War Metabolism and Operative Film

Recent colonial endeavors are structured by a spatial logic of occupation in which the large-scale destruction of built environments is coupled with the successive investment of neoliberal capital in their reconstruction. In the spring of 2022, the northwestern coast of the Sea of Azov came under sustained bombardment as the Russian Federation advanced its occupation of the region. One of the most dramatic sites of this assault was the industrial Ukrainian city of Mariupol. As a result of the siege, marked by extraordinary high causalities,1 approximately 93 percent of buildings, along with much of its medical infrastructure, were destroyed or severely damaged. The rapid demographic collapse produced by this initial phase of occupation prepared the ground for a second phase—officially termed “reconstruction” by the occupying authorities. In the essay “With Bricks, Not Bombs,” researcher and activist Ksenia Rybak analyzes visual propaganda, satellite images, and developers’ renderings to observe how post-hostilities construction operates as a means of “embedding the city into the body of the empire,” while simultaneously engendering new forms of social disintegration.2 Under the new “reconstruction plan,” even residents who could verify property ownership were relocated to compensatory housing on the city’s margins, while central coastal zones were designated for elite development, attracting investment from Russia’s middle and upper classes under exceptionally favorable credit conditions.3

Despite differences in geography, scale, and geopolitical configuration, analyses by researchers and activists identify a similar nexus of destruction and reconstruction in the settler-colonial dynamics of the war on Palestine. Examining visualizations of new residential quarters in Mariupol, Rybak identifies a formal and ideological affinity with the “Riviera of the Middle East” fantasies promoted by the US administration. In parallel, comparisons between the Israeli government’s Gaza 2035 plan and the so-called Trump Riviera proposal point to an intimate entanglement of war and capitalist development, in which colonial destruction is reframed as a frontier for investment. The language of “modernization” and “economic peace,” far from enabling Palestinian self-determination, serves instead to consolidate an architecture of control and intensify dependency within a settler-colonial regime.4

What emerges across these contexts is not a sequence of war followed by reconstruction, but a single operational field in which destruction and production are co-constitutive. Already in his early writings and films, filmmaker and activist Harun Farocki foregrounded the formative role of the organization of labor, structured through its division, in this dynamic, which conceals the overall ruinous effects of the circuits of capital accumulation. Occupation, in this sense, functions as a spatial technique that reorganizes environments through a distributed chain of actions, images, and material interventions. From the remote operation of military drones to construction work on redevelopment sites, a continuous chain of operations sustains colonial transformation: the same circuits that dismantle infrastructures also organize their reconfiguration. Owing their particular articulations to contemporary militarized oligarchies, various projects of colonial “reconstruction” fall within the broader trajectory of Western techno-culture, theorized in Marxist thought as the homology between production and destruction.5

This essay examines social intelligence and modes of mediation underlying this production-destruction nexus and its political economy through a materialist genealogy of the concept of “operation.” Primarily, we investigate the account of operation that took shape in Harun Farocki’s theory and practice of operative film, developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although his projects—to an extent—fall into two groups, with some focusing primarily on labor and others on warfare, they foreground a dialectical connection between the two, which one of his later texts describes as the “connection between a productive force and a destructive force.”6 In this sense, the intertitle of his 2001 Eye/Machine associates operative images (operative Bilder)—machine vision used by devices such as unmanned drones to carry out technical operations without human intervention—with the gradual abolition of “visual work” both on the assembly line and in warfare. Yet already three decades earlier, in response to the Vietnam War, Farocki had developed operative film (operierender Film)—a concept and practice marking a radically different endeavor. Confronted with the “inflationary television representations of war” in Vietnam, he mobilized a Marxist approach to moving image that rejected representation in favor of intervening in the relations of production and the division of labor structuring the operations of war.7 Operative film became for Farocki a tool of leftist agitation aimed at revealing and disrupting the vicious economy of the “production of destruction.”8

Contemporary with his film Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki’s 1969 text “to scientize agitation and politicize science” engages in a search for social agency that leads to operativism—the aesthetic and political approach developed by the Soviet writer and newspaper editor Sergei Tretyakov.9 Yet the concept, mediated through Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer,” does not pass unchanged: while operativism in Tretyakov’s work participated in the Soviet Union’s forced collectivization of 1928–30—entangled with the large-scale exploitation of the peasantry and the exhaustion of land—Farocki’s reception selectively reactivates it under radically different historical conditions. We argue that this idealizing and partial appropriation, despite overlooking the entanglements of Tretyakov’s project with Soviet extractivism, provided conceptual tools for disrupting the operational chains of the militarized capitalism of Farocki’s day. Our text thus traces these two historically linked yet fundamentally divergent trajectories of operativism, using the production-destruction nexus as its analytical lens.

Operativism and Soviet Extractivism

Farocki’s title “to scientize agitation and politicize science” proposes two coordinated infinitive constructions that omit any explicit subject or modal framing. This grammatical suspension emphasizes processuality. It performs the entanglement between politics and knowledge as an operative relation. Agitation is never true in itself, Farocki announces. It is true “from someone for someone.” Composed entirely in lowercase letters, the text relinquishes conventional typographic hierarchies in order to foreground its programmatic intent: the articulation of a pedagogy of operative thinking.

When introducing the notion of operative film, the filmmaker’s first reference is to the Soviet writer, playwright, and poet Sergei Tretyakov:

tretyakov coined the terms “operative” and “informative” to distinguish between literary genres. the agitation film, or any component of agitation, is operative. the informative film can speak of anything, of its own speechlessness as much as of a political issue. the operative film can only speak of what is or will become a component of the operation … the theory of the operative film and the theory of the operation are intertwined.

Adapting Tretyakov’s theory of operativism to film, Farocki’s aim is to resocialize the agency of technological operations in a double sense. First, owing to its Marxist orientation, operative film intervenes in the social relations of its own production and circulation. From the Latin agitāre, “agitation” retains a double valence: at once kinetic, setting things in motion, and affective-political, inciting, mobilizing, and unsettling. An agitation does not merely represent its conditions but operates within them: in this way, operativism is the theory and practice of a nonrepresentational mediation. Second, for Farocki, this approach is meant to deactivate the destructive effects of the productive force. For Tretyakov, however, the production-destruction nexus appears as a blind spot—it is thus necessary for us to reconstruct this connection by situating the early articulation of operativism in its historical configuration.

Tretyakov based the theory of operativism on his experience as a standing member of a Soviet collective farm—Kommayak (The Communist Lighthouse) in the North Caucasus. From July 1928 to August 1930, he undertook four extended visits to the kolkhoz (collective farm), which resulted in two anthologies of essays, Vyzov: Collective Farm Essays (1930) and A Month in the Countryside: Operative Essays (1931). Tretyakov arrives at the collective farm amid major political and economic transformations in Soviet agricultural policy affecting rural populations and the countryside more broadly.10 After the collapse of the Russian Empire, agriculture—the dominant sector of the early postimperial economy—was expected to supply the resources necessary for the progressive technological advancement of industry under socialist modernity. After the revolution and up until 1928, the Communist Party facilitated the “voluntary socialization of agriculture,” which included the development of private farms and the consequent extraction of gained surplus by the state.11 With the introduction of Stalin’s Five-Year-Plan in 1928, however, voluntary socialization changed to the centralized project of accelerated forced collectivization.

The new doctrine mandated the compulsory incorporation of each peasant into a state-run collective farm—an institution tasked with provisioning the cities and producing export grain to finance the import of foreign technologies necessary for industrialization. After the grain procurement crisis of 1927–28, the Soviet bureaucracy recast the collective farm as a model of both economic and administrative reliability.12 In his analysis of Stalinism as colonialism, Marxist sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner writes: “Collectivization meant the creation of huge plantations whose advantage was not greater efficiency but a more effective system of centralized control over the peasantry than would have been possible had they remained on their 25 million individual farms.”13

Often facing peasant resistance on site, collectivization was implemented with “administrative coercion, police measures, and massive deportations,” involving the armed security services (OGPU) and special brigades.14 In the period of Tretyakov’s visits, North Caucasus became a charged area of social revolts, often led by female peasants—the so-called “women’s riots” (bab’i bunty).15 One of the essays in Vyzov considers the capacity of the local newspaper, edited by Tretyakov, to pacify the unrest wreaked by such women’s riots at their collective farm.16 As Alla Vronskaya notes, by 1929 the villages surrounding Kommayak were nonetheless collectivized. As a result, “fifteen collective farms were united to form the combine Challenge (Vyzov), under Kommayak’s leadership.”17

Operativism must be approached dialectically, in relation to its complex historical conditions: as a radical materialist revision of Western aesthetics—yet one developed within one of the most violent technocratic projects of socialist modernity. Tretyakov presented his concise formulation of operativism in the text “The Writer and the Socialist Village.” It was initially delivered as a talk in Berlin, in the working-class district of Wedding. Tretyakov, born in Goldingen—today Kuldīga, Latvia—spoke and published in German and in 1930 traveled to the Weimar Republic for two months of lectures and presentations. Employing much of the Stalinist vocabulary, the tonality of his text is charged with militarized rhetoric: “In the era of the Five-Year Plan, literature becomes an actual weapon in the revolutionary, operative activity of the huge masses who have been summoned to socialist construction.”18

In the new extractivist regime of the collective farm, artistic practice is embedded in the relations of production. Operativism marks a decisive departure from reportage, which Tretyakov had previously theorized in his role as cultural worker and factographer.19 The operative author is no longer merely informative, but one who, as Tretyakov insists, participates in the life of the material:

I call participation in the life of the material [Stoff] itself an operative relation [operative Beziehungen]. To put it simply: inventing something important is belletristic novelism; discovering something important is reportage; constructing something important is operativism [Operativismus].20

He edited a newspaper serving the surrounding communities, contributed as a kolkhoz correspondent to the central press, coordinated radio broadcasts and mobile film screenings, and maintained administrative communication between the commune and Moscow. Alongside these processes of mediation, Tretyakov also turned to the camera as an operative tool. With his Leica, he produced a vast archive of more than two thousand images—a collection largely lost following his arrest and execution in 1937. Maria Gough analyzes in detail the few surviving photographs, preserved in contemporary publications in Soviet newspapers, highlighting a parallel between Tretyakov’s literary and photographic techniques: the emphasis on the de-professionalization of both practices. These kolkhoz photographs perform his “anti-aesthetic, functionalist theory of photography.”21

A photo by Sergei Tretyakov of tractor drivers sharing a meal, ca. 1930. From Gough, Radical Tourism.

The concept of operative authorship thus requires abandoning the passive position of the spectator or reporter—“the man at the desk”—who observes reality from a distance. Instead, operativism positions the artist within an organizational and constructive function in the material processes of the farm’s everyday operations. Tretyakov drew on the German term “Stoff” (material) to refer to the productive heterogeneity in which soil, animal fertility, tractors, and the peasant labor force merge into each other. The problem of Stoff recurs in Tretyakov’s essay “Processual Film Observation.” There, he proposes using the film camera over extended periods at the same location in order to record—and subsequently communicate—the progressive “growth” of the collective farm. This procedure operates the material’s rapid economic and infrastructural modernization.22 Authorship is thus understood in its mediating function within the arrangement of social metabolism (Stoffwechsel) between human labor and the environment, enabling the increased productivity of bodies and lands to be extracted for socialist construction.23 “The professional writer incorporates himself organically into the work of construction.”24 Here, authorship becomes an operative relation.

Tretyakov’s two-month Weimar Republic book tour was attended by a wide range of leftist intellectuals, including Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracauer, and Georg Lukács. The responses to his radical experiment in abolishing traditional literary forms were largely chilly, if not outright scathing—with the notable exception of Benjamin’s later intervention in “The Author as Producer,” a text Farocki uses as reference for operative film. In this 1934 address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, Benjamin insisted that the inscription of artistic practice into relations of production necessitates a revision of the aesthetic categories through which it is conceived. Rejecting “genre” and “style,” he therefore writes:

Rather than asking, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I would like to ask, “What is its position in them?” This question directly concerns the function the work has within the … relations of production of its time. It is concerned, in other words, directly with the … technique of works.25

The notion of technique (Technik) in Benjamin however does not merely relate to a set of tools needed for creating an artwork. It can be reduced neither to, as Miriam Hansen has observed, “technical devices,” nor to what in the English language is designated as “technology.” Instead, Benjamin’s Technik foregrounds “forms of collective praxis and sensory organization.”26 Following Marx, it abolishes the nature-culture dualism, pointing to the historically specific modalities of relations between machines, humans, nature, and perception. Here, Benjamin emphasizes that technique is not “the mastery of nature” but “the interplay between nature and human.”27

Since the cruelties of collectivization were concealed by the Soviet authorities until the collapse of the USSR,28 Benjamin—like many of his West European contemporaries—takes Soviet artistic discourse at face value and celebrates the collectivization of literature. In this light, “The Author as Producer” overlooks a crucial aspect of the artwork’s technique: it operates not only within relations of production but also within relations of destruction. One of Tretyakov’s Leica images shows a hand depositing a folded ballot into a locked box marked “purge” (chistka), beneath a sign reading “For the purge of the commune apparatus.”29 Such procedures enabled members of the collective to vote one another off the farm, inscribing mechanisms of exclusion and discipline within the very fabric of Vyzov—its Stoff. What largely escaped the attention of many of the leftist intellectuals who constituted Tretyakov’s Weimar audience, however, was the extent to which Soviet modernization and construction were underwritten by forced labor. The expansion of the Gulag system—intensified in the wake of collectivization—became a central, if disavowed, condition of possibility for this project of large-scale modernization and operativism. Akin to the vicious logic of today’s colonial “reconstruction” projects, the socialist construction of the late 1920s and 1930s naturalized the violent ruination of the social fabric and the built environments by presenting it as subsumed within a seemingly objective process of progressive development.

A photo by Sergei Tretyakov of a “purge” ballot box, ca. 1930. From Gough, Radical Tourism.

Alienation and Agitation

In the second half of the twentieth century, operativity had been imbricated in military rationalities of destruction—from Operations Research in the West to analogous techniques in the Soviet context.30 Farocki, like Benjamin, could not do justice to operativism’s extractivist genealogy—and thus refunctioned it for a distinct political objective. Against this background of Cold War–era militarization of industry and knowledge, he redefines the function of operative film within social metabolism:

a materialist art or film theory asks: how does a work relate to the relations of production? does it stand in reactionary opposition to them, or does it intend their disruption? with regard to film in left agitation, one may initially answer: it aims to disrupt them.31

Operative film assumes—following Benjamin’s terminology—a technique of disruption. A film’s position in the relations of production does not necessarily advance their progressive development (as in Tretyakov); rather, it can become the point at which their interrelations fracture. Put differently, such a technique seeks to disrupt production in order to disrupt destruction. This strategic orientation crystallizes in Farocki’s work in Inextinguishable Fire (1969), which examines the role of the chemical industry in supplying compounds for the aggressor during the Vietnam War and the ecocidal devastation of human and nonhuman life that ensued in the region. Here, for film to become operative means that it intervenes in the metabolic circuits linking production and destruction.

Inextinguishable Fire was produced by Farocki for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the West German state television company, which allowed it to reach a broadcast audience. The opening scene shows the filmmaker seated frontally to the camera, addressing the problem of mass-mediated war imagery. His stylized posture as a news presenter critically estranges the very institution of television that provided the film’s platform.32 Farocki reads the testimony of Thai Binh Danh, a victim of a US napalm attack in South Vietnam, delivered before the International War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm. This legal framework is a reference to the Russell Tribunal—a “people’s tribunal” convened by Bertrand Russell in 1966 and chaired by Jean-Paul Sartre, with the participation of intellectuals and activists including James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Günther Anders, Gisèle Halimi, Tariq Ali, and Peter Weiss. The tribunal gathered witnesses to the Vietnam War in order to investigate and publicly assess US military intervention.

“How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm?” asks Farocki. In what follows, he extinguishes a lit cigarette on his left hand. This demonstration offers “a hint of an idea of how napalm works.” It establishes a relation between what is visible and what, though overexposed, remains unseen and repressed: “A cigarette burns at four hundred degrees. Napalm burns at three thousand degrees.”33

The scene has since generated a wide range of interpretations, with the cigarette gesture read variously as a restoration of shock value, a limit of representation, a Brechtian estrangement device, a critique of Enlightenment, or a figure oscillating between metaphor and metonymy.34 What matters for our context is not merely an aporia of representation that this scene incorporates, but an opening onto what Farocki contemporaneously describes as “operative film”: an agitprop aesthetic and media strategy nourished by a Marxist critical appropriation of cybernetics and oriented toward a new cinematic pedagogy.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Following this opening, Farocki calls for an intervention into the relations of production: “If napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. One must combat the napalm fire where it is produced—in the factories.” The second part of the film turns to an investigation of the Dow Chemical plant in Michigan. By 1969, the company had emerged as the principal supplier of chemical weapons to the US military, following the withdrawal of other firms amid growing protests. Along with napalm, it produced the herbicides used in the war—chemical sprays applied to the soil to decrease the growth of plants by entering their internal systems. Although they were developed in the 1940s to manage vegetation, US aircraft sprayed the chemicals over entire ecosystems in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to interrupt food supplies and inflict psychological damage on anti-colonial guerrillas, as well as on the broader population.35 For a region that was predominantly agricultural at the time, the effect of the herbicide was devastating. As the activist involved in refugee relief John Lewallen noted, “By the end of 1970 about one-seventh of that nation’s land area had been sprayed with herbicides, and twenty percent of its forests had been defoliated.”36 In this way, Dow’s chemical production inscribes a single operational logic in which the large-scale destruction of ecosystems and the targeted devastation of human life converge as co-constitutive effects of capitalist accumulation.

At a facility structured by dual-use production, where “civilian” chemicals and weapons are manufactured side by side, workers possess only fragmentary knowledge of the outcomes of their labor: whether it sustains the earth’s fertility or contributes to its erasure—along with the living beings who inhabit it. The film stages this condition by reconstructing the chemical laboratory in the wake of the state-directed escalation of napalm production. Scenes from the plant’s departments—Fats, Petrochemical, Plastics—unfold in sequence, composing a chain of operations through which napalm’s lethal adhesiveness is generated from polystyrenes also used in shoe manufacturing. In the plant administrator’s words: “A large chemical corporation is like a set of building blocks. You can put together the entire world with them.” In the following sequence, plant scientists are shown watching the war on television. Recirculated and reworked by Farocki, the news images return to the site of production from which their conditions had been abstracted. Footage of US bombardments is intercut with close-ups of skin burned by napalm, previously shown in a laboratory experiment. Accompanied by a news voice-over reporting mass casualties, the montage sabotages the division of labor at the level of perception, reintroducing alienated knowledge into the production process and confronting workers with the destructive effects of the plant’s operations. “Due to the intensified division of labor, many technicians and scientists no longer recognize their own work in the production of destruction [Vernichtungsproduktion]. Faced with the crimes in Vietnam, they experience themselves as mere spectators,” comments the film’s intertitle.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. The still shows an intertitle in German: “Who does it benefit / who does it harm”. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

The film’s third part, “How to Change It,” activates the agitational logic of operative film by calling for the socialization of privileges produced by the division of labor and its automation. This concluding agitprop sequence is set in a factory restroom. An actor, first performing a worker, stands with his back to the camera, washes his hands, then turns to face it, removing a metal object from an empty paper towel dispenser. He explains that he secretly takes home individual parts from the factory, attempting to assemble a vacuum cleaner—yet the device invariably materializes as a machine gun. The sequence is then repeated with the same actor as a student, who seeks to demonstrate that the factory produces weapons, but what comes out is a vacuum cleaner. Finally, an engineer appears, stating that both devices are composed of the same elements and that their outcome depends on those who design, assemble, and operate them.

This final part is aimed at political education informed by the Marxist account of alienation. To approach this problem, we need to diagram the relation between the division of labor and machinery. Capitalist production is organized as a sequence of partitioned operations (division of labor), some performed by workers and others by machines. However, as Marx notes, “The machine is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools.”37 Drawing on this passage, Matteo Pasquinelli describes the machinization of production as a process directly conditioned by the cooperation of labor. He describes the gradual replacement of workers by machinery as a “labor theory of automation,” while also noting that “a process of alienation of skill and knowledge starts as soon as machinery appears in place and in front of labor.” The machine thus becomes “a crystallization of collective knowledge.”38

The film’s final part thus suggests an additional angle on alienation. The division of labor, with the growing automation of its chains in post-WWII Western European industry, increasingly obscures the totality of the production process from those involved in it, particularly its political dimension. Segmented along operational circuits, fragmented knowledge and divided work processes prevent workers, students, and engineers from gaining agency over the broader outcomes of production: war or the household. In a way, this understanding of capitalist production is analogous to a film reel. It appears as a sequence of operations whose overall destructive logic remains concealed for its participants, much like the frames of a reel that only produce meaning in their continuous but invisible succession.

The crucial aspect of labor automation is the reorganization of both knowledge and learning: the capacity for abstract, systemic understanding is reserved for those positions that require it. According to Farocki, “autonomous activity is a privilege granted by automation: learners have not fought for it.”39 What appears as autonomous intellectual activity is thus not an emancipatory achievement but a privilege produced by the organization of labor itself. “for left agitation, this means it must socialize privileges,” Farocki argues. This entails a strategic task: not to adapt to these hierarchies of knowledge, but to disrupt them by socializing the capacity for abstraction and autonomous thought across divisions of labor, without reproducing the very structures of exclusion it seeks to overcome.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969. Copyright: Harun Farocki GbR.

Towards the Solidarity Collective

Operative film seeks to unsettle the professionalization of knowledge shaped by the division of labor and labor automation. In this sense, it questions the structural limits of both educational and cinematic institutions. Professional language, Farocki claims, is separated from private language, while the political forms a “third sphere”: “the public language of the mass media for the upper social strata.”40 As a result, critical knowledge is stratified: unlike engineers and manual workers, only liberal arts students retain the institutional privilege of engaging with Marx’s concepts of alienation and the division of labor. In a 1968 essay titled “Vacuum Cleaner or Submachine Gun: A Travelling Cinema for Engineers,” published in the journal Film, Farocki describes an agitational project aimed at disrupting the division of knowledge. For this project Farocki organized a mobile program that travelled to a dozen West German technical universities, staging discussions, teach-ins, and film screenings. The aim was not simply to present films but to inscribe them into pedagogical environments from which political reflection was largely excluded—particularly among engineering students.

An agitprop sequence on a vacuum cleaner and machine gun—which in part entered Inextinguishable Fire—was shown in different ways on monitors via a mobile Ampex videotape system. Among the various setups, one proved especially effective: a screen placed in front of the cafeteria. In more conventional arrangements, “the students absorbed the hierarchically flowing information from the screen, just as they receive it from the lecturer.” In front of the cafeteria, however, they “had the courage for autonomous activity”: to engage, ignore, discuss, laugh, remain silent, and multiply interpretations. Here, reception becomes situational and collective. As part of a social gathering, the film circulates within the milieu; it does not merely reproduce its object but socializes it:

Political agitation cannot be unrestricted communication; yet it must at every moment set such unbinding in motion. The cited spot attempts this by conventional means: it offers itself to free interpretation and allows for the projection of one’s own situation. In doing so, however, it tends toward indeterminacy.41

This mobile social placement of film allowed for flexible association, engaging with the viewer. The almost psychoanalytic setting—or more precisely, schizoanalytic setting, since it resembled Félix Guattari’s media experiments in the same years—frames Farocki’s intervention as a social and technological activation of spectatorship. In place of “anonymous consumer class” or “audience,” Farocki designated this alternative type of spectator “target groups” (Adressatengruppe)—such as future engineers—throughout his writings from this period.42 Such groups serve as operative points of entry into metabolic circuits fused by the growing militarization of the Cold War.

The notion of the disposition of a target group marks a turning point in the development of operativist thinking—a turning point between Tretyakov’s articulation and that of Farocki. In the former’s political imagination, the impact of operative intervention is allocated to the historical function of authorship—however innovative for Western art and literature of the time, in Benjamin’s view. In line with agricultural technologies and novel forms of concentrationism, operative intervention breaks with bourgeois culture in favor of socialist progress—the ideology and practice that substitutes the vector of historical development for that of social change. For Farocki, in contrast, it is the indeterminacy of the social that harbors the potential for political transformation. Associated with spectatorship, this political orientation informs the decisive role of pedagogy in operative film.

Not by chance, this interrogation was followed by Farocki’s first teaching appointment at Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts. Tom Holert has situated Farocki’s work of this period within a critical reappropriation of cybernetic pedagogy as an advanced techno-ideology of late capitalism—an effort to subvert a model of learning in which an instructor transmits specialized knowledge to passive students. The question, rather, was how to link political agitation to transformative practice, or, in Holert’s formulation, how “to disrupt the relations of production of the techniques of consciousness.”43 In this sense, Farocki’s 1970 essay “Capital in the Classroom” turns against Gordon Pask’s cybernetic group model—a feedback-based, self-organizing form of collective learning—by counterposing it to the Grundrisse by Marx. In Pask’s model, a token-based internal currency simulates exchange and regulates learning through incentives, rendering knowledge production commensurable with profit. Against this profit-driven cybernetic “forced cooperation,” Farocki posits the “solidarity collective”:

Gordon Pask’s model drives the contradiction to its extreme; its abolition would mean that students and teachers recognize, through the play money, the link between the maximization of knowledge and the maximization of profit. They project forms of free association among communicating individuals. They break with enforced cooperation and establish the solidarity collective. To this end, they make use of the technical achievements bequeathed to them by the development of capitalist exploitation.44

What emerges here is not simply a critique of cybernetic pedagogy but a programmatic refunctioning of its operative logic—one that Farocki had previously begun to test and materialize within film itself. Although the cybernetic theory of learning promises that an operative film will become effective in its late-capitalist contemporaneity, and that the pedagogical process will become nonlinear and reciprocal, it fails to recognize the fundamental turbulence of social relations: the possibility of solidarity which extends beyond the predetermined organization of the cybernetic system.

The theory and practice of operative film is deeply rooted in the particularity of its geography and historical situation—collective projects emerging from student protests in the late 1960s and insurgencies at Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. Yet, the political strategy of the social repurposing of technology and institutions exceeds these conditions. Farocki’s later projects on operative images—images that are not made to reproduce, to entertain, or to inform, but instead are part of the operation45—continue to resocialize the automation of labor across both capitalist production and its warfare. In Eye/Machine I (2001), a two-screen projection in the exhibition space juxtaposes two images: a worker feeding a die-cutter, and a red guided missile in flight, filmed from a plane above. “Such films represent concrete human work as a non-event. An event is just the progressive development of the machine and the gradual abolition of the worker.” It was the “horizontal connection of meaning” emerging between these scenes—the connection between productive force and destructive force—that revealed the capitalist abstraction of the technological from the social. “You don’t have to be a Marxist for that,” Farocki notes.46 It was as if the images in the operation of this double projection would refract the mechanism of alienation in which the hand and the eye are caught, in the nonevent of their gradual abolition. Carles Guerra comments on Farocki’s transition from cinema and television to the post-Fordist social space of the museum: Since the media transmission of the Gulf War, “making war and reporting have become a single project.” The consequence for the museum is the need to “dismantle the premise of a disinterested viewer, whose visuality is no longer innocent.”47

Since our first collaboration on the film program “Mental Ecologies of War” in 2023, we have been concerned with how moving images might resist their militarized media environment.48 More specifically, we have asked how minor—anti-authoritarian, queer-feminist, and socially vulnerable—perspectives can reshape modes of seeing and perceiving Russia’s war on Ukraine against the homogenizing nationalist discourses imposed by dominant media. The program therefore brought together, among others, works by Freefilmers, a hybrid activist-filmmaking network striving to decentralize cultural production and provide aid in wartime. It also included, beyond the art field, user-generated evidence of life amid Russia’s atrocities in Mariupol in March 2022, produced by the local teenage blogger Alena Zagreba.

These practices reject reducing the image-war nexus to warfare vision technologies (such as drone or radar imaging), to visual articulations of victimhood, or to representations of violence alone. Instead, they foreground the capacity of images to mediate social cooperation, mobilize collective desire, and foster transnational networks of solidarity in times of crisis. With regard to the conceptual proposition of this essay, they proliferate beyond the linearity of erasure and “reconstruction,” yielding minor possibilities for sustaining life through disruptions of the operational field, where production and destruction merge into one another. In 2026, against the backdrop of intensified military violence waged by fascistic oligarchies—from Russia to the United States and Israel, among others—we consider it crucial to pose the question of how social agency can repurpose audiovisual media. The theory and practice of operative film provide a means of conceiving such an agency. A film becomes operative only beyond the screen.