The project examines how (moving) images represent and produce the concept of a ‘governance of friends’ in the United States from the introduction of the daguerreotype to silent cinema. It analyzes instances of American visual history not as depictions of socio-political reality, but as agents of the imaginary or utopian notion of philocracy – a specific loosely structured, heterarchical assemblage of political elements. While Gilles Deleuze, in his references to American culture and literature, considers philocracy as the United States’ historically unrealized or ‘metastable’ founding ideal, it nevertheless continues to shape cultural imagination from Whitman to contemporary arts, politics, and media. In order to trace the concept’s manifestations, the project concentrates on case studies, e.g., on the collective potential of photographic processes, the composite portraits (and Civil War coverage) by M. Brady, the societal impact of pre-cinematic apparatuses like Edison’s Kinetoscope, or the political substructures of early narrative and experimental cinema.

The project’s key term, philocracy, synthesizes concepts of various authors from Maurice Blanchot to Deleuze. In contrast to the common idea of friendship as a bond between two individuals, they describe the friend or brother as a central figure of thought in debates about democracy since the late 18^th century. As a provisional basis for the analysis of historical images, one can deduce several interrelated features of philocracy: 1) its relations are not mere connections between the elements of a group or set, but external and independent from them; 2) hierarchy is eliminated, all components are arranged horizontally; 3) dynastic and blood relations are rejected, oedipal family structures are replaced by a voluntary ‘oath,’ experimental relationships and alternative gender concepts; 4) elements remain in ‘mid-distance’ between fusion and dispersal, unity and decomposition (“a brick wall of uncemented stones”). These defining features of relationalism, horizontality, non-cognation, and internal distance provide reference points for the study of political friendship in (moving) images: they pertain to their contents or diegetic level, to their formal and compositional strategies, and also to the basic structure of the respective medium itself.

Images of friendship not only reflect but perpetually reinvent and constitute the idea of philocracy. In delineating this historical and aesthetic process, the project’s case studies cover a period from the 19^th to the early 20^th century, including the peak of industrialized modernity with its oft-cited empowerment of the visual. However, due to the unsteady and purely notional character as well as erratic historical recurrences of philocracy, its analysis cannot follow the (chrono-/teleo-)logical lines of a traditional history of ideas. Instead, the project reverts to a number of exemplary moments, shifts, or ‘breaking points’ in US-American visual culture to examine how photography and early cinematography shape the notion of collective friendship as a variant of democracy. In view of the significant changes in the historical sciences, art history, and visual culture studies since the ‘iconic turn,’ the project will result in a more distinct comprehension of the image as an element of political discourse and of the politics of images ...