Floating on the Same Plane: Metropolis, Money and the Culture of Abstraction

Abstract

This article argues that the emergence of a trans-disciplinary discourse of 'visual culture' must be understood as, above all, a constitutively urban phenomenon. More specifically, it is in the historically new form of the capitalist metropolis, as described most famously by Simmel, that the 'hyper-stimulus' of modern visual culture has its social and spatial conditions. Paradoxically, however, it is as a result of this that visual culture studies is also intrinsically 'haunted' by a certain spectre of the invisible: one rooted in those forms of 'real abstraction' which Marx identifies with the commodity and the money form. Considering, initially, the canonical urban visual forms of the collage and the spectacle, these are each read in a certain relation to Simmel's account of metropolitan life and of the money form, and, through this, to what the author claims are those forms of social and spatial abstraction that must be understood to animate them. Finally, the article returns to the entanglement of the visible and invisible entailed by this, and concludes by making some tentative suggestions about something like a paradoxical urban 'aesthetic' of abstraction on such a basis.

Terrorism, governmentality and the simulated city: the Boston Marathon bombing and the search for suspect two

“…Put another way, the photograph forces us to confront terror's urban apparitions, which also entails confronting the field of vernacular practice that technological mediation renders. Urban culture and visual culture are co-constitutive (Cunningham, 2013). The city is always a simulated city.…”

Urbanization and the City Image in Lowry at Tate Britain: Towards a Critique of Cultural Cityism

“…Cunningham (: 40) uses Debord's argument that the image has become the final form of commodity reification to suggest ‘a hyper‐intensification of the visual within metropolitan life’. One way of interpreting this is to suggest that as urban space in the great Western metropolises continues to grow obscenely in exchange value—making the city unliveable and unattainable for the majority—one consequence is that the image of the city also becomes commodified.…”

Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the realism of abstraction

“…6 In the latter case, a specifically 'artistic abstraction' can certainly be conceived, in 33 J.M. Bernstein's words, as combating a 'societal abstraction' (or the 'scientistic') by asserting an affective and sensuous particularity to be found precisely within the materiality of the aesthetic object itself (Bernstein, 2006: 151-152; see also Cunningham 2013), just as, from a rather different direction, it is, one might say, the snapshot's very particular connection to specific biographies and everyday lives -its 'concreteness' of reference -that has, in a contrary fashion, made it exemplary of a specifically anti-aestheticist resistance to the abstractions of an interchangeability of images characteristic of mass media. The photographers of the new generation will describe a hat just because it happens to be somewhere' (Dyer 2012: 148).…”