This text attempts to outline a relationship between images and 'image-spheres' (or image-spaces) to provide a way of tracing the political and cultural dynamics of the present. Starting from a theory of cinema, it will suggest an image of politics that escapes visibility by conjuring up images. The space of politics can thus incorporate all possible images in order to expand its own image-sphere, without ever appearing as an image itself. Power is therefore animated by a space at the boundaries of the image; boundaries that are necessary only insofar as they are rejected again. Seemingly without a reason.

The analysis of the out-of-field and voice-off, of the space outside the frame, plays a central role in Gilles Deleuze's attempt to work out a comprehensive theory of cinema. At issue is nothing less than the question of the limits of the image. The fact that the frame establishes a boundary, defining what is part of the image and what is not, leaves in question what still belongs to the image without actually being visible inside the frame. The voice-off and out-of-field constitute the space outside the frame that belongs, one could say, to the image-regime. For instance, when the voice-off announces a person or a space that actually appears in the subsequent frame, or when the space outside the frame contains a point of reference or a vanishing point that never appears directly, then Deleuze speaks of an 'absolute' function of the out-of-field, representing 'a more radical elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time'.¹ Deleuze also refers in passing to electronic and digital images and their displacement of the relationship between the internal and external space of the image.

  The new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they
  are internalised in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse,
  reversible and non-superimposable, like a power to turn back on themselves.
  They are the objects of a perpetual reorganisation, in which a new image
  can arise from any point whatever in the preceding image. The organisation of
  space here loses its privileged directions ... in favour of an omni-directional
  space that constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, exchanging the
  vertical and the horizontal.²

Deleuze does not restrict this argument to digital images, but perceives it as a historical figure of the evolution of cinema: '...modern cinema has killed flashback, like the voice-off and the out-of-field'.³ If the voice-off and the out-of-field is used to represent that space outside the image to which it could refer, then this outside is now disappearing. For Deleuze, the outside is substituted by the 'irrational cut'.⁴ This cut is situated between the visual and acoustic images; it constitutes their limit without being part of them. This autonomy of the cut forms the motor driving the perpetual relinking of the images - a linkage that cannot be understood as an effect of one or the other image but represents the product of their incommensurability. In other words: the cut does not result as an effect of the image to then consistently lead up to the next, instead it constitutes an interstice around which the images are linked time and again because they have lost the capability of converging towards an imaginary aim. To the degree that Deleuze's (irrational) cut emancipates itself from the images, the cut may still be localised at that interstice around which the images link time and again; but this place between the images remains untouched by images themselves. In this way the interstice does not belong to the frame anymore. This is in contrast to the techniques of the voice-off or out-of-field that still represent an outside, albeit one that refers to an inside not visible within the frame, yet still belong and correspond to the liberal idea of an inside that needs an outside in order to recognise itself. But instead of using the theory of the irrational and autonomous cut to put an end to the modern dialectics of inside and outside, Deleuze continues this dialectics at least on the level of his terminology: 'because [the irrational cut], no longer forming part of any sequence, itself appears as an autonomous outside which necessarily provides itself with an inside'.⁵ In other words: where Deleuze puts an end to the house of modernity, he 'necessarily' has to build a new one for the cut, a border station at which the traffic and exchange between inside and outside is regulated.

At this point the question arises whether the cut has still to be associated with the idea of the boundary, and thus with a territorial figure. When Deleuze separates the acoustic and the visual image to outline an incommensurable relationship between the two, he establishes a 'non-totalisable, asymmetrical outside and inside' between which one can effortlessly change sides and get from one to the other.⁶ In their integrity and difference, however, they remain intact - as inside and outside. The cut between the images is autonomous. It is not part of the images and at the same time causes them incessantly to link anew, only to be dissociated again by the next linkage. With the image of a perpetual linkage of incommensurable images the cut remains external to the images. The cut simply marks an interstice that does not appear directly in the images and merely articulates itself indirectly in their modification and linkage. The cut itself has no image. It represents a space that is not accessible to the images; it represents a space to which the images can only allude indirectly and temporarily through their linkage. Thus the cut is never visible; it has no place within the visible. It represents a space without place and a space without image - although it requires images in order to appear in its non-visibility.

If it is the autonomous cut that makes the images link and dissociate over and over again, then the cut represents a figure of power, albeit only a power over images. Even though Deleuze's analysis refers to cinema, it would appear that there is more to be gained from his concept of the irrational cut than the boundary and the interstice that he associates with it: namely a description of the form in which power is articulated and represented after modernity. This form of power is effective by not appearing directly and by not producing an image of itself. Its space is animated by a non-visibility that makes use of images in order to act between them. It initiates a visuality in order to make an image of power appear at a time and place where it is not. Thus power maintains a seemingly paradoxical relationship with visibility: it fetishises images under the condition that these images fail categorically - fail at the attempt to show an image of power. What can appear as image then is only an image of powerlessness.

To get a broader understanding of this space of power without place and without image, a glance at Hardt and Negri's Empire will suffice: 'The spatial configuration of inside and outside ... seems to us a general and foundational characteristic of modern thought. In the passage from modern to postmodern and from imperialism to Empire there is progressively less distinction between inside and outside.'⁷ The chapter from which this sentence is taken is titled 'There Is No More Outside'. While modernity was based on the dialectics of inside and outside, Hardt and Negri diagnose 'the end of the outside' for Empire.⁸ 'The binaries that defined modern conflict have become blurred. The Other that might delimit a modern sovereign Self has become fractured and indistinct, and there is no longer an outside that can bound the place of sovereignty.'⁹ When describing the space of modernity and Empire as 'striated' and 'smooth', Negri and Hardt's terminology refers back to Deleuze and Guattari:

  The striated space of modernity constructed places that were continually
  engaged in and founded on a dialectical play with their outsides. The space of
  imperial sovereignty, in contrast, is smooth. ... In this smooth space of
  Empire, there is no place of power - it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire
  is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.¹⁰

It seems obvious to associate Deleuze's 'irrational cut' with Hardt and Negri's 'non-place' of power. The irrational of Deleuze's cut is equivalent to Hardt and Negri's everywhere and nowhere. The cut is a non-place, and as a non-place it has no image. In this sense the cut represents a non-image that is surrounded by images that cannot converge to convey a consistent idea of the world. Deleuze describes the resulting experience of an 'omni-directional space that constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal'.¹¹ Corresponding to that, Hardt and Negri introduce the notion of 'omni-crisis' - an omni-directional crisis that can materialise everywhere and nowhere, and which therefore is also present at a time and place when and where it is not appearing.¹² In this, the omni-crisis follows the logic of the irrational cut, comparable to the statistical probability of an accident: statistically, accidents have to happen, yet no one knows when and where, and even less who will be affected. From the point of view of the (innocent/irrational) victim, even the current debate on terrorism follows the logics of the irrational cut: one can become a victim of a terrorist attack without being able to recognise a comprehensible role or responsibility for the underlying crisis. The irrational cut links images and events which rationally do not belong together, and at the same time ensures that this linkage dissociates again in order to produce a new irrational linkage - when the next accident, the next terrorist attack occurs.

In his 'politics of everyday fear', Brian Massumi pursues the same logic of the irrational cut: 'An unspecified enemy threatens to rise up at any time and at any point in social or geographical space.'¹³ Hardt and Negri also delineate 'minor and elusive enemies everywhere' that, analogous to power, can surface everywhere and nowhere, at any place and any time, one would like to say: without reason. 'We can now see that imperial sovereignty ... is organised not around one central conflict but rather through a flexible network of micro-conflicts. The contradictions of imperial society are elusive, proliferating and non-localisable: the contradictions are everywhere.'¹⁴

At this point, the question arises if images are still able at all to depict this space of contradictions, this everywhere and nowhere, power and 'its unspecified enemies'. If power is localised in a non-place, in an interstice that is not visible, and if even its enemies strategically act out of a non-visibility in order to be able to strike, seemingly irrationally, 'at any time at any point', then the image runs the risk of depicting a social or geographical space and identifying an event with a space that wasn't actually referred to and that only actualised a prototypical effect of power and its enemies. 'Empire requires that all relations be accidental. Imperial power is founded on the rupture of every determinate ontological relationship.'¹⁵ To designate this loss of foundation, which is comparable to Deleuze's irrational cut, Hardt and Negri introduce the notion of corruption: 'Corruption is simply the sign of the absence of any ontology. [...] Corruption names the perpetual process of alteration and metamorphosis, the anti-foundational foundation, the de-ontological mode of being.'¹⁶ Massumi argues for an anti-foundational foundation as well: 'But in the end, the very concept of the cause may have to go, in favour of effects and their interweavings (syndromes). Syndromes mark the limits of causal analysis. They cannot be exhaustively understood...'¹⁷ When images of company headquarters, catastrophes, terror attacks and their victims are made, a space or a subject is identified with an event. This process of identification runs the risk of tying an out-of-field, a voice-off to the singularity of the effect. Then the space is reintroduced as a foundation and ontologised. For instance, the United States' attempt to territorialise terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, to find its foundation there, plays a double role from this perspective: the image that depicts a space is used to stage an anti-foundational foundation and a ground from which to deprive terrorism of its non-place and thus of its power, while at the same time it is used to pursue one's own deterritorialisation of power. It is always the others that appear as image. The linkage of terrorism with images of terror and a localisable space from which it feeds can only be described by the irrational cut.

Thus we arrive at the proposition that the image of a space runs the risk of identifying a foundation with the space: it is not the affect and the effects of irrational linkages that are depicted, but rather its foundation that is actually located somewhere entirely different, everywhere and nowhere. In order to break away from this commensurable relationship between image and space, it seems appropriate to use images as a means of referring to that space which they cannot represent. This space is not the depictable social or geographical space, but the irrational cut, whose effect and language they are. The significance that is presently attributed to space and spatial installations of videos and images in the art context is possibly connected with this knowledge that the irrational cut can only be localised in the space beyond the images, at their limit. The incommensurable relationship that the space of cinema has always maintained with urban space once more turns cinema into the prototype for the manifestation of singularities. Cinema only maintains a loose relationship to the films that are shown within it. One could also say that these relations between cinema and film are merely accidental. Cinema is indifferent to what film is shown within its space, and from this indifference it gains its power. Cinema is a smooth space through which diverse, striated image-spheres can pass without it being touched by them. If one now asks what relations are maintained between images, image-spheres and the spatial images of power, then maybe the cinema would yield the best spatial model to describe the corrupted space of Hardt and Negri's Empire. It cannot exist without images even though they remain external to it.

Translated by Daniel Pies and Charles Esche

— Andreas Spiegl