Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
To abstract implies a removal, a drawing out from an original location, and
an enforced movement of elements from one level to another. Abstraction,
then, involves the transposition of worlds; an extracting of essences, or
elements, or generalities from one original plane into another. The new
world, the created level, the (re)presentation, provides the potential arena for
the manipulation and control of images. Images become infinitely malleable
once freed from their original context, whilst still retaining significations
within that original context (as poetry, hermeneutic theory, modern art and
advertising all know—for good or ill). Because, for some and on some
occasions, the strategies of refining, adjusting, displacing and enhancing
images that occur through abstraction may generate unwelcome ‘sights’, the
whole process can sometimes be indicted as a practice of reification.
Whether or not we take heed of this last criticism, abstraction undoubtably
leads us through a series of problematics which are unsettling in their
implications. Through the practice of abstracting phenomena from one plane,
locus or level up onto another visual dimension, we are led to ask ‘which
image should we finally attend to?’, or indeed, ‘which image (re)presents the
world?’ Such questions pitch us into, what Hegel might have termed, ‘a
whirling circle’ of uncertainty, which derives, in part, from the essentially nonconsensual
character of socio-cultural theory. We are confronted with a set of
questions concerning representation which are not wholly dissimilar to those
which have beset art history when it attempts to explain painting’s relation to
its social context. As Bryson has put it in his debate with Gombrich:
To the question, what is painting? Gombrich gives the answer, that it is
the record of perception. I am certain that this is fundamentally wrong.
...It is a natural enough attitude to think of painting as a copy of the
world, and given the importance of realism in Western painting it is
perhaps inevitable that eventually this attitude would be elevated to a
doctrine…what is suppressed by the account of painting as the record of
perception is the social character of the image, and its reality as sign. 25
Here, we are essentially questioning the level at which a particular theory,
or scopic regime, seeks to concentrate and thus suspend, or hold, its signs:
for theory always gives supremacy to a particular level. Art history might
see this as, for example, an issue of figuration, abstract expressionism,
conceptualism, hyperrealism or whatever.
Sociology, far from being a shared and happy perspective on social
reality, is, rather, fragmented and competitive. This dispersion and
challenge quite appropriately, though not exhaustively, reflects what Schutz
would regard as the infinite ‘multiple realities’ that comprise all human
experience. Different paradigms within sociology, then, producedifferent
worlds just as different scopic regimes of modernity, or different
rationalisations of sight have fashioned our cultural ‘outlook’. The world
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