One Time Becoming Another: Afterlives of the Seen, Figures of the Yet-to-Come

Abstract

This article examines the configuration of a new visual regime in the context of today’s “troubled times”, characterised by geopolitical acceleration, the consolidation of alliances between technology, economics and warfare, and the radical transformation of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, Hito Steyerl, and Éric Sadin, it analyses how the proliferation of images produced and circulated with the help of artificial intelligence and social media gives rise to processes of cognitive saturation, neuro-excitation, and loss of traceability, ushering in an “age of indistinction” that facilitates the invisibilisation of conflicts and subjectivities that fall outside the interests of post-liberal extractivist capitalism. Particular attention is paid to the appropriation of the visual logics of cinema and fantasy by populist leaders and techno-oligarchs, as well as the rupture of the “civil contract of images”, exemplified by the “Gaza Riviera” reel. This article thus affirms the vital importance of cinema as a forum for critical resistance and for reclaiming the future, with the ability to dismantle dominant regimes of visibility through editing, anachronism, and the creation of zones of opacity and undecidability that restore a politics of the gaze and of relationality.