Harvey, Simon Timothy. 2005. Smuggling in theories and practices of contemporary visual culture. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

The term smuggling has, for the most part, functioned in critical theory and visual culture only as an arch-metaphor. It conveniently carries discourse unproblematically and invisibly across impasses and between bodies of incompatible work. Alternatively, it is all too visible and taken for granted as romantic stereotype. In the thesis, contraband and smuggling are examined for their complexity beyond these omissions and over-determinations in their theorization and circulation in literary and visual cultures. Secrecies, emergences and partial visibilities of smuggling are considered for how they disrupt dominant modes of vision, such as the scopic geometry of border checkpoints and simplistic representative mappings of territory that assign fixed cultural identities and positionalities. The thesis proposes that contraband subjectivities produce new ways of being-in-the-world, critical perspectives and modes of mobility, as well as providing a toolbox for examining ways that art practice negotiates between its visibility and its constitutive secrecy.

The simplistic, unimpeded scopic structuring of the border drama between smuggler and customs/Law, that often becomes ensnared in systematic psychoanalytic and socio-anthropologic readings, is contested, and instead proposed as a site of variability; of partial visibilities, knowledges and meanings. Smuggling, rarely considered in postcolonial theory, is put forward as a mediating installation and subjective occupation of a space that began to be opened up through the oscillating veil theorized, by amongst others, Frantz Fanon. The argument attempts to move beyond the screening of contraband towards another form of mobility that is most subtly expressed through the baroque notion of the fold theorized by Gilles Deleuze (after Leibniz) and that suggests forms of dissimulation that go beyond surface and towards productive secrecy. In a case study that examines a very overt, literal form of smuggling in Colombia it is suggested that secrecy must be built back into conceptions of contrabanding for it to be, at least in part, visually comprehensible. New ways of thinking contraband, for instance in alliance with law and as public secrecy, are examined for how they form relational counter-cartographies and singular fields of operation that might be taken up by art practices. The capacity for critical theorists to get close to affective contraband milieu through visual material becomes a measure of how they themselves perform as smugglers.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00033820
Keywords:	smuggling, visual culture, cultural identities, mobility, postcolonial theory, Colombia, secrecy
Date:	2005
Item ID:	33820
Date Deposited:	25 Jul 2023 14:59
Last Modified:	25 Jul 2023 18:00
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33820

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