Hence, it is fair to say that various spatial–logistical formations are also conditioned by temporal futurity enacted in financial terms, continuing what Sekula referred to as the universalizing currency trope of “traffic in photographs” with the twenty-first-century logistical media and its operational images. We trade in operational images, which are increasingly an operational element in the financialization of earth grounds and undergrounds as commodities.80 Here, the point about operative ontologies becomes rerouted through images and finance as they hit the ground, where an ontology of “ground” is only established through operative techniques such as remote sensing coupled together with the scaffolding of finance and extraction industries tying a knot between cultural techniques research and the contemporary analysis of capitalism via operational images.

Operations are where images of landscapes, property, and so on, are sustained and mobilized. Though this can be approached through the trio of extractivism, logistics, and finance, that does not need to be it: other operational spheres and scales of references can be included and addressed in the rest of this book. Forms of techniques (that are other than military targeting or the even broader aerial view and photography)81 are central in understanding the operative ontologies at play: images materialize at specific sites and spatial–logistical formations, and they are operative in specific institutional practices (military, finance, extraction industries, scientific remote sensing, landscape surveys, architecture, and planning, to name some).

In this sense, my argument concerns the mobilization of the terms “operation” and “operative” as a methodological hinge that facilitates a discussion of situated material practices with an epistemological force as per operative ontologies and the work of Karen Barad. In addition, it concerns how operational images are implied in a range of technological practices that define the contemporary moment. And while there is a need to look more carefully at the longer media archaeology of operational logic82 that emerges in the contexts of operations research and scientific “operationalism,” we already face ongoing and intensive debates about the specific uses and range of the operational: to measure, to guide, to analyze, to mention a few of the characterizing features where the operational image functions as a logistical apparatus, one that reformats territories and bodies to its own onto-epistemological needs.

Dealing with operative ontologies as a frame for operational images helps us to build a stronger theoretical case for further discussion: the notion of operation has become a central term in the long twentieth century of military tactics and scientific management, and it has featured in several cultural and media theory contexts over recent years. This chapter proposes that operational images can be understood as onto-epistemological knowledge instruments, able to trigger repercussions across a multitude of scales by combining epistemic abstractions with site-specific impacts, such as those involved in the remote sensing of extraction sites.83 Moreover, ontic operations are part of all sorts of contemporary mechanisms and institutions such as trade and transactions, finance and property (contract operations), thereby linked to those genealogies of (racial) capitalism already mentioned. These are also the institutional contexts where one can start to draw out some of the contemporary versions of cultural techniques: if anthropotechnics is fundamental to establishing any reference point of the ontological “human”; temporal techniques of calendars, measurement, synchronization for establishing “time”; and grids, ruling, scales, and measurement (again) for establishing “space,”84 we can add complex recursive layers—and we will continue to formulate this in the next chapter—that also pay attention to contemporary forms of posthuman agency, data regimes, complex computational infrastructures, and territorial management that have both material and informational dimensions.