As Charles Babbage reminds us; “An object is frequently not seen, from not knowing how to see it, rather than from any defect in the organ of vision.”
All of this is from the essay, Obedient Numbers, Soft Delight in the book of essays, Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen (2002):
…. what if it can be shown that these two technologies [computing and photography] actually share a common history and embody comparable logics? What if the cultural and social conditions that made photography conceivable were the same as those from which emerged computing? What, indeed, if the representational desires, and therefore the political challenges, of the computer are also those of the photograph?
It is not difficult to establish the chronological and personal links between the inventions of computing and photography.
He goes on to describe the many ties between Henry Fox Talbot and Charles Babbage (which I am not going to include here). Then he goes on:
… Talbot … sent Babbage some photogenic drawings of pieces of lace. This was a common subject for Talbot, allowing him to demonstrate the exact, indexical copying of intricate details that photographic contact printing made possible. It also allowed him to demonstrate the strange implosion of representation and reality (again, culture and nature) that photography allowed. … As Root Cartwright has pointed out, contact printing was able to show the lace as a “true illusion” of white lines on burgundy-colored paper. It also meant that Talbot rendered the world in binary terms, as a patterned order of the absence and presence of light. When Talbot included one of these negatives in his 1844 The Pencil of Nature, his accompanying text carefully explained the difference between a contact print (“directly taken from the lace itself”) and the positive copies that could be taken from this first print (in which case “the lace would be represented black upon a white ground”). However, he suggested, a negative image of lace was perfectly acceptable, “black lace being familiar to the eye as white lace, and the object being only to exhibit the pattern with accuracy.” So this is a photograph not so much of lace as of its patterning, of its regular repetitions of smaller units in order to make up a whole.
Babbage too might have been impressed by the photograph’s ability to represent accurately the geometric patterns of lacework, for here was mathematics made visible.
[ ... ]
At the time he began working on his computing machines, Babbage was also calculating a set of “life tables” for the Protector Life Assurance Company of London. Interestingly, the only working example of a Difference Engine, produced by Swedish printers Georg and Edvard Sheutz between 1843 and 1853, was also employed to calculate tables for William Farr’s definitive 1864 publication, English Life Tables. From the beginning, then, we find the history of computing associated with the transformation of human beings into data — in this case, digitized for the purpose of making predictive judgments that fix them in space and time (that photograph them). In Babbage’s conception of the computer, the user becomes simultaneously the subject and the object of the apparatus. Indeed the apparatus itself collapses the boundaries of subject and object altogether; it is this power above all else — this ability to undermine the comfortable Cartesian dualities of the previous century — that so astonished its maker.
I have written elsewhere about the way photography embodies a similar collapse, in the process linking its conception with the paradoxical play of disciplinary power that Michel Foucault has associated with panopticism. Conceived by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, the panopticon is, for Foucault, the exemplary technological metaphor for the operations of modern systems of power. Continually projecting himself into a space between tower and cell, the panoptic subject becomes both the prisoner and the one who imprisons, both the subject and the object of his own gaze. As Foucault says, “He inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principal of his own subjection … [Prisoners] are not only [panopticism's] inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation.” As an effect of and vehicle for the exercise of power/knowledge, the modern person is, in other words, a being produced within the interstices of a continual negotiation of virtual and real. Thus, for Foucault, panopticism is not just an efficient piece of prison design but also “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.”
The same might be said for computing. And this, of course, is the point. The history I have been recounting, and the economy of power that it represents, is not only something that lies outside the computer. It is not just something that is conveyed, created, or reconstructed by the computer’s compliant circuitry. For the computer is itself the material expression of a certain history, the mechanical and electronic manifestation of a conceptual armature that insistently reproduces itself every time we depress a key and direct a flow of digital data. …
I find panopticism reminiscent of how the process of “doing” photography is often described (for example those self-descriptions posted in discussions found in the Philosophy of Photography forum at Photo.net).
See previous posts from Geoffrey Batchen essays here and here.
-Julie
Block that metaphor! I found this abstract interesting but trying to really stretch a point. I note that one usually does not include motion pictures in a discussion of real photography. In my mind, a motion picture would be a far more appropriate comparison to a computer since a photograph is, by essence, a single, static vision. (That may be part of its fascination since life is certainly dynamic. Note to self: think more about this in view of Felix’s serial images.) In the same sense, computers are, almost by definition, dynamic. So, I have trouble putting photographs and computers on the same page. But then, I am not as erudite as Mr. Batchen.
As for the development of the ability to “recognize” something, that is also a fascinating discussion that goes far beyond photography. One is often asked “When do babies begin to see?” Of course we don’t know that with any kind of certainty. It is my opinion that babies begin to see almost immediately since previous experiments (of which I don’t approve, Felix) show that covering of an eye in experimental animal during the first few weeks of life results in decreased development of vision even up to eventual “blindness.” That is, there is sight but there is not recognition. (The neurobiology of vision is something that Felix and I went around and around about two years ago).
It is my opinion, and only a opinion, that a baby is able to see images probably close to what an older child or even adult “sees.” That is, the same number and patterns of actions potentials reach their visual cortex. What they can’t do is, as Batchen says, “recognize” the image. This involves further processing of the signals in other parts of the brain.
But the mystery is how children develop that ability to recognize. Some of it must be inherent. That is, infants don’t “learn” to recognize humans, particularly mothers. I think one could make a strong argument that this has been hard wired in our neurological circuits (and how that could happen evolutionarily must be very complex involving the natural selection of not just neuronal structures but their actual priming). But what about things like numbers, and language? The latter is also, apparently, at least partially hard wired but the differences between Chinese and Inuit is mamouth.
Sorry, veered off the road pertinence.
Comment by Dr. C. — November 14, 2009 @ 1:00 pm
Sorry, mammoth (note to self; SPELL CHECK)
Comment by Dr. C. — November 14, 2009 @ 1:04 pm
But the “recognize” is all. Of course, the recognition might be fine, but the baby has no name for it. Gotta have a label before you can mail the package.
Comment by unrealnature — November 14, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
Dr C: I don’t know why, but … although I had access to a ciné camera from age ten, and I have enjoyed cinema as long as I can remember, and I have made both films and videos at various times, and I have a video camera … producing the moving image has never taken the hold on me that producing the still image has. The sequences of still image are not, within my own mind and heart, in any relation at all to the moving image: they are, crucially, sequences of still images.
Acquisition of language … I think the consensus these days is behind Chomsky’s suggestion that we are hard wired to learn language, though the actual nature of that language is down to nurture?
Comment by Felix — November 15, 2009 @ 6:48 pm