In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective

Examples of so-called anti- and post-foundational philosophy are given in the preface to Oliver Marchart’s introductory volume Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 1–10. Briefly speaking, such thought,as proffered by the philosophers under discussion, rejects the idea of a given and stable metaphysical ground and revolves around Heideggerian metaphors of abyss and ground, as well as the absence of ground. Ernesto Laclau describes the experience of contingency and groundlessness as a possible experience of freedom.

Peter Ifland, “The History of the Sextant”; see →.

Erwin Panofsky, “Die Perspektive alssymbolische Form,” in Erwin Panofsky:Deutschsprachige Aufsätze II, ed. Wolfgang Kemp et al. (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1998), 664—758.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. H.Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261. See →.

Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso, 1991).

The following quote by Elsaesser can be seen as blueprint for this paper, whose inspiration derives from an informal conversation with the author: “This means that stereoscopic images and the 3-Dmovie are part of the new paradigm, which is turning our information society into a control society and our visual culture into a surveillance culture. The movie industry, civil society and the military sector are all united in this surveillance paradigm, which, as part of a historic process, seeks to replace “monocular vision,” the way of seeing that has defined Western thought and action for the last 500 years. It is this means of seeing that gave rise to a wide range of innovations like panel painting, colonial seafaring and Cartesian philosophy, as well as the whole concept of projecting ideas, risks, chancesand courses of action into the future. Flight simulators and other types ofmilitary technology are part of a new effort to introduce 3-D as the standard means of perception—but the development goes even further to include surveillance. This encompasses an entire catalog of movements and behaviors, all of which are intrinsically connected to the monitoring, steering and observation of ongoing processes, and which delegate or outsource what was once referred to as introspection, self-awareness and personal responsibility.”Thomas Elsaesser, “The Dimension of Depth and Objects Rushing Towards Us. Or: The Tail that Wags the Dog. A Discourse on Digital 3-D Cinema.” See →.

Eyal Weizman,“The Politics of Verticality.” See →.

Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture vol. 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 29. See →.

Dieter Roelstraete and Jennifer Allen both describe this new normality from different perspectives in very good texts. Dieter Roelstraete “(Jena Revisited) Ten Tentative Tenets,” e-flux journal, issue 16 (May, 2010). See →; and Jennifer Allen, “That Eye, The Sky,” Frieze 132 (June–August 2010).

Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

In fact, the perspective of the floating camera belongs to a dead man. Most recently, a dehumanization (or posthumanization) of the gaze is perhaps nowhere as literally allegorized as in the film Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé,2010), where, for most of the film, a disembodied point of view endlessly drifts over Tokyo. This gaze penetrates any space, moving without constraint and with unrestricted mobility, looking for a body in which to biologically reproduce itself and reincarnate. The point of view in Enter the Void is reminiscent of the gaze of a drone. But instead of bringing death, it is looking to recreate its own life. To this end, the protagonist basically wants to hijack a fetus. But the film is also very picky about this procedure: mixed race fetuses get aborted in favor of white ones.There are more issues that link the movie to reactionary breeding ideologies.Floating and biopolitical policing are mixed into a computer-animated obsession with superior bodies, remote control, and digital aerial vision. The floating gaze of the dead man thus literally echoes Achille Mbembe’s powerful description of necropower: necropower regulates life through the perspective of death. Could these tropes allegorized in a single (and frankly, god-awful) movie be expanded into a more general analysis of disembodied hovering point of views? Do the aerial views, drone perspectives, and 3D dives into abysses stand in for the gazes of “dead white males,” a worldview which lost its vitality, yet persists as an undead but powerful tool to police the world and control its own reproduction?

Paraphrasing Elsaesser’s notion of the “military-surveillance-entertainment complex.”

Assuming there is no ground, even those on the bottom of hierarchies keep falling.

These techniques are described in Manessh Agrawala, Denis Zorin, and Tamara Munzer, “Artistic multiprojection rendering,”in Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering Techniques 2000, ed. Bernard Peroche and Holly E.Rusgmaier (London: Springer-Verlag,2000), 125–136; Patrick Coleman and Karan Singh, “Ryan: Rendering Your Animation Nonlinearly Projected,” in NPAR ’04: Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Non-photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NewYork: ACM Press, 2004), 129–156; Andrew Glassner, “Digital Cubism, part 2,” IEEE Computer Graphics and. Applications, vol. 25, no. 4 (July 2004): 84–95; Karan Singh, “A Fresh Perspective,” in Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering Techniques 2000,ed. Bernard Peroche and Holly E. Rusgmaier (London: Springer-Verlag, 2000), 17–24; Nisha Sudarsanam, CindyGrimm, and Karan Singh, “Interactive Manipulation of Projections with a CurvedPerspective,” Computer Graphics Forum 24 (2005): 105–108; and Yonggao Yang, Jim X. Chen, and Mohsen Beheshti,“Nonlinear Perspective Projections and Magic Lenses: 3D View Deformation,” IEEEComputer Graphics Applications, vol. 25, no. 1 (January/February 2005):76–84.

Hito Steyerl, “Is a Museum a Factory?” e-flux journal, issue 7 (June, 2009). See →.

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum,1972), 43.

Taking the cue from GilLeung’s reflection, “After before now: Notes on In Free Fall.” See →.