Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ethical productiveness of blurriness in visual anthropology as an interruption in the regime of the transparent. I claim that blurriness allows for an ethics of care to emerge in which the encounter with otherness is based on speculative opacities and transversal relations.

Paper long abstract:

Blurriness often poses a problem for visual anthropology and its inclination towards bearing witness. In this paper, however, I want to stress the potential productiveness of blurriness, that is, as a performative force of interruption in the regime of the transparent, creating generative moments of unsettlement and novel forms of perception, sociality, and collectivity. It is the blur, as I will claim, that allows for a rethinking of care in which the encounter with otherness is not grounded in a violent regime of transparent epistemologies and simplistic delineations but in speculative opacities and transversal relations. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten, as a case in point, I will look at Philip Scheffner's experimental documentary Havarie from 2016, which shows pixelated slowed-down footage of a small migrant vessel, waiting for help amid the blue vacuum of the Mediterranean Sea, whose images are reduced to an opaque blur on a tumbling horizon, while various voices and testimonies can be heard on the soundtrack. Going against the optical logic of the transparent and entering haptic terrain, the film transforms the rational notion of being a witness into, following Sara Ahmed, an embodied being-with-ness. Taking this shift into account, I will ask how blurriness in visual anthropology and documentary practices can engage with the unknowable other without participating in the symbolic violence of the transparent while establishing relations of care grounded in an ethics of the opaque.